:: About the MISC Institute

The MISC Institute is an independent cultural organization with no political or denominational affiliations. It is incorporated as an independent not-for-profit institution with the federal government of Canada, with full charitable status.

After the very successful astronomy-related activities the first few years of the MISC, we are now expanding to a broader set of topics (medicine, philosophy, literature, poetry, music, architecture, etc.)

The Islamic civilisation's love affair with the sciences is deeply rooted in its culture and history. In past centuries, Islamic World scholars of various ethnicities and religious persuasions invented several of the mathematical disciplines and empirical techniques that eventually led to modern astronomy, chemistry, medicine, computing, and many other fields of scientific inquiry. For hundreds of years Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and other scholars, working under the umbrella of a progressive Islamic civilisation, dominated the world scene in these disciplines as well as in many others such as philosophy, music (then considered a science) and architecture. The fact that the brightest visible stars in the sky have Arabic names and that Western musicians still use clefs derived from Arabic letters bears witness to that glorious era of "Eastern" science.

The Institute honours Muhammad's name for his historical campaign against superstitious and supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, and in favour of rational scholarship. He dramatically departed from previous epistemological traditions by relentlessly combating superstition and charlatanism, often at great personal risk. He had a deep influence on the emergence of subsequent generations of rationalist scholars and philosophers who paved the way for modern scientific thinking. On January 27, 632 AD, the painful death of his son Ibrahim coincided with an annular solar eclipse. As rumours started circulating that this was a miracle proving the divinity of his message, he famously preached that the sun and the moon do not eclipse each other according to whether a human lives or dies. He taught to seek the explanation of natural phenomena not in supernatural intervention, but in the secret workings of nature itself. Even if, as he said, that scholarly quest were to take you to the farthest reaches of the Earth ("Seek knowledge unto China").