Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

[Toramana]

Science and the Islamic world—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.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy
August 2007, page 49

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 ...

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml?bypassSSO=1

[tor_khan]

The Muslim world is caught up in dependency and lacks the innovation that it did in the past, when it was, arguably more confident about its global position.

Today many Muslims struggle to eat so innovation is perhaps a lower priority.

In my view, knowing that the Muslim world is struggling between these leads to the reactions that we see. For scientific and cultural growth, you need a level amount of peace.

[Toramana]

"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."

[Khostai]

Science and the Islamic world—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.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy
August 2007, page 49

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 ...

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc...ml?bypassSSO=1

Most of the scientific growth in the begining of the muslim age was due to the assimilation of the great civilizations like that of Egypt, Greece, Persia, Babylonia and India. The knowledge was borrowed from them and made a littel better, but once the Islam took control, there was no growth becuase the muslims failed to establish strong learning centers, they wasted there power on useless things. Unlike the Europeans who really did an effort to learn peopel how to write and read becuase they wanted that peopel will read the bibel self and would become better christians. The muslims didn't do that. And also Europeans had many monasteries were old texts were studied and translated.

[Toramana]

"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."

[Zirey]

Sometime ago a Turkish friend sent me a booklet arguing against the theory of evolution. The booklet's Muslim author cited favorably the work of Christian young-earth creationists. Is there a place for believers in both traditions to cooperate in the field of science?

[Toramana]

Islam's arrested development
Islam did ancient science brilliantly, but today Muslims lag behind. To catch up, they must demand the freedom to question

Material resources are immaterial to the current sorry state of science in Islam. To do science, it is first necessary to accept the key premises underlying science – causality and the absence of divine intervention in physical processes, and a belief in the existence of physical law. Without the scientific method you cannot have science because science is all about objective and rational thinking. Science demands a mindset that incessantly questions and challenges assumptions, not one that relies upon received wisdom. If this condition is not fulfilled, all the money and machines in the world make no difference.

Can Islam accept the premises of science? There are some versions of the religion that can, and others that simply cannot.

But before proceeding further, let me distinguish between ancient science – which Muslims did brilliantly – and modern science. They are not quite the same but are so often confused together that it is important to make the point. The ancient science of the Greeks, Chinese, Muslims, and Hindus was a rather limited affair that did not put any theological system under undue stress. Scholars observed, drew a few conclusions, and wrote a treatise that only a few could read. It was inconceivable at that time to imagine that the workings of the entire physical world could be understood from just a handful of basic principles. There was almost no link to technology and therefore no impact upon how people actually lived.

Not so for modern science. This product of the European Enlightenment is now the essence of a universal human civilisation. Although it was fuelled by the discoveries of ancient science, including Muslim science, the Enlightenment had an impact that was totally different from the stellar works of individual ancient scholars.

Modern science defines our world by constantly creating new technologies. It also claims to explain everything from the scale of the atom to the universe, and from times that range from the present to the very birth of the universe. It evokes resistance among traditionalists because it offers an explanation of how humans emerged from the depths of biological evolution to their present form. All this makes it hugely different from ancient science, which is what the Greeks and Muslims – as well as Chinese and Hindus – had done so splendidly in their respective times. So if a civilisation did great ancient science, this does not automatically mean that it is equally qualified for doing modern science.

To return to the issue of the compatibility of science with Islam: at one level the for-and-against arguments resemble those for Christianity. Islam has had its share of pro-science reformers, such as the 19th century figure from India, Syed Ahmad Khan and the Iranian Jamaluddin Afghani, who argued that miracles specified in the Qur'an must be understood in broad allegorical terms rather than literally. Following the rationalist (Mutazillite) tradition of 9th century Islam, Muslim rationalists insisted on an interpretation that was in conformity with the observed truths of science. This meant doing away with cherished beliefs, also held by Christians, of the great flood and Adam's descent from heaven, etc. It was a risky proposition at that time but it was far safer than it is today when the mood has shifted away from empirical inquiry.

On the other hand, fundamentalist versions of all religions, including Islam, are philosophically averse to the notion of material forces running the world. They insist that the divine hand constantly intervenes, and so individual wellbeing requires constant supplications to the powers "up above". This belief system ascribes earthquakes, as well as drought and floods, to divine wrath. On this basis, it would be fair to say that Saudi Islam, or the various Wahhabi-Salafi-Deobandi versions, reject material causality and hence the very basis of modern science.

Shia Islam, on the other hand, while politically assertive and insurrectionist, is less inclined towards pre-modern beliefs. Ayatollah Khomeini was quite content to keep science and Islam in separate domains. He once remarked that there is no such thing as Islamic mathematics. Nor did he take a position against Darwinism. In fact, Iran is one of the rare Muslim countries where the theory of evolution is taught. Today it is a front-runner in stem-cell research – something which President George Bush and his neo-conservative administration had sought to ban from the United States.

