Why does it matter?
Throughout this course we’ve explores some fascinating people and ideas from a long time period. But a few times I have asked myself what my own reasons are for learning about these figures and why it would important for our society to acknowledge and explore this remarkable period of world history. To me there is no question at all that intellectual pursuits and science of historical Islamic societies represented a vibrant and influential learning tradition, but how is knowledge of this period going to help us today? This class and other intiatives can’t exist solely for the purpose of glorifying the period for a bunch of people who are interested, I think in studying any historical aspect of a society certain goals of the study must relate to contemporary contexts. Show how does the content of our class do this? I know we have many reasons, but oftentimes they are not entirely practical in the sense that even if a wider audience took our class or was educated on the topic it still may not result is changes that could be attributed to their new historical knowledge.
A few reasons that just come tothe top of my head for learning about science in Islamic civilizations is:
-it may allow Muslim nations to recover elements of their discourse which allowed historical societies to flourish in intellectual pursuits
-as students we know that sciences are not merely a European phenomenon, rather they have been an aspect of many societies who follow diverse cultural models of learning(why does this matter though?)
-it opens the door to pluralistic notions of education which remind us that many civilizations share common ambitions(positice ambitions) that are expressed and achieved in many ways, all of which are rich and fascinating in their own context-this is what I think is the most important becuase it affects us today in a world where on one hand due to globalization people are connected in new way(and thus require a hollistic understanding of one another, because a lot of clashes we see today are born out of mutual ignorance) and on the other many educated people(even students, both Muslim, non-Muslim, all types of peoples who learn) don’t feel the need to contextualize their learning or connect it to history. What we’ve learnt can be of great utility in this.
Why I wrote this as my final blog post is becuase I often felt with this course that we were studying Islamic science only to glorify it in an ideal way as a response to what we see in modern science. But I don’t think by saying that people today don’t appreciate Islamic contributions to science we are doing full justice to the topic because we are defining the subject matter in negative terms(by addresing something we feel is missing). To me there had to be more to it than this and I know there is, and I think that the most lasting element from this course for me will be questions concerning what can be done with the knowledge wev’e acquired and why it is important to be curious about history that often feels very distant? I think alot of us will definitely leave with many questions(interesting and curious ones) from this course, and I really think that is awesome cause it will allow us to see more dimensions to what we have learnt and many of which will deal with our(individual and societal) current situations