Muslim Theological Encounters with Science dismantles the 'Islamic decline' narrative by showing how science and theology have long coexisted in Muslim civilization. Premodern thinkers navigated enduring tensions between reason and revelation, ensuring that intellectual disagreement fostered growth rather than hostility. Modern friction between science and Muslim theology-driven by colonialism, limited scientific literacy, and the absence of a science-attuned common sense among theologians-has often, though not exclusively, stemmed from adherence to outdated theological models. The author proposes a 'symphonic and braided' framework for relating science and theology, treating them as distinct yet complementary languages of meaning-making. Cultivating humility and imagination emerges as essential to human understanding. By avoiding the trap of forced convergence, this framework allows science to explain the 'how' while theology addresses the 'why,' together weaving a more complex and resilient pursuit of the truth. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Within Muslim populations, debates about the compatibility between science and religion tend to be framed by the long-standing competition between modernizing reformers, particularly westernizers, and theological conservatives. Much like their liberal Christian counterparts, reformers propose to embrace technical knowledge and reinterpret traditional beliefs undermined by modern science. Conservatives are more open to challenging the content of science, especially when science appears to support materialist views. Islamists promote an alternative, non-western style of modernity, nurturing a more pious professional class that contrasts with westernized elites. By scientific standards, westernizers appear to have the upper hand, especially as conservative apologetics is drawn toward distortions of science such as creationism, or fruitless attempts to Islamize science. But conservatives can also point to some success in defusing tensions between scientific and religious institutions without adopting the full secularization of science seen in post-Christian countries.