Limitations in answering the “When” and the “Why” of “the decline" of Islamic science:

Limitations in answering the “When” and the “Why” of “the decline" of Islamic science:



To understand both the “When” and the “Why” questions related to “the decline of Islamic science (a subject on which very little reliable material is available) it is also important to take into consideration the regional schools which dominated the scene from the eleventh or twelfth-century onwards.” Moreover, we cannot establish any reliable date for the decline of the Islamic scientific tradition without knowing much more than we know at present about the scientific enterprise in the later Iranian, Indian and Ottoman empires. Until we have the source material available, no definite verdict can be passed. So far, we only know of about 1,000 Muslim scientists who worked between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries; there are thousands more about whom we have no information or we merely know their names and titles of their works. There are over 200,000 manuscripts in Iran alone, of which about three-quarters are as yet uncatalogued. [King, David (1999), World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca, E.J. Brill and Al-Furqan, Leiden and London, p. 4]

-Islam and Science by Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal p.135