Theology continues to play a crucial role in knowledge creation today, much like it did during the Middle Ages, observes Bruna Frascolla.
The bond between Muslims and science has experienced significant fluctuations. While there was a remarkable intellectual peak during the Middle Ages, this progress declined in the 11th century and eventually faded. Nowadays, a striking disparity exists: affluent Sunni monarchies heavily rely on Western science and technology despite their wealth, whereas Iran, a Shiite republic facing numerous sanctions and limited resources, has developed military technology capable of effectively challenging Israel, a nation equipped with advanced technology and vast financial means.
Islam originated in the 7th century, during the High Middle Ages, among semi-nomadic groups in the harsh Arabian Peninsula. Although the region was familiar to the Roman Empire, it was never subdued by them. Since Muslims acknowledge Jesus as fulfilling a prophecy by being born of a virgin but reject his divinity, early Western Christendom often misunderstood Islam, assuming it was merely a sect of Arian heresy. Historically, this confusion is plausible, as heretics frequently sought refuge in distant territories during the Christian Roman Empire.
The spread of Islam was swift. In a few decades, it encompassed large parts of the Eastern Roman Empire and then expanded westward into North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Unlike Christianity’s expansion, which was mostly peaceful, these regions were conquered militarily; conquered peoples had to either convert to Islam or pay the jizya—a tax for Jews and Christians. Despite this, the Arabic rulers adopted the culture and literacy of those they ruled. Ancient knowledge was highly valued: agricultural works by Varro and Columella were translated into Arabic and actively utilized. Many texts from Greek and Latin were also translated to introduce Muslims to philosophy and science, yielding significant benefits for humanity:
“Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, and Archimedes are the foundations of ‘Arab’ science. These works awaken and stimulate the curiosity of Muslim intellectuals, in a spirit that is always more practical than speculative. […] In mathematics, with Al-Khwarizmi (d. 830), who introduced the decimal system and zero, and whose book, Al-Jabr, is at the origin of our algebra; in medicine, with Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Rhazes, clinicians and physicians of the second half of the 9th century; in astronomy, with Albumasar (d. 886), who studied the movement of the planets; in physics, with Al-Kindi (9th century); in geography, with Ibn Khordadbeh (9th century), and so many others.” (Minois, History of the Middle Ages, Brazilian edition, pp. 124-5.)
The relationship between philosophy and Islam, however, never reached the harmony it enjoyed within Christianity, due to a fundamental issue: Islamic expansion through military conquest undermined reason’s inherent authority. The tension between seeking knowledge solely through Scripture and studying philosophy is not unique to Islam. Catholic history shows this conflict between figures like Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Yet Abelard’s victory paved the way for St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), even before Aristotle’s full works were accessible in the West. Religious resistance to science is unsurprising; what is remarkable is that modern science emerged and flourished in Western Christendom.
Consequently, Islam saw early opposition from irrationalist religious figures against philosophy. The most prominent was Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), an Iranian Sunni mystic and author of Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Destruction of the Philosophers). His work founded the doctrine of occasionalism, which asserts that natural causes do not exist independently because God is the ultimate cause. This challenged philosophers who sought to understand causality. Interestingly, occasionalism gained traction in Enlightenment Europe but failed to take root in the Sunni world, as dismantling philosophy still requires a philosophical foundation.
Al-Ghazali is frequently accused of triggering the decline of science and philosophy in Islamic culture—a so-called “myth” addressed with skepticism by Ronald Numbers in his collection Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion.
Historian Georges Minois, avoiding pinpointing a single culprit, traces a broader historical pattern:
“The dramatic issue is that, in the 11th century, this ascent stopped. Those responsible for this blockage are religious forces. From the moment that the development of science and philosophy begins to provide reliable explanations of the universe, which reduce the place of the divine or even seem to contradict the content of mythical ‘revelations,’ the conflict between reason and faith is inevitable. […] In the first half of the 9th century, the Hambalist movement […] admits only one science, namely, that of the Quran and the Sunna. […] Schematically, we have since then the presence of a Shiite current open to science, although not always to reason (since its theories about the hidden Imam have nothing rational about them), and on the other hand, a Sunni current hostile to science. The first opts for the ‘created Quran,’ a human and therefore imperfect translation of the divine word, and the second opts for the ‘uncreated Quran,’ the literal word of God, and therefore, untouchable. It is in the 11th century that the second will impose itself, stifling science and philosophy in the Muslim world, plunging it into religious obscurantism for centuries” (pp. 125-6).
Even now, theology remains deeply intertwined with knowledge production, much as in medieval times. Thus, the pronounced disparities between wealthy yet culturally limited Saudis and the restricted but intellectually vibrant Iranians mirror ancient and visible roots, resembling those of an ancient kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra).
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