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Topic Name: THE Introspective ,Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement
Category: Systems Optimization
Research persons: Pervez Hoodbhoy
Location: Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years., Pakistan
Details
Internal causes led to
the decline of Islam's scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile
imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask
what went wrong.
This article grew out of
the Max von Laue Lecture that I delivered earlier this year to celebrate that
eminent physicist and man of strong social conscience. When Adolf Hitler was on
the ascendancy, Laue was one of the very few German physicists of stature who
dared to defend Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. It therefore seems
appropriate that a matter concerning science and civilization should be my
concern here.
The question I want to
pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a
billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world
disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be
definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.
It was not always this
way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about
major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held
sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics,
established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created
universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world
essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the
Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific
development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that
contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of
injustice and victimhood.
Such negative feelings
must be checked before the gulf widens further. A bloody clash of civilizations,
should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most
dangerous challenges to life on our planet—climate change and nuclear
proliferation.
First encounters
Islam's encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no
science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as
Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In
the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of
Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and
enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars
from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who
sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic
Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims,
Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over
time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist
interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus
predestination—became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy
eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the
open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly
relegated to the margins of Islam.1
A long period of darkness followed, punctuated by occasional brilliant spots. In
the 16th century, the Turkish Ottomans established an extensive empire with the
help of military technology. But there was little enthusiasm for science and new
knowledge (see figure 1). In the 19th century, the European Enlightenment
inspired a wave of modernist Islamic reformers: Mohammed Abduh of Egypt, his
follower Rashid Rida from Syria, and their counterparts on the Indian
subcontinent, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Jamaluddin Afghani, exhorted their
fellow Muslims to accept ideas of the Enlightenment and the scientific
revolution. Their theological position can be roughly paraphrased as, "The
Qur'an tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." That echoed
Galileo earlier in Europe.
The 20th century
witnessed the end of European colonial rule and the emergence of several new
independent Muslim states, all initially under secular national leaderships. A
spurt toward modernization and the acquisition of technology followed. Many
expected that a Muslim scientific renaissance would ensue. Clearly, it did not.
What ails science in the
Muslim world?
Muslim leaders today, realizing that military power and economic growth flow
from technology, frequently call for speedy scientific development and a
knowledge-based society. Often that call is rhetorical, but in some Muslim
countries—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria among others—official patronage and funding for
science and education have grown sharply in recent years. Enlightened individual
rulers, including Sultan ibn Muhammad Al-Qasimi of Sharjah, Hamad bin Khalifa Al
Thani of Qatar, and others have put aside some of their vast personal wealth for
such causes (see figure 2 and the news story on page 33). No Muslim leader has
publicly called for separating science from religion.
Is boosting resource
allocations enough to energize science, or are more fundamental changes
required? Scholars of the 19th century, such as the pioneering sociologist Max
Weber, claimed that Islam lacks an "idea system" critical for sustaining a
scientific culture based on innovation, new experiences, quantification, and
empirical verification. Fatalism and an orientation toward the past, they said,
makes progress difficult and even undesirable.
In the current epoch of
growing antagonism between the Islamic and the Western worlds, most Muslims
reject such charges with angry indignation. They feel those accusations add yet
another excuse for the West to justify its ongoing cultural and military
assaults on Muslim populations. Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and
science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and
science may account for the slowness of progress. The Qur'an, being the
unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a
problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement
the Qur'an's divine instructions.
In defending the
compatibility of science and Islam, Muslims argue that Islam had sustained a
vibrant intellectual culture throughout the European Dark Ages and thus, by
extension, is also capable of a modern scientific culture. The Pakistani physics
Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam, would stress to audiences that one-eighth of
the Qur'an is a call for Muslims to seek Allah's signs in the universe and hence
that science is a spiritual as well as a temporal duty for Muslims. Perhaps the
most widely used argument one hears is that the Prophet Muhammad had exhorted
his followers to "seek knowledge even if it is in China," which implies that a
Muslim is duty-bound to search for secular knowledge.
