Toby Huff examines the long-standing question of why modern science arose only in the West and not in the civilizations of Islam and China, despite the fact that medieval Islam and China were more scientifically advanced. Huff explores the cultural contexts within which science was practiced in Islam, China, and the West. He finds major clues in the history of law and the European cultural revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as to why the ethos of science arose in the West and permitted the breakthrough to modern science that did not occur elsewhere.
The bedrock reason that explains the failure of Islam to usher modern science is articulated very well by Dr. Huff in his book, page 158, that reads as follows:
"It was even essential to Islam, ..., because the 'method was part and parcel of the Islamic orthodox process for determining orthodoxy. Where it failed was in the creation of a set of objective standards of law, against which all other laws and principles could be judged. Since the legal principles of Islamic law had been given once and for all, in the Quran and the sunna, and in the principles of fiqh worked out by al-Shafi'i, the only task left was to use logic in the narrow sense, to uncover faulty reasoning and thus preserve the doctrinal status quo...."
This explains clearly, as one finds that application "freethought" was arrested and persecuted by the dictates in the theological canons of Islam, why modern science did not take birth from the womb of Islam, but rather took firm foothold in the European rennaisance ushering the birth of quantum (wave) mechanics and modern science.
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