There has been a surge of publications on science and Islam, and nearly all of them do the same thing: gather Qur'anic verses pointing to the physical world in order to argue that science and Islam are compatible.
What is missing in English is the history — how science and technology actually developed in the Muslim world, what caused it to flourish, and what caused it to stop. This book covers that ground.
The Forgetting
The decline has been so complete that today's Muslims are largely unaware that their own ancestors founded the modern sciences. The evidence is in everyday English: cotton, algebra, aorta, alcohol, chemistry, alkaline. Words carried into English from Arabic because the concepts arrived with them — a living testimony to work that the descendants of those who did it no longer know about.
What the Book Traces
The advances Muslims made across the disciplines of science and technology, from the early Islamic state through to its last days in the twentieth century. Not a list of names, but the development itself — what was built on what, and how.
The Two Harder Questions
This is where the book earns its place, because celebrating a golden age is easy and explaining it is not.
First: what were the key factors that produced such rapid advance? A civilization does not become the world's scientific center by accident, and the conditions that made it possible can be identified.
Second: why did it decline? The book analyzes the reasons rather than avoiding them — and then asks how the Muslim world might achieve that kind of success again.
Who It Is For
Muslim students in the sciences, who are frequently told their religion is an obstacle to their subject. Teachers and parents. Anyone who has heard about a golden age and would like to know what was actually in it. Non-Muslims interested in the history of science, which is largely written as though these centuries did not happen.
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