The Muslim nostalgia for the past and feelings of inferiority in the presence can sometimes lead one to project modern understandings and presuppositions about what is considered rational and intellectually respectable onto past scholars living during what is known as the Golden Age of Islam. However, a reading of works by those scholars, such as the one by founder of Algebra, al-Khwārizmī, disputes such projections.
Topics addressed in this episode include the difference between the conception of science by Muslim scholars of the Golden Age and that of modern materialists today, the goal of science, and how this impacts the way the natural world is approached.