Such arguments have been
and will continue to be much debated, but they will not be pursued further here.
Instead, let us seek to understand the state of science in the contemporary
Islamic world. First, to the degree that available data allows, I will
quantitatively assess the current state of science in Muslim countries. Then I
will look at prevalent Muslim attitudes toward science, technology, and
modernity, with an eye toward identifying specific cultural and social practices
that work against progress. Finally, we can turn to the fundamental question:
What will it take to bring science back into the Islamic world?
Measuring Muslim
scientific progress
The metrics of scientific progress are neither precise nor unique. Science
permeates our lives in myriad ways, means different things to different people,
and has changed its content and scope drastically over the course of history. In
addition, the paucity of reliable and current data makes the task of assessing
scientific progress in Muslim countries still harder.
I will use the following
reasonable set of four metrics:
The quantity of
scientific output, weighted by some reasonable measure of relevance and
importance;
The role played by science and technology in the national economies, funding for
S&T, and the size of the national scientific enterprises;
The extent and quality of higher education; and
The degree to which science is present or absent in popular culture.
Scientific output
A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of
published scientific research papers, together with the citations to them. Table
1 shows the output of the seven most scientifically productive Muslim countries
for physics papers, over the period from 1 January 1997 to 28 February 2007,
together with the total number of publications in all scientific fields. A
comparison with Brazil, India, China, and the US reveals significantly smaller
numbers. A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia2
showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per
1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries
of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (For more on the
OECD, see
http://www.oecd.org.) Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the
world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from
Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by
Israel alone. The US NSF
records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half
belong to the OIC.3
The situation may be even
grimmer than the publication numbers or perhaps even the citation counts
suggest. Assessing the scientific worth of publications—never an easy task—is
complicated further by the rapid appearance of new international scientific
journals that publish low-quality work. Many have poor editorial policies and
refereeing procedures. Scientists in many developing countries, who are under
pressure to publish, or who are attracted by strong government incentives,
choose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly
commercialized policies of journals. Prospective authors know that editors need
to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month. In addition to
considerable anecdotal evidence for these practices, there have been a few
systematic studies. For example,4 chemistry publications by Iranian scientists
tripled in five years, from 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003. Many scientific papers
that were claimed as original by their Iranian chemist authors, and that had
been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been
published twice and sometimes thrice with identical or nearly identical contents
by the same authors. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily
detected by any reasonably careful referee.
The situation regarding
patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few.
According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only
eight patents in the past 43 years.
Islamic countries show a
great diversity of cultures and levels of modernization and a correspondingly
large spread in scientific productivity. Among the larger countries—in both
population and political importance—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan are the
most scientifically developed. Among the smaller countries, such as the central
Asian republics, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan rank considerably above Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Malaysia—a rather atypical Muslim country with a 40%
non-Muslim minority—is much smaller than neighboring Indonesia but is
nevertheless more productive. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and other
states that have many foreign scientists are scientifically far ahead of other
Arab states.
National scientific
enterprises
Conventional wisdom suggests that bigger science budgets indicate, or will
induce, greater scientific activity. On average, the 57 OIC states spend an
estimated 0.3% of their gross national product on research and development,
which is far below the global average of 2.4%. But the trend toward higher
spending is unambiguous. Rulers in the UAE and Qatar are building several new
universities with manpower imported from the West for both construction and
staffing. In June 2006, Nigeria's president Olusegun Obasanjo announced he will
plow $5 billion of oil money into R&D. Iran increased its R&D spending
dramatically, from a pittance in 1988 at the end of the Iraq–Iran war, to a
current level of 0.4% of its gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia announced that
it spent 26% of its development budget on science and education in 2006, and
sent 5000 students to US universities on full scholarships. Pakistan set a world
record by increasing funding for higher education and science by an immense 800%
over the past five years.
