ABSTRACT
In studying the relation between science and religion in the greater Middle East and the Islamic World, using the traditional Eurocentric division of science and religion, which was formulated in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, cannot yield accurate conclusions and often leads to anachronistic or Eurocentric analyses. Here we look at different scientific, philosophical, and religious disciplines, discourses, and paradigms as integral parts of a socio-intellectual environment, where different methods, ideas, theories, and discursive strategies are exchanged, debated, and developed in conjunction, while keeping an eye on debates on sources of knowledge and on epistemic authority of scholars, ideas, and methodologies. Moreover, analysis should pay close attention to political and socio-intellectual debates of legitimacy, which constitute particular dynamic distributions of social and intellectual capital.
