Globalizing 'science and religion': examples from the late Ottoman Empire.

This article brings together insights from efforts to develop a global history of science and recent historical and sociological studies on the relations between science and religion. Using the case of the late Ottoman Empire as an example, it argues that 'science and religion' can be seen as a debate that travelled globally in the nineteenth century, generating new conceptualizations of both science and religion in many parts of the world. In their efforts to counter arguments that represented Islam as the enemy of science and progress, young Ottoman intellectuals wrote many texts addressing a specific European author, or an imagined, broad European audience in the mid- to late nineteenth century. These texts described a 'science-friendly' Islam of which not only Europeans but also 'ignorant Muslims' were unaware. Using examples from the Ottoman press, the article demonstrates how this effort involved separating Islam from the lived reality of Muslims, transforming the religion essentially into a text that referred to scientific facts or that instructed adherents to appreciate science. In their contributions to the debate on science and religion, these young intellectuals thus also defined themselves as the legitimate interpreters of Islam in the 'age of science'.

Kindred fatalisms: debating science, Islam, and free will in the Darwinian era.

An important aspect of the nineteenth century debate on the relationship between science and religion concerned the popularity of deterministic views among scientists. An integral part of Comte's positivism, the idea of immutable laws that determined natural and social phenomena became an increasingly prevalent component of scientific perspectives in the Darwinian era. Referring to this tendency as 'scientific fatalism,' critics likened it to Calvinist predestination, which transformed the debate into one involving polemics about different branches of Christianity as well. This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of this debate, namely, the role that references to Islam and Turks played in it. 'Mohammedan fatalism,' already a common theme in justifications of colonialism, promptly became a tool with which to condemn new scientific views. Comparing French, British, and American writings on the topic, the paper illustrates that while there emerged approaches that praised the fatalism of Muslims while making a case for scientific determinism, most scientists and thinkers resorted to condemning the fatalism of Muslims in order to distinguish their views from it. In this respect, the paper demonstrates how political and religious discourses played a significant part in the shaping of scientific discourse in the Victorian era.

Science as an ally of religion: a Muslim appropriation of 'the conflict thesis'.

John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) is commonly regarded as the manifesto of the 'conflict thesis'. The superficiality of this thesis has been demonstrated in recent studies, but to read Draper's work only as a text on 'science versus religion' is to miss half of its significance, as it also involved evaluations of individual religions with respect to their attitudes towards science. Due to Draper's favourable remarks on Islam, the Ottoman author Ahmed Midhat translated his work into Turkish, and published it along with his own comments on Draper's arguments. Midhat interpreted Islam using the cues provided by Draper, and portrayed it as the only religion compatible with science. While his Christian readers condemned Draper for his approach to Islam, Midhat transformed the 'conflict thesis' into a proclamation that Islam and science were allies in opposition to Christian encroachment on the Ottoman Empire. This paper analyses Midhat's appropriation of Draper's work and compares it to the reaction of Draper's Christian readers. It discusses the context that made an alliance between Islam and science so desirable for Midhat, and emphasizes the impact of the historico-geographical context on the encounters between and representations of science and religion.