In the nineteenth century, the Muslim world's encounter with modern science took the form of a double challenge, simultaneously material and intellectual. The Ottoman Empire's defense against the military rise of Western countries, followed by successful colonization, made it necessary to acquire Western technology, and, therefore, the science behind it. The pressure of modern science on Islam has remained very strong. The West appears as the model of progress that the Muslim world has to reach, or at least follow, through the training of technicians and engineers and through the massive transfer of those technologies that are key to development. But more than anything else, the encounter of Islam with modern science stimulated philosophical and doctrinal thinking, provoked in some fashion by an inaugural event, the now famous lecture titled "Islam and Science," which Ernest Renan (1823–1892) delivered at the Sorbonne in 1883. In the...