AN INTRODUCTION TO ISLAMIC COSMOLOGICAL DOCTRINES Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for its Study by the Ikhwan al- Safa, Al – Biruni, and Ibn Sina

AN INTRODUCTION TO ISLAMIC COSMOLOGICAL DOCTRINES Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for its Study by the Ikhwān al-Safā, Al-Bīrūnī, and Ibn Sīna   AN INTRODUCTION TO ISLAMIC COSMOLOGICAL DOCTRINES Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for its Study by the Ilchwan Al-Biruni, and Ibn Sina Seyyed Hossein Nasr Studies of the Western Orientalists as well as contemporary modern Muslim scholars of the cosmological and natural sciences in the Islamic world have been carried out with the aim of establishing a relation between these sciences and those cultivated in the modern world with rare attention given to the general world view of the Muslims themselves. Nasr clarifies some of the cosmological principles and brings into focus the contours of the cosmos in Which the Muslims lived and thought, and which to a certain extent still provides the framework in which they envisage the world. It is the only book to deal with classical Islamic cosmology as it was formulated during the tenth and eleventh centuries influencing all the later centuries of Islamic history by creating the cosmological framework within which all later scientific activity in the Islamic world was carried out. “This study opens up a relatively unexplored, hence unfamiliar, aspect of Islam. The majority of modern Muslim rationalists will no doubt join in chorus with the formalist orthodox theologians to deny that its subject can be identified with Islam “in any true sense.” But their perspective is false. The theme of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s study is one no less vital than the tracing out of one line in the complex process by which the Islamic Community gradually discovered its own nature and habitat.” -H. A. R. Gibb 110