<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="auto">There was a time in the 8th century in the Islamic Golden Age when Baghdad was the center of the scientific world during the Abbasid Caliphate. For science to prosper there must be a culture which values knowledge and freedom.</div><div dir="auto">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbasid_Caliphate</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Knowledge is based on language and stored in books. In Baghdad there was at the time a "house of wisdom", a mix between library and university </div><div dir="auto">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The scholars used a form of dialectic debate called "kalam", which is a bit similar to the Jewish method of hevruta/havruta in which a small group of students discuss and debate a shared text</div><div dir="auto">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/26/baghdad-centre-of-scientific-world</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">-J.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div><br></div><div align="left" dir="auto" style="font-size:100%;color:#000000"><div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: thompnickson2@gmail.com </div><div>Date: 9/25/21 20:23 (GMT+01:00) </div><div>To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com>, kitchenlist@liste.unisa.it </div><div>Subject: [FRIAM] Islam-Science-Muslims-and-Technology-Seyyed-Hossein-Nasr-in-Conversation-with-Muzaffar-Iqbal-2009.pdf </div><div><br></div></div><div class="WordSection1"><p>Dear Colleagues, </p><p>Because of an interest some of you expressed in Islamic science, I ran down the text linked below. It is an entire book, and I have read only the first chapter, but I found that fascinating. It is a sort of airing of linen concerning the role of science in the modern Islamic world that tracks in interesting ways the recent American ambivalence about science. This first chapter is both unsettling and very familiar at the same time. </p><p><a href="http://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Islam-Science-Muslims-and-Technology-Seyyed-Hossein-Nasr-in-Conversation-with-Muzaffar-Iqbal-2009.pdf">http://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Islam-Science-Muslims-and-Technology-Seyyed-Hossein-Nasr-in-Conversation-with-Muzaffar-Iqbal-2009.pdf</a></p><p>Ok, just to give you sense of one of the places it leaves <b><i>me</i></b>: If the fault of western science is that it is laced with unacknowledged western values, what would a science that acknowledged its values look like. I have argued that the science we practice is absurdly dualistic (given that we have only one source of information). But it is unclear to me how \u201cdualism\u201d is a value. Is the \u201crape of nature\u201d and all that follows implicit in dualism? I wish I could claim that if I turn you all into monists, you will all become wind=turbine fanatics, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the case. Do values guide what we do or are they just the heavy artillery that we muster to convince others to do what we have done? </p><p>See what you think?</p><p> </p><p>Nick </p></div></body></html>