But bigger budgets by
themselves are not a panacea. The capacity to put those funds to good use is
crucial. One determining factor is the number of available scientists,
engineers, and technicians. Those numbers are low for OIC countries, averaging
around 400–500 per million people, while developed countries typically lie in
the range of 3500–5000 per million. Even more important are the quality and
level of professionalism, which are less easily quantifiable. But increasing
funding without adequately addressing such crucial concerns can lead to a null
correlation between scientific funding and performance.
The role played by
science in creating high technology is an important science indicator. Comparing
table 1 with table 2 shows there is little correlation between academic research
papers and the role of S&T in the national economies of the seven listed
countries. The anomalous position of Malaysia in table 2 has its explanation in
the large direct investment made by multinational companies and in having
trading partners that are overwhelmingly non-OIC countries.
Although not apparent in table 2, there are scientific areas in which research
has paid off in the Islamic world. Agricultural research—which is relatively
simple science—provides one case in point. Pakistan has good results, for
example, with new varieties of cotton, wheat, rice, and tea. Defense technology
is another area in which many developing countries have invested, as they aim to
both lessen their dependence on international arms suppliers and promote
domestic capabilities. Pakistan manufactures nuclear weapons and
intermediate-range missiles. There is now also a burgeoning, increasingly
export-oriented Pakistani arms industry (figure 3) that turns out a large range
of weapons from grenades to tanks, night-vision devices to laser-guided weapons,
and small submarines to training aircraft. Export earnings exceed $150 million
yearly. Although much of the production is a triumph of reverse engineering
rather than original research and development, there is clearly sufficient
understanding of the requisite scientific principles and a capacity to exercise
technical and managerial judgment as well. Iran has followed Pakistan's example.
Higher education
According to a recent survey, among the 57 member states of the OIC, there are
approximately 1800 universities.5 Of those, only 312 publish journal articles. A
ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in
Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of
Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the
top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about
1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article
is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were
excluded). There are fewer data available for comparing against universities
worldwide. Two Malaysian undergraduate institutions were in the top-200 list of
the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2006 (available at
http://www.thes.co.uk). No OIC university made the top-500 "Academic Ranking
of World Universities" compiled by Shanghai
Jiao Tong
University (see
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/en). This state of affairs led the director general of
the OIC to issue an appeal for at least 20 OIC universities to be sufficiently
elevated in quality to make the top-500 list. No action plan was specified, nor
was the term "quality" defined.
An institution's quality
is fundamental, but how is it to be defined? Providing more infrastructure and
facilities is important but not key. Most universities in Islamic countries have
a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job
skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity. Poor teaching
owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally,
obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is
rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent.
Academic and cultural
freedoms on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At
Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, where I teach,
the constraints are similar to those existing in most other Pakistani
public-sector institutions. This university serves the typical middle-class
Pakistani student and, according to the survey referred to earlier,5 ranks
number two among OIC universities. Here, as in other Pakistani public
universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on, and sometimes even
physical attacks by student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate
Islamic norms take place. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one
planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus
Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in
1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The
Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be
Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the Pakistani government.
As intolerance and militancy sweep across the Muslim world, personal and
academic freedoms diminish with the rising pressure to conform. In Pakistani
universities, the veil is now ubiquitous, and the last few unveiled women
students are under intense pressure to cover up. The head of the
government-funded mosque-cum-seminary (figure 4) in the heart of Islamabad, the
nation's capital, issued the following chilling warning to my university's
female students and faculty on his FM radio channel on 12 April 2007:
The government should
abolish co-education. Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in
objectionable dresses. . . . Sportswomen are spreading nudity. I warn the
sportswomen of Islamabad to stop
participating in sports. . . . Our female students have not issued the threat of
throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be
used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it.
There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women.6
The imposition of the
veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that
over time most students—particularly veiled females—have largely lapsed into
becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to
ask questions or take part in discussions. This lack of self-expression and
confidence leads to most Pakistani university students, including those in their
mid- or late-twenties, referring to themselves as boys and girls rather than as
men and women.
