Science in the service of religion: the case of Islam

In Islam, as in no other religion in human history, the performance of various aspects of religious ritual has been assisted by scientific procedures. The organization of the lunar calendar, the regulation of the astronomically-defined times of prayer, and the determination of the sacred direction of the Kaaba in Mecca—these are topics of traditional Islamic science still of concern to Muslims today, and each has a history going back close to fourteen hundred years. But the techniques advocated by the scientists of medieval Islam on the one hand and by the scholars of religious law on the other were quite different, and our present knowledge of them is based mainly on research conducted during the past twenty years on one small fraction of the vast literary heritage of the Muslim peoples.