Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives (Book Review‪)‬

Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), xxii+386 pp, HB, ISBN 0-262-19482-1 Writing during the formative period of contemporary Western studies of Islamic scientific tradition, Ignaz Goldziher constructed one of the first models of the twentieth century that pitched the so-called sciences of the ancients ('ulum al-awa'il or ('ulum al-qudama')--which included exact sciences--against a nebulous and ill-defined "old Islamic Orthodoxy". (1) This formulation was to influence the whole field in numerous implicit and explicit ways throughout the twentieth century, and it was not until the final decades of the century that his authoritarian position was seriously challenged by a few perceptive scholars who found his characterization of Islamic intellectual tradition highly problematic.