ABSTRACT
In the Islam and science discourse, the eighteenth century stands as the great watershed. It was a century in which the winds of change acquired a ferocity that would leave nothing intact in the whole fabric of Islamic civilization, including its tradition of learning. It would inaugurate an era in which the Islam and science discourse would go through its first great transmutation. But this transmutation would only be a small part of a much greater calamity that this century before the deluge would bring to the entire Muslim world. From an Islamic perspective, this sterile century, so fatefully synchronized with the appearance of certain events on the world history that made it more than a passing lapse, became the beginning of the great collapse that would alter the geopolitical map, uproot established empires and bring about total collapse of the Islamic scientific tradition.