Science and religion
still at odds
Science is under pressure globally, and from every religion. As science becomes
an increasingly dominant part of human culture, its achievements inspire both
awe and fear. Creationism and intelligent design, curbs on genetic research,
pseudoscience, parapsychology, belief in UFOs, and so on are some of its
manifestations in the West. Religious conservatives in the US have rallied
against the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Extreme Hindu groups such as the
Vishnu Hindu Parishad, which has called for ethnic cleansing of Christians and
Muslims, have promoted various "temple miracles," including one in which an
elephant-like God miraculously came alive and started drinking milk. Some
extremist Jewish groups also derive additional political strength from
antiscience movements. For example, certain American cattle tycoons have for
years been working with Israeli counterparts to try to breed a pure red heifer
in Israel, which, by their interpretation of chapter 19 of the Book of Numbers,
will signal the coming of the building of the Third Temple,7 an event that would
ignite the Middle East.
In the Islamic world,
opposition to science in the public arena takes additional forms. Antiscience
materials have an immense presence on the internet, with thousands of
elaborately designed Islamic websites, some with view counters running into the
hundreds of thousands. A typical and frequently visited one has the following
banner: "Recently discovered astounding scientific facts, accurately described
in the Muslim Holy Book and by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) 14 centuries ago."
Here one will find that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and
genes was anticipated 1400 years ago.
Science, in the view of
fundamentalists, is principally seen as valuable for establishing yet more
proofs of God, proving the truth of Islam and the Qur'an, and showing that
modern science would have been impossible but for Muslim discoveries. Antiquity
alone seems to matter. One gets the impression that history's clock broke down
somewhere during the 14th century and that plans for repair are, at best, vague.
In that all-too-prevalent view, science is not about critical thought and
awareness, creative uncertainties, or ceaseless explorations. Missing are
websites or discussion groups dealing with the philosophical implications from
the Islamic point of view of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos
theory, superstrings, stem cells, and other contemporary science issues.
Similarly, in the mass
media of Muslim countries, discussions on "Islam and science" are common and
welcomed only to the extent that belief in the status quo is reaffirmed rather
than challenged. When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90
000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief,
freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment
for sinful behavior. Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an
explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets, which
had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake. As several class
discussions showed, an overwhelming majority of my university's science students
accepted various divine-wrath explanations.
Why the slow development?
Although the relatively slow pace of scientific development in Muslim countries
cannot be disputed, many explanations can and some common ones are plain wrong.
For example, it is a myth
that women in Muslim countries are largely excluded from higher education. In
fact, the numbers are similar to those in many Western countries: The percentage
of women in the university student body is 35% in Egypt, 67% in Kuwait, 27% in
Saudi Arabia, and 41% in Pakistan, for just a few examples. In the physical
sciences and engineering, the proportion of women enrolled is roughly similar to
that in the US. However, restrictions on the freedom of women leave them with
far fewer choices, both in their personal lives and for professional advancement
after graduation, relative to their male counterparts.
The near-absence of
democracy in Muslim countries is also not an especially important reason for
slow scientific development. It is certainly true that authoritarian regimes
generally deny freedom of inquiry or dissent, cripple professional societies,
intimidate universities, and limit contacts with the outside world. But no
Muslim government today, even if dictatorial or imperfectly democratic, remotely
approximates the terror of Hitler or Joseph Stalin—regimes in which science
survived and could even advance.
Another myth is that the
Muslim world rejects new technology. It does not. In earlier times, the
orthodoxy had resisted new inventions such as the printing press, loudspeaker,
and penicillin, but such rejection has all but vanished. The ubiquitous cell
phone, that ultimate space-age device, epitomizes the surprisingly quick
absorption of black-box technology into Islamic culture. For example, while
driving in Islamabad, it would occasion no surprise if you were to receive an
urgent SMS (short message service) requesting immediate prayers for helping
Pakistan's cricket team win a match. Popular new Islamic cell-phone models now
provide the exact GPS-based direction for Muslims to face while praying,
certified translations of the Qur'an, and step-by-step instructions for
performing the pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Qur'ans are already
popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting bend-downs during
prayers) have made their debut.
