3. MUSLIM CONTRIBUTION TO SCIENCE

~ 104 ~ astronomer who offended the Church simply by endorsing the Copernican view of the planets moving round the sun. He was sentenced by a religious court and thrown into prison. When he saw that death awaited him, he was forced to recant before the Inquisition. Kneeling, with both his hands on the Bible, he solemnly withdrew his ‘farfetched’ theory of the movement of the planets around the sun. He not only rejected this theory, but said that he considered it ‘abominable.’ This was not just an isolated incident, but rather a symptom of the intellectual malaise created by the Christian scholars of those times. The search for new truths and the discovery of nature’s secrets remained forbidden pastures to them for centuries. Such activities were reviled as black magic and a part of satanic teachings. In such circumstances, it was impossible for the processes of research and investigation to be carried on with any success. In the Middle Ages, it was solely due to the Muslims that such work could be given any impetus, thanks to the Qur’an having removed the kind of mental blocks that had stood in the way of people of other faiths, such as Galileo.