By Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi     The theory of evolution of all species from a common ancestor, with no special distinction for humankind, spills over from the domain and concern of specialists in biology. It does so because the theory is often promoted as something we have to believe. This upsets religious believers who have a quite different understanding of the origin of humankind. The difference…

I. Setting the stageIn its history and development, the innovative features of Ottoman science are obvious and various. Whilst the older Islamic centres of science and culture influenced initially Ottoman scientific tradition, it quickly reached a point where it could itself influence these old centres and serve as an example to them.

The Enlightenment movement flourished from around the early 1700s through the contribution of pioneering thinkers, referred to as the ‘philosophers’ or in the French form ‘philosophes’. They included such figures as the Frenchmen Voltaire, Montesquieu, d’Almenert, Turgot, Condorcet; Britons such as Locke, Hume and Gibbon; the Genevan Rousseau; the German-born, d’Holbach, Kant and Herder and the American, Franklin.[1] With such a diversity of thinkers and ideas, scholars…