SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN ISLAM

DESCRIPTION:

Basing himself on the traditional Islamic concept of science and its transmission and classification, the author discusses various branches of the Islamic sciences from cosmology, geography and other qualitative and descriptive sciences to the mathematical sciences which include arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, astronomy and music as well as certain branches of physics. The author then turns to the application of the Islamic sciences to such domains as medicine, pharmacology, alchemy, agriculture and various forms of technology connected with irrigation as well as the making of automata. In the final section of the work, the author discusses the role of man in the Universe, the equilibrium between man and nature and the integration of the sciences of the Cosmos into the total scheme of knowledge drawn from the Qur’anic revelation. The book combines an account of the morphology and brief history of the various sciences with illustrations drawn from sources spread throughout the Islamic world.

DETAILS:

ITEM CODE: EL01247
AUTHOR: Seyyed Hossein Nasr
BINDING: Hardback
PAGES: 378
DIMENSIONS: 15 x 22 CM
PUBLISHER: Suhail Academy
CATEGORIES: Original Works, Science & the Sacred

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born in Tehran, where he received his early education. He studied in the West and gained his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MA and PhD from Harvard University, where he studied the History of Science and Learning with special concentration on Islamic science and philosophy. In 1958, he returned to Iran to teach at Tehran University, where he was Professor of the History of Science and Philosophy. In 1962 he was visiting lecturer at Harvard University, and he taught there during the summer of 1965. During 1964-65, he was the first holder of the Agha Khan Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut. He also served as Vice Chancellor of Tehran University and Chancellor of the Arya-Mehr University of Technology in Iran. He was the founder and first President of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy and is presently University Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University, Washington D. C. and President of the Foundation for Traditional Studies. Professor Nasr has lectured in America, Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Japan, and Australia and was the first Muslim Scholar to deliver the Gifford Lectures. He is the author of over twenty-five books and five hundred articles in Persian, English, Arabic and French. His works have appeared in more than ten languages. His important contribution is three generations of scholars he has trained in the course of his fifty-year scholarly career in Iran and the West.