Re: Root cause of Muslim decline in science
Dude you cant just leave the historical progress alone, to understand today one must look at past, to this date scientists are trying to look at fossils and discovering gravity waves to find the absolute beginning of planet Earth. Historians study Democritus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to this day. The idea is not to see the conclusions they got to, but the thought process, the questions they posed to find answers of everyday problems. Without history mankind is lost.
This is from Wikipedia page of Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali has sometimes been referred to by historians as the single most influential Muslim after the Islamic prophet Muhammad.[SUP][/SUP] Within Islam he is considered to be a Mujaddid or renewer of the faith, who, according to tradition, appears once every century to restore the faith of the community
Imam Ghazali is the most respected of muslim philosophers, and being a muslim at heart he could not go along with Plato’s ideas of forms(neoplatonism), Aristotle’s demeaning view of role of women in society and materialistic origin of world. That’s why he warned about blindly reading and following western philosophy. During the 11th century world scholars were mystified by works of the Greek philosophers, philosophy was thought to be a better science then mathematics and other natural sciences, and by that time muslims had seen the best of their times in medicine, chemistry and mathematics and therefore naturally felt left behind those advancing in Philosophy.
For better understanding visit
Ghazzali (450-505H) ??? - Islamic Encyclopedia