But there is another side of the coin: Khomeini also developed the doctrine known as "guardianship of the clergy" (vilayat-e-faqih) which gives mullahs much wider powers than they had generally exercised in the past. Instead of being simple religious leaders, in post-revolutionary Iran they became political leaders as well. This echoed the broader Islamic fusion of the spiritual and the temporal, something that science is acutely uncomfortable with.

To conclude: scientific progress in Muslim countries requires greater personal and intellectual freedom. Without this there can be no thinking, ideas, innovations, discoveries, or progress. The real challenge is not better equipment or faster internet connectivity. Instead, to move ahead in science, Muslims need freedom from dogmatic beliefs and a culture that questions rather than obeys.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/islam-science-muslims-religion

[Toramana]

Pervez: Why Muslims Lack Science? - YouTube

[JattApache]

Most of the scientific growth in the begining of the muslim age was due to the assimilation of the great civilizations like that of Egypt, Greece, Persia, Babylonia and India. The knowledge was borrowed from them and made a littel better, but once the Islam took control, there was no growth becuase the muslims failed to establish strong learning centers, they wasted there power on useless things. Unlike the Europeans who really did an effort to learn peopel how to write and read becuase they wanted that peopel will read the bibel self and would become better christians. The muslims didn't do that. And also Europeans had many monasteries were old texts were studied and translated.

Well said.

[Toramana]

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy speaks out for scientific rationality
The Higgs boson news exposes the "tragedy," he says, of religion-based scorn for a scientific achievement.
July 11, 2012
Published: July 11, 2012
By Steven T. Corneliussen
American physicists regularly address public science awareness, but for the MIT-educated Pakistani physicist and public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy—a longtime colleague of physicists worldwide—the recent Higgs boson news re-illuminated antiscience attitudes having a ferocity not regularly encountered in America.
Hoodbhoy writes frequently in major public forums in Pakistan, the US, and elsewhere. In Pakistan's Express Tribune on 27 May, he published "How to spot the crackpot—pseudoscience in Pakistan." He argued, "Quack science does not just cost money. It also confuses people, engages them in bizarre conspiracy theories, and decreases society's collective ability to act sensibly." Among the objects of his criticism were "a self-taught engineer [who] claims he can 'fix Pakistan's energy problem in 3 years' by splitting water to produce free electricity," a "Fellow of the Royal Society from Pakistan [who] published an article saying that the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme) experiment in Alaska caused floods and earthquakes in Pakistan," and "hucksters who run companies which freely advertise 'magnetised water' for boosting crop yields and making mangoes taste better."
Some of that might call to mind some of what troubles American physicists about public science literacy. But Hoodbhoy was quoted extensively this week in an Associated Press article that the Guardian in the UK headlined "Higgs boson physicist shunned in Pakistan: Man whose work made discovery of elusive particle possible scorned in homeland because of his religious affiliation."
The scorned scientist is the late Nobel laureate Abdus Salam. The piece circulated worldwide, from Australia's media conglomerate News Limited to the Washington Post online. Here's how it began in the Guardian:
In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week, is being largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.
Abdus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.
The wire-service article quotes Hoodbhoy on the nature of Salam's scientific collaboration with Steven Weinberg (a Nobel laureate whose views on a scientific quackery incident Hoodbhoy had requested and reported in that Express Tribune piece). The article also includes this:
Officials at Quaid-i-Azam University had to cancel plans for Salam to lecture about his Nobel-winning theory when Islamist student activists threatened to break the physicist's legs, said his colleague Hoodbhoy.
"The way he has been treated is such a tragedy," said Hoodbhoy. "He went from someone who was revered in Pakistan, a national celebrity, to someone who could not set foot there. If he came, he would be insulted and could be hurt or even killed."
The president who honoured Salam would later go on to intensify persecution of Ahmadis.
Salam was targeted even after his death. His body was returned to Pakistan in 1996 after he died in Oxford, England, and was buried under a gravestone that read "First Muslim Nobel laureate," but a local magistrate ordered the word "Muslim" to be erased, said Hoodbhoy.
Hoodbhoy is not alone in Pakistan in speaking out about his country's memory of Salam. An Express Tribune commentary headlined "Higgs boson: Pakistan's contribution to a major breakthrough" began, "Few Pakistanis know what the Higgs boson is and even fewer realise that some of the earliest theoretical groundwork that led to this discovery was laid by Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam." The closing paragraph merits quoting:
A Pakistani was at the fore of this frontier of discovery in the 1960s and 1970s. But rather than encourage and celebrate his magnificent achievement, he was maligned and sidelined for his faith. An ironic fact: most physicists are staunch atheists but Salam was one of the few firm believers in God.
---

