1. uluslararasi prof. Dr. Fuat sezgiN İSLÂM

INTRODUCTION

Following the death of Turkish Science Historian Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin on June 30, 2018, our President, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared 2019 as the “Year of Fuat Sezgin”. In this context, with the cooperation of Istanbul University, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Foundation University and the Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin Research Foundation for the History of Science in Islam, and the support of the Istanbul Directorate of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the 1^st International Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin Islamic Science History Symposium was organized on June 13-15, 2019 in Istanbul. This symposium, attended by world science historians studying the history of Islamic science, had a long preparation phase. Within the framework of the symposium, the nature of the accumulation of knowledge in Islamic civilization over the centuries, its historical development, problems, literature and historiography were discussed and evaluated in the light of Professor Dr. Fuat Sezgin’s work in these fields.

After the death of the Prophet Mohammed (A.D.571-632), Islam spread to a large geographical area outside the Arabian Peninsula, encompassing the basins of ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Syria, Iran, Egypt and North Africa in a short time. This expansion, which continues unabated despite the domestic political struggles that have been quite challenging for Muslims, has led to major social changes and transformations as well as economic prosperity. One of the important aspects of these changes and transformations, whose effects are be seen on a global scale, has been the intellectual field.
In this process, Muslims began to be interested in areas that were “new” for them as a result of meeting new cultures while studying the material on which the sciences were to be built, namely the Quran, the sunnah of Prophet Muhammad, his companions, and the tabi’un generation of Muslims who followed them making an important progress in terms of codification, classification and interpretation.
The “translation movement” that started with individual curiosity and efforts during the Umayyad period and gained a more systematic structure with the Abbasids became the most important tool for getting acquainted with the new “philosophy” in its specific sense. The works translated into Arabic from different languages, especially Greek, were re-evaluated by Muslims in line with the different intellectual interests and needs of the cosmopolitan Islamic civilization that was being built. Thus, a new set of sciences, which are referred to as theological or philosophical sciences and including branches of science today called “positive sciences”, was added to the rapidly developing accumulation of scientific knowledge.
Islamic civilization has guided humanity for centuries, thanks to the intellectual products put forward in the context of positive and theological / philosophical sciences. However,


the Euro-centered and linear understanding of history which the developing modern Western civilization used to legitimize its own rise limited the role of Islamic civilization in the development of sciences on a global scale to only its contribution in the transition and transference between civilizations and to a certain historical period. This narrative was accepted even by Muslims themselves as a result of the traumatic situation that the post-colonial Islamic world was going through. Since the last quarter of the 20^th century, the revival in the Islamic world has provided important opportunities for Muslims to re-discover their own civilizational heritage. One of the most important names of this rediscovery effort, which has become more scientific and objective in contrast to the defensive and reactive attitudes that prevailed a century ago, is undoubtedly Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin. With his work Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), which deals with the literature of the positive sciences and the theological studies since the beginning of the history of Islamic civilization, Prof. Dr. Sezgin put forward his studies with the meticulousness of a historian of science both in the introductions he wrote for the fields of science and in his research focusing on the important characters of Islamic history as well as the sciences of the Hellenistic period, and supported the chapters that he wrote in the light of modern research with new materials that may change common beliefs.
The first International Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin Islamic Science History Symposium was held with the participation of 83 scientists. The scientists who contributed to the symposium with their papers from many countries around the world deserve special thanks. I would also like to thank our Honorary and Organizing Committee and our Secretariat for their financial and moral support in the organization of the symposium. This proceedings book is a selection of the papers presented during the Symposium. The book, which has 38 articles in total, consists of eight chapters under the titles of Fuat Sezgin’s Contributions to the History of Science, Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine, Geography, Natural Sciences, and Islamic Studies. This book encompasses the institutional dimension of Islamic studies; methodological relationships between different fields of science, contribution of different civilizations to its accumulation of scientific knowledge, its scientific instruments and technology products, and finally, the political, social, economic, intellectual and environmental factors in the development of Islamic studies. The book also presents new discoveries on the aforementioned topics and new methods in Islamic science research.
The papers were presented in Turkish, Arabic and English at the symposium. We felt it was important to publish the texts in this book in the languages in which they were presented, in order to convey the diversity of languages available in the Islamic history of science.
Prof. Dr. Mustafa Kaçar Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University