Islamic Perspectives on Science and Religion: The Contrasting Cases of al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn and Ibn ʿ Arabī's al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya

Abstract: In both Islam and Christianity, the historical interaction between science and religion has fluctuated between productive harmony on the one hand and mutual antagonism on the other. How then have Muslim religious thinkers conceptualised the relationship between Islam and the physical sciences and what criteria have they applied to determine whether the study of such sciences is religiously legitimate or not? The present study focuses on the emblematic treatment of this topic in the writings of two major figures in the history of Islamic thought: the eleventh-century jurist and theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and the thirteenth-century Sufi master Muḥyī l-Dīn ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), a thinker deeply influenced by al-Ghazālī's epistemological theories. Both authors discuss the relationship between Islam and the sciences at length, revealing original and distinctive approaches to this question as they do so. But whereas al-Ghazālī remains generally wary of the Hellenistic physical sciences that had been adopted by the Muslim world, Ibn ʿArabī regards the assimilation of such sciences as a natural and positive consequence of Islam's intrinsically universalist outlook.