WHAT IS ISLAMIC SCIENCE AND DEVELOPMENT?
With these thoughts in mind, I will now turn to the question of how Islam interacts with science and development. I will approach this question in the following way. First, I address a fundamental challenge faced by all religions: Does the promise of an otherworldly salvation thwart attempts to achieve justice in the here and now? I then identify four themes arising from the discussion throughout my paper that might be called the “value perspectives” that Islam brings to science and development and attempt to show how they apply in practice. Denis Goulet, the economist and development theorist, noted that Marx handed a fundamental challenge to religion when he decried that it places human destiny outside history and thereby turns humans away from the task of working for justice on Earth. This otherworldly orientation, he argued, negates true humanism and perpetuates injustice. On this basis, Goulet asked whether any religion can supply men and women with a convincing rationale for buil
