English

Iran’s revolution is understood (at least by its past leader, Ayatollah Khomeini) as the revitalization of religion in the modern world. Based on this religious foundation, Iranian governments in the past 40 years since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979 have had a special science policy, which (although with different accentuations) interestingly remained almost constant through the most fundamental political shifts. This paper, after a short introduction to the scientific achievements of post-revolutionary Iran, tries to look for religious reasons for this continuity in science policy. The teachings of the Qur'an stress the importance of knowledge, and therefore it is of fundamental importance in Islamic culture to seek for knowledge. Yet there are different views concerning what is the proper relationship between science and Islam. This paper will define four different hermeneutic and philosophical approaches to the relationship between new sciences and Islam, focusing on post-revolutionary Iran.