The quest for rapprochement
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
BY PERVEZ AMIRALI HOODBHOY
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 civilisation 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 Organisation 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 ninth-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 marginalisation 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 civilisations, 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. 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 Koran 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 modernisation
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, realising 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.
No Muslim leader has publicly called for separating science from religion.
Is boosting resource allocations enough to energise
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 Koran, 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
Koran’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 Koran 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 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:
Ø The quantity of scientific output, weighted by some
reasonable measure of relevance and importance;
Ø The role played by science and technology in the
national economies, funding for S&T and the size of the national
scientific enterprises;
Ø The extent and quality of higher education; and
Ø 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 January 1, 1997 to February 28, 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 1,000
population, compared with a world average of 40.7 and 139.3 for countries
of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Forty-six
Muslim countries contributed 1.17 per cent of the world’s science
literature whereas 1.66 per cent came from India alone and 1.48 per cent
from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55 per cent, compared with
0.89 per cent 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 commercialised 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
1,040 in 1998 to 3,277 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 plagiarised 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 modernisation 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 per cent non-Muslim minority – is much smaller
than neighbouring 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 per cent of their gross national product
on research and development, which is far below the global average of 2.4
per cent. 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 plough $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 per cent of its gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia announced that it
spent 26 per cent of its development budget on science and education in
2006 and sent 5,000 students to US universities on full scholarships.
Pakistan set a world record by increasing funding for higher education and
science by an immense 800 per cent 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
3,500-5,000 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. Defence 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 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 judgement 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 1,800 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, nine in Iran, three each in
Malaysia and Egypt, two in Pakistan and one each in Uganda, the UAE, Saudi
Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan and Azerbaijan. For the top 20
universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about
1,500, 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.
No OIC university made the top 500 "Academic Ranking of
World Universities" compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 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 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
April 12, 2007:
"The government should abolish coeducation. 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 Vishwa
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 anti-science 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. Anti-science 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 Prophet Muhammad 14 centuries ago". Here one will find
that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and genes was
anticipated 1,400 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 Koran 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 behaviour. 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,
including some common ones offered, 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 per cent in Egypt, 67 per cent in Kuwait, 27
per cent in Saudi Arabia and 41 per cent 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, epitomises 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 Koran and step by step instructions
for performing the pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Korans 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 per cent 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 1,000 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 behaviour.
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 judgement 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 cataloguing 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 organisation was helped by Israel in its fight
against the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation 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 globalised 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 Koran 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 Organisation) in serving the ummah
(the global Muslim community). But a visit to the websites of those
organisations 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 per
cent of Jews were "morons" – a term he popularised 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 behavioural 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 Koran 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 rigour 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, honouring 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 practise 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.
n
(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. MA Anwar, AB 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).
6. The News, Islamabad, April 24, 2007.
7. For more information on the red heifer venture, see http://www.templemount.org/heifer.html.
8. N. Fergany et al, Arab Human Development Report 2002, United
Nations Development Programme, Arab Fund for Economic and Social
Development, New York (2002).
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