[Khostai]

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy speaks out for scientific rationality
The Higgs boson news exposes the "tragedy," he says, of religion-based scorn for a scientific achievement.
July 11, 2012
Published: July 11, 2012
By Steven T. Corneliussen
American physicists regularly address public science awareness, but for the MIT-educated Pakistani physicist and public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy—a longtime colleague of physicists worldwide—the recent Higgs boson news re-illuminated antiscience attitudes having a ferocity not regularly encountered in America.
Hoodbhoy writes frequently in major public forums in Pakistan, the US, and elsewhere. In Pakistan's Express Tribune on 27 May, he published "How to spot the crackpot—pseudoscience in Pakistan." He argued, "Quack science does not just cost money. It also confuses people, engages them in bizarre conspiracy theories, and decreases society's collective ability to act sensibly." Among the objects of his criticism were "a self-taught engineer [who] claims he can 'fix Pakistan's energy problem in 3 years' by splitting water to produce free electricity," a "Fellow of the Royal Society from Pakistan [who] published an article saying that the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme) experiment in Alaska caused floods and earthquakes in Pakistan," and "hucksters who run companies which freely advertise 'magnetised water' for boosting crop yields and making mangoes taste better."
Some of that might call to mind some of what troubles American physicists about public science literacy. But Hoodbhoy was quoted extensively this week in an Associated Press article that the Guardian in the UK headlined "Higgs boson physicist shunned in Pakistan: Man whose work made discovery of elusive particle possible scorned in homeland because of his religious affiliation."
The scorned scientist is the late Nobel laureate Abdus Salam. The piece circulated worldwide, from Australia's media conglomerate News Limited to the Washington Post online. Here's how it began in the Guardian:
In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week, is being largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.
Abdus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.
The wire-service article quotes Hoodbhoy on the nature of Salam's scientific collaboration with Steven Weinberg (a Nobel laureate whose views on a scientific quackery incident Hoodbhoy had requested and reported in that Express Tribune piece). The article also includes this:
Officials at Quaid-i-Azam University had to cancel plans for Salam to lecture about his Nobel-winning theory when Islamist student activists threatened to break the physicist's legs, said his colleague Hoodbhoy.
"The way he has been treated is such a tragedy," said Hoodbhoy. "He went from someone who was revered in Pakistan, a national celebrity, to someone who could not set foot there. If he came, he would be insulted and could be hurt or even killed."
The president who honoured Salam would later go on to intensify persecution of Ahmadis.
Salam was targeted even after his death. His body was returned to Pakistan in 1996 after he died in Oxford, England, and was buried under a gravestone that read "First Muslim Nobel laureate," but a local magistrate ordered the word "Muslim" to be erased, said Hoodbhoy.
Hoodbhoy is not alone in Pakistan in speaking out about his country's memory of Salam. An Express Tribune commentary headlined "Higgs boson: Pakistan's contribution to a major breakthrough" began, "Few Pakistanis know what the Higgs boson is and even fewer realise that some of the earliest theoretical groundwork that led to this discovery was laid by Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam." The closing paragraph merits quoting:
A Pakistani was at the fore of this frontier of discovery in the 1960s and 1970s. But rather than encourage and celebrate his magnificent achievement, he was maligned and sidelined for his faith. An ironic fact: most physicists are staunch atheists but Salam was one of the few firm believers in God.
---

Really sad, but what do you expect from Pakis...

[Toramana]

[Friend]

Toramana has been giving us lectures on hatred for Punjabis this and Punjabis that but now he has start boasting about the intellect of a punjabi and giving references of punjabi videos and articles. Did't you find any other better guy than this one ?
Toramana you like ANP are being punjabized by their lectures and articles. Good change ???

[khushal]

Muslims have many intellectuals, the problem is that the vast majority move to the West. India, Russia, China and South America are facing the same problem but are doing a lot better to keep them lately. Still though 30% of silicon valley entrepeneurs are Indians.

The other problem is that Muslim resources is not centralized, you have Saudi and the Gulf states who invest nothing but creates chaos in its own society.

[randolph85]

acting as if secularism is the saving grace of intellectual progress in the islamic world is not honest. the islamic "golden era" thrived a 1000 years ago under islamic law, the kind of society that would make liberals of today hate muslims even more. if it were a simple matter of islamic fundamentalists keeping the muslim world backwards, than we would see all the "istans" besides afghanistan and pakistan excelling in these fields. the truth is that they don't, even with their near 100% literacy rates.

take iran for example, its post islamic revolution contribution to science and technology far surpasses its pre revolution past under the secular shah.