Buildings

You know,

like all humans, muslims have always had the need

to build homes of one sort or another

And as the community grew,

they needed much larger buildings,

such as mosques and hospitals, and forts and palaces,

all in a wide variety of different local styles,

ancient and modern.

But homes and hospitals fill clear and immediate practical needs.

But muslims also built spaces simply devoted to pure knowledge,

places to study the Creation,

not knowing how results might change the world,

workshops for scientific experimentation,

mechanics and alchemy.

And spaces were built for observation of the heavens,

looking at what we can't influence at all,

only observe.

The Qur'an tells us that the stars are sent to guide us,

and we can clearly be guided in more ways than just using the stars as a travellers' navigation aid,

and the more refined our ability to observe

the more we learn.

The early muslim observatories

were little more than giant observational instruments,

built large to increase their accuracy.

Observation is improved with better and more refined instruments,

as was seen when observation in Europe was transformed by lensed instruments,

microscopes for the study of the small but manipulable,

and telescopes to look up to the unreachable and unchangeable.

But the European crisis that ensued

when Galileo's observations challenged traditional Church understandings

was not a problem for the world of Islam.

Muslims have no problem with whatever follows on

from scientific observation.

Scientific truth is only ever a case of

whatever is currently the best attempt humans can make

at an explanation of the truth that underlies what we are observing.

And every now and again

humans come up with new observational instruments,

more powerful, or delicate, or subtle,

and what they reveal breaks existing theories,

and requires new ways of understanding.

Scientific truth is always conditional.

It is only ever the latest theory.

When we say that only God is the Truth,

we accept that there is a truth

that will always be beyond the knowledge and understanding of humankind.

Science, along with other fields of understanding,

is set in a hierarchy of knowledge with God at its peak,

the fount of all knowledge,

manifesting through the material of Creation.

It is in this context that observation of the cosmos

leads us to the source,

the Creator, the Maker, the Shaper,

the Truth.