ABSTRACT
The Islam and science discourse entered a new phase in the nineteenth century. This new dimension of the discourse was the natural outcome of the arrival of the Western science in the Muslim world. Until then, the Islam and science discourse had been rooted within the larger Islamic intellectual tradition; now it acquired a new dimension because one of the two entities of the discourse, science, had a matrix situated outside the Islamic tradition. The arrival of this foreign entity, which was premised on its own philosophical and religious foundations, was not like the arrival of the material from the pre-Islamic civilizations into the Islamic scientific tradition because that material had come into a living tradition, through an active process of appropriation. The new science, on the other hand, came to a tradition that was neither actively seeking it, nor was able to appropriate it into its own matrix. As a result, there emerged a completely new phenomenon that produced novel effects previously unknown.