Some relatively more
plausible reasons for the slow scientific development of Muslim countries have
been offered. First, even though a handful of rich oil-producing Muslim
countries have extravagant incomes, most are fairly poor and in the same boat as
other developing countries. Indeed, the OIC average for per capita income is
significantly less than the global average. Second, the inadequacy of
traditional Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, Urdu—is an important contributory
reason. About 80% of the world's scientific literature appears first in English,
and few traditional languages in the developing world have adequately adapted to
new linguistic demands. With the exceptions of Iran and Turkey, translation
rates are small. According to a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab
intellectuals and released in Cairo, Egypt, "The entire Arab
world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece
translates." The report adds that in the 1000 years since the reign of the
caliph Maa'moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in
just one year.8
It's the thought that
counts
But the still deeper reasons are attitudinal, not material. At the base lies the
yet unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and
social behavior.
That assertion needs
explanation. No grand dispute, such as between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, is
holding back the clock. Bread-and-butter science and technology requires
learning complicated but mundane rules and procedures that place no strain on
any reasonable individual's belief system. A bridge engineer, robotics expert,
or microbiologist can certainly be a perfectly successful professional without
pondering profound mysteries of the universe. Truly fundamental and
ideology-laden issues confront only that tiny minority of scientists who grapple
with cosmology, indeterminacy in quantum mechanical and chaotic systems,
neuroscience, human evolution, and other such deep topics. Therefore, one could
conclude that developing science is only a matter of setting up enough schools,
universities, libraries, and laboratories, and purchasing the latest scientific
tools and equipment.
But the above reasoning
is superficial and misleading. Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has
grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The
deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful
work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential.
Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and
rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The
scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only
the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in
which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with
difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated,
and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be
discovered.
Science finds every soil
barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is
considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the
scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of
intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific
research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting"
activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold
hypotheses are made and checked.
Religious fundamentalism
is always bad news for science. But what explains its meteoric rise in Islam
over the past half century? In the mid-1950s all Muslim leaders were secular,
and secularism in Islam was growing. What changed? Here the West must accept its
share of responsibility for reversing the trend. Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq,
Indonesia under Ahmed Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser are examples
of secular but nationalist governments that wanted to protect their national
wealth. Western imperial greed, however, subverted and overthrew them. At the
same time, conservative oil-rich Arab states—such as Saudi Arabia—that exported
extreme versions of Islam were US clients. The fundamentalist Hamas organization
was helped by Israel in its fight against the secular Palestine Liberation
Organization as part of a deliberate Israeli strategy in the 1980s. Perhaps most
important, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US Central
Intelligence Agency armed the fiercest and most ideologically charged Islamic
fighters and brought them from distant Muslim countries into Afghanistan, thus
helping to create an extensive globalized jihad network. Today, as secularism
continues to retreat, Islamic fundamentalism fills the vacuum.
How science can return to
the Islamic world
In the 1980s an imagined "Islamic science" was posed as an alternative to
"Western science." The notion was widely propagated and received support from
governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Muslim ideologues
in the US, such as Ismail Faruqi and Syed Hossein Nasr, announced that a new
science was about to be built on lofty moral principles such as tawheed (unity
of God), ibadah (worship), khilafah (trusteeship), and rejection of zulm
(tyranny), and that revelation rather than reason would be the ultimate guide to
valid knowledge. Others took as literal statements of scientific fact verses
from the Qur'an that related to descriptions of the physical world. Those
attempts led to many elaborate and expensive Islamic science conferences around
the world. Some scholars calculated the temperature of Hell, others the chemical
composition of heavenly djinnis. None produced a new machine or instrument,
conducted an experiment, or even formulated a single testable hypothesis.
