ABSTRACT
The new Islam and science discourse that emerged from the ruins of the old tradition during the nineteenth century is a “colonized discourse”, steeped in the great chasm that separates our contemporary world from the traditional Islamic universe and the science it inspired and cultivated for almost eight centuries. The modern Muslim scientist is unlikely to find any resonance with his peers in that universe of discourse not because modern science has discovered some new facts about nature that are fundamentally different from the scientific data of Ibn Sina and al-Biruni. It is not the scientific content that is of importance in this widening breach that separates the contemporary Muslim scientist from the Islamic scientific tradition. Had it been the scientific content, the Newtonian and the quantum physics could not have shared a common universe in which they remain rooted in spite of their vast divergence; both are constructs of a concept of reality formulated within the metaphysical and philosophical worldview of the modern Western civilization. Thus, it is neither the heliocentricity nor the contemporary atomic theory of matter that has rent asunder the traditional universe of Islam and science discourse; it is the foundational philosophy of modern science that stands as an unbridgeable chasm between modern science and the Islamic scientific tradition. This great chasm between the pre-colonial Islam and science nexus and its post colonial caricature is not the result of any specific theory of science, but that of a radical recasting of the foundations of science since the seventeenth century.
