He's talking about the Mutazilah, a branch of Islam that rejected the Sunni beliefs.

I'll quote Wikipedia, 'cause I'm lazy:
They proceeded to posit that the injunctions of God are accessible to rational thought and inquiry: because knowledge is derived from reason, reason is the "final arbiter" in distinguishing right from wrong. It follows, in Mu'tazili reasoning, that "sacred precedent" is not an effective means of determining what is just, as what is obligatory in religion is only obligatory "by virtue of reason."

Basically, their credo was the antithesis of Sunni Islam, but it didn't stop them from becoming the major intellectual/religious force within the Muslim empire at that time.

Also, the guy presented as causing their downfall didn't just come up with "2+2=Satan" and call it a day: he was a fatalist (i.e. believed in Fate) who posited that reason leads nowhere, was persecuted for that, and his followers turned him into a martyr, making their cause more popular. Besides, the fact that the Middle East suffered through various invasions (culminating with Mr Khan & Sons a few decades later) probably did a lot to distance people from a rational/cerebral worldview toward a more emotional / "God Controls All" one.

Revelation replaced Investigation - Nicely said.

And now, the USA is falling into the same colossus rut, not with eastern views but with Western, Christian philosophy. The US population is letting the Revelations of religion outweigh the Investigations of the Scientific Method. Infact they are going so far as to condemn the scientific Method and are trying to have it removed from schools in some states.
http://videosift.com/video/Texas-wants-the-Scientific-Method-out-of-schools

This sift is a short excerpt from a full talk, here:
http://videosift.com/video/The-God-of-the-Gaps-Neil-deGrasse-Tyson

>> ^9547bis:

He's talking about the Mutazilah, a branch of Islam that rejected the Sunni beliefs.
I'll quote Wikipedia, 'cause I'm lazy:
They proceeded to posit that the injunctions of God are accessible to rational thought and inquiry: because knowledge is derived from reason, reason is the "final arbiter" in distinguishing right from wrong. It follows, in Mu'tazili reasoning, that "sacred precedent" is not an effective means of determining what is just, as what is obligatory in religion is only obligatory "by virtue of reason."
Basically, their credo was the antithesis of Sunni Islam, but it didn't stop them from becoming the major intellectual/religious force within the Muslim empire at that time.
Also, the guy presented as causing their downfall didn't just come up with "2+2=Satan" and call it a day: he was a fatalist (i.e. believed in Fate) who posited that reason leads nowhere, was persecuted for that, and his followers turned him into a martyr, making their cause more popular. Besides, the fact that the Middle East suffered through various invasions (culminating with Mr Khan & Sons a few decades later) probably did a lot to distance people from a rational/cerebral worldview toward a more emotional / "God Controls All" one.


Sounds a lot like gnosticism.

In the documentary BBC - Science and Islam http://videosift.com/video/BBC-Science-and-Islam

It suggests that Islam fell out of being the preferred language of science after the invention of the printing press.

Arabic was used for science because of all its phonetic symbols, which enabled people of any nation to understand each other and do scientific debates in person. Production and writing of scientific papers was expensive, since they had to be hand written, no matter what the language. So only ideas that were fully debated would be written down and distributed.

With invention of the printing press, English became the preferred language of science, because now it was cheap to produce and distribute scientific papers. English letters are easily put on printing press block letters. So it became possible to do peer review of scientific papers published anywhere in the world. They tried to print Arabic with the printing press, but the language wasn't well suited for that, because of the same phonetic symbols which had given it the edge in the past.

And that is how the Islamic world fell out of science...

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