A more pragmatic
approach, which seeks promotion of regular science rather than Islamic science,
is pursued by institutional bodies such as COMSTECH (Committee on Scientific and
Technological Cooperation), which was established by the OIC's Islamic Summit in
1981. It joined the IAS (Islamic Academy of Sciences) and ISESCO (Islamic
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) in serving the "ummah" (the
global Muslim community). But a visit to the websites of those organizations
reveals that over two decades, the combined sum of their activities amounts to
sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and
travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.
One almost despairs. Will
science never return to the Islamic world? Shall the world always be split
between those who have science and those who do not, with all the attendant
consequences?
Bleak as the present looks, that outcome does not have to prevail. History has
no final word, and Muslims do have a chance. One need only remember how the
Anglo–American elite perceived the Jews as they entered the US at the opening of
the 20th century. Academics such as Henry Herbert Goddard, the well-known
eugenicist, described Jews in 1913 as "a hopelessly backward people, largely
incapable of adjusting to the new demands of advanced capitalist societies." His
research found that 83% of Jews were "morons"—a term he popularized to describe
the feeble-minded—and he went on to suggest that they should be used for tasks
requiring an "immense amount of drudgery." That ludicrous bigotry warrants no
further discussion, beyond noting that the powerful have always created false
images of the weak.
Progress will require
behavioral changes. If Muslim societies are to develop technology instead of
just using it, the ruthlessly competitive global marketplace will insist on not
only high skill levels but also intense social work habits. The latter are not
easily reconcilable with religious demands made on a fully observant Muslim's
time, energy, and mental concentration: The faithful must participate in five
daily congregational prayers, endure a month of fasting that taxes the body,
recite daily from the Qur'an, and more. Although such duties orient believers
admirably well toward success in the life hereafter, they make worldly success
less likely. A more balanced approach will be needed.
Science can prosper among
Muslims once again, but only with a willingness to accept certain basic
philosophical and attitudinal changes—a Weltanschauung that shrugs off the dead
hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in authority, accepts
the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific
honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms. The struggle to usher in
science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out
rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy, and
pluralism.
Respected voices among
believing Muslims see no incompatibility between the above requirements and true
Islam as they understand it. For example, Abdolkarim Soroush, described as
Islam's Martin Luther, was handpicked by Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the reform
of Iran's universities in the early 1980s. His efforts led to the introduction
of modern analytical philosophers such as Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell into
the curricula of Iranian universities. Another influential modern reformer is
Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian who grew up in France. Meddeb argues that as early
as the middle of the eighth century, Islam had produced the premises of the
Enlightenment, and that between 750 and 1050, Muslim authors made use of an
astounding freedom of thought in their approach to religious belief. In their
analyses, says Meddeb, they bowed to the primacy of reason, honoring one of the
basic principles of the Enlightenment.
In the quest for
modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Islamic world.
Progressive Muslim forces have recently been weakened, but not extinguished, as
a consequence of the confrontation between Muslims and the West. On an
ever-shrinking globe, there can be no winners in that conflict: It is time to
calm the waters. We must learn to drop the pursuit of narrow nationalist and
religious agendas, both in the West and among Muslims. In the long run,
political boundaries should and can be treated as artificial and temporary, as
shown by the successful creation of the European Union. Just as important, the
practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced
by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the
principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and
progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade
those who do not.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is chair
and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam
University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where
he has taught for 34 years.
References
1. P. Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science—Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for
Rationality, Zed Books, London (1991).
2. M. A. Anwar, A. B. Abu Bakar, Scientometrics 40, 23 (1997).
3. For additional statistics, see the special issue "Islam and Science," Nature
444, 19 (2006).
4. M. Yalpani, A. Heydari, Chem. Biodivers. 2, 730 (2005).
5. Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic
Countries, Academic Rankings of Universities in the OIC Countries (April 2007),
available at [LINK].
6. The News, Islamabad, 24 April 2007, available at [LINK].
7. For more information on the red heifer venture, see [LINK].
8. N. Fergany et al., Arab Human Development Report 2002, United Nations
Development Programme, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, New York
(2002), available at [LINK
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