Muzaffar Iqbal is the director of the Center for Islam and Science, whose main publication, Islam & Science, is a journal of Islamic perspectives on science, civilization and intellectual history, and who are engaged in producing an integrated encyclopedia of the Qur'an based on fourteen centuries of Islamic Muslim reflection and scholarship. The aim of the four volumes of New Perspectives on the History of Islamic Science is to gather a collection of recent significant articles by eminent specialists in their fields, to show that the traditional view of Islamic science as established by nineteenth-century orientalists is wrong: that (1) Islam has never been hostile to the natural sciences, (2) science did not decline in Islam from the thirteenth century onwards, (3) Islam was not just a depot which hosted the received Greek knowledge for a while before conditions were ripe for its transport to Europe, but on the contrary (4) Islam contributed to the emergence of modern science. Hence the necessity to provide ‘New Perspectives on the History of Islamic Science’. The third and fourth volumes in the series follow volumes on Studies in the Islam and Science Nexus (general discussions of the relationship of the Islamic religion to science), and Contemporary Issues in Islam and Science, which looks forward to what Muslims should and will be doing in science in the future. The third volume takes the historical perspective. Several of the articles have already appeared in the periodical Islam and Science; others in Rashed's three-volume Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science (1996). The focus is on mathematics and astronomy, and thus the key ‘witnesses’ are David King, Roshdi Rashed, Christian Houzel, Emilia Calvo, Roser Puig and George Saliba. This volume looks at mathematics and astronomy from an internal Islamic perspective. The fourth volume, on the other hand, considers the passage of knowledge (again entirely mathematical and astronomical) from Greek into Arabic, its transformation within Islam, and its passage on to the West. In his introduction to the fourth volume, Muzaffar Iqbal makes an implied value judgement by saying that the translation of Greek, Syriac, Sanskrit and Pahlavi works into Arabic was a well-organized and well-funded translation process which took place primarily in Baghdad and lasted for approximately two hundred years from the middle of the eighth century; the passage of Arabic learning to the West ‘was less focused and less organized and was spread over a large geographical area’ (vol. 4, p. xi). Astrology was the spur to translating.

Most of the reprinted articles have been published in the last ten years, and Iqbal is not averse to mentioning recent scholarship which runs counter to long-held beliefs, such as the denial that the famous House of Wisdom was a foundation established for the translations of texts into Arabic (vol. 4, p. xii) – a denial elaborated by Dimitri Gutas and Kevin van Bladel in their recent contribution to the Encyclopedia of Islam 3, s.v. Bayt al-hikma). Iqbal refers to Sabra's use of the term ‘aspecting’ (which surely has an astrological origin), ‘in order to refer to the way in which individuals in a given culture aspect another culture as they direct their gaze to the other from their own location’ (vol. 4, p. xvi)

Iqbal gives as a reason for the concentration on astronomy the fact that ‘recent studies in the history of Islamic scientific tradition have paid considerably more attention to astronomy than other branches’ (vol. 4, p. xvii). This is hardly fair to the large amount of work that has been done in the field of medicine (not to mention philosophy).

Iqbal eventually wishes to reject and dispel the idea that Islam is irrational and intolerant, and that ‘Greek learning never found a secure institutional home in Islam, as it was eventually to do in the universities of medieval Christendom’ (quoting Roshdi Rashed, vol. 4, pp. xvii–xviii). Iqbal is clearly on a mission to alter the prevalent perspective on Islam and science. His aim is similar to that of the Gallimard publication L’épopé de la science arabe by Danielle Jacquart (2005) and the website muslim.heritage.com. Most similar, however, is a set of four volumes of articles collected by Peter E. Pormann under the title Islamic Medical and Scientific Tradition, and published by Routledge in 2010. Pormann introduces the articles with the statement that ‘Islam is often perceived, and not only in the popular imagination, as being opposed to science and rationality. Some scholars even argue … that Islam was incapable of innovation and did little more than transmit, and at times disfigure, previous Greek knowledge’ (p. 1). Pormann counters this perception by presenting articles, mostly written within the last ten years, mainly on medicine and natural science. Iqbal's collection provides a nice compliment to Pormann's in concentrating on astronomy.