This excellent book is crying out for an updated reissue. Even despite being nearly two decades old, it's quite extraordinarily valuable in its portrayal of a culture that's not just in a scientific backwater but is largely under the thumb of rulers both secular and religious who, for their own corrupt purposes, find it useful to promote the cause of anti-science. Professor Hoodbhoy, who's a Pakistani nuclear physicist, head of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University, with some remarkable courage skewers the so-called "Islamic science" that has sprung up in reaction to the enormous successes of Western science, holding it up for show as the complete nonsense a great deal of it is. We learn about the senior Pakistani physicist who advanced the idea of harnessing djinns into power plants to solve his nation's energy crisis at a stroke. An Egyptian geologist presented at a grotesque parody of a scientific conference in Islamabad his notion that the deep roots of mountains act as pegs holding the earth's outer layers in place, as otherwise they'd be thrown off into space by the planet's spin. And there's very much more of this -- depressingly much. Yet Hoodbhoy's concerns are far wider. Topics of discussion include the mystery of why it could be that the Muslim world was (if often patchily) a paragon of scientific achievement for a full six hundred years (roughly AD750-1350), which is longer than the glory of Greece, longer than, in fact, our modern scientific era has so far lasted. And he also looks at the various causes of the catastrophic decline into today's scientific Dark Age, identifying as culprit not primarily religious orthodoxy (although that very certainly plays a major part) but an educational system that's rooted in tradition: knowledge is seen as something permanent that is to be acquired from an inerrant authority, rather than as a tool by whose use further knowledge can be discovered, with authority being ever open to educated challenge.
Although there's no new edition of his book available, alas, Hoodbhoy has more recently (August 2007) published a longish relevant article in Physics Today, called "Science and the Islamic World: The Quest for Rapprochement". You can find it online here: http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml?bypassSSO....
I really can't get over how much I enjoyed Islam and Science -- the pleasure all the greater because it was so unexpected: from an initial browse, I'd anticipated the book would be a bit sort of academically po-faced. Pam's weary of me raving about it and I imagine that, by now, so are you. ( )