"In this brief introduction, it has been necessary to cover much ground that is unfamiliar and often quite difficult for a Western reader to grasp. But we felt that we had to dispel the common conception of the Muslims as merely Puritan warriors and merchants, whose strange bent for the "subtleties" of algebra and logic somehow also enabled them to become the transmitters of Greek learning to the West. As against that all too current notion, we have tried to present a brief picture of a culture whose spiritual values are inextricably tied up with mathematics and with metaphysics of a high order, and which once again fused the constituent elements of Greek science into a powerful unitary conception, which had an essential influence on the Western world up to the time of the Renaissance.

Strangely enough, it is this latter conception, half unknown at best, and then quickly forgotten in the Wcst, which has remained, up to the present Western impact upon the Islamic world, the major factor in the Islamic perspective determining its attitude toward Nature and the meaning it gives to the sciences of Nature; conversely, it is those very elements of the Islamic sciences, most responsible for providing the tools with which the West began the study of the already secularized Nature of the seventeenth century, that became secondary in the Islamic world itself and had already ceased to occupy the main intellectual efforts of that civilization by the ninth/ fifteenth century.

The Western world has since concentrated its intellectual energies upon the study of the quantitative aspects of things, thus developing a science of Nature, whose all too obvious fruits in the physical domain have won for it the greatest esteem among people everywhere, for most of whom "science" is identified with technology and its applications. Islamic science, by contrast, seeks ultimately to attain such knowledge as will contribute toward the spiritual perfection and deliverance of anyone capable of studying it; thus its fruits are inward and hidden, its values more difficult to discern. To understand it requires placing oneself within its perspective and accepting as legitimate a science of Nature which has a different end, and uses different means, from those of modern science. If it is unjust to identify Western science solely with its material results, it is even more unjust to judge medieval science by its outward "usefulness" alone. However important its uses may have been in calendarial work, in irrigation, in architecture, its ultimate aim has always been to relate the corporeal world to its basic spiritual principle, through the knowledge of those symbols which unite the various orders of reality. It can only be understood, and should only be judged, in terms of its own aims and its own perspectives." .. Science and Civilization in Islam.

"The function of religion is to bestow order upon human life and to establish an "outward" harmony upon whose basis man can return inwardly to his Origin by means of the journey toward the "interior" direction." ... The Interior Life in Lislam

"The challenges which I put before this audience today are, I believe, among the most important that must be confronted in future relations between religions because we cannot evade the following realities: First, there is a major environmental crisis. Second, the religious element in the environmental crisis is extremely important. Third, the vast majority of the peoples of the world are still religious, and if a mullah tells somebody in a mosque not to pollute the water, it will have a lot more effect than the government publishing an article about it in a newspaper in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran. The fact is that we all live on the globe within a web of life and an ecological system now being threatened with destruction through the manner in which we live. Therefore the question of interfaith dialogue and the relation between religions must also encompass this very important dimension, that is, this attitude toward God's creation. Without consideration of this reality, there will never be concrete unity of life of human beings and other creatures or any kind of peaceful existence and we will in fact only have the negative unity of joining forces to destroy the earth together, leading to our own destruction." ... from a paper delivered at Oxford in 1994, The Relation Between Religions in the Shadow of the Environmental Crisis. Click HERE to read whole paper.