Almost every standard world history textbook celebrates Islam’s golden age of science. Between the ninth and 13th centuries, Muslim scholars not only translated the great works of Greek medicine, mathematics, and science but also pushed the frontiers of discovery in all of those areas. They improved and named algebra, refined techniques of surgery, advanced the study of optics, and charted the heavens. Then, toward the end of the 13th century, something mysterious happened: The scientific spirit seemed to die almost completely.
Today, most predominantly Muslim countries benefit daily from the fruits of science and technology, and most of the leaders of these nations at least pay lip service to the importance of scientific education. Arab analysts, in recent U.N.-backed reports on the deplorable state of human development in 22 Arab countries, have consistently called for more robust support for “knowledge acquisition” as a crucial step toward catching up with other regions of the world.
Yet according to the distinguished Pakistani scientist Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, chair of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the news from the Islamic world is not very encouraging. And if his report in the August issue of Physics Today is accurate, it seems that not only science but the critical reasoning that undergirds it is in a precarious state.
Hoodbhoy marshals an array of data to demonstrate that the commitment to real scientific study and research in Muslim nations still lags far behind international averages.
For example, the 57 nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference can boast only 8.5 scientists per 1,000 population, while the world average is 40.7. Of the lowest national producers of scientific articles in 2003, half are members of the OIC. The OIC countries spend about 0.3 percent of their gross national product on research and development, in contrast to the global average of 2.4 percent.
Loved these lines: “Heresy. Throughout the Muslim world, there is a widespread suspicion that science is heresy—or at least those parts of science that cannot be used, or twisted, to support literalist interpretations of Islamic scriptures. Needless to say, this suspicion has received support from other varieties of religious fundamentalism, including the Christian and Hindu ones.”
Yep, the ol’ Falwell-Hindutva-Al Qaeda axis at it again.
Still, things ain’t that bad. They’re pretty good at high school chemistry hooked up with cell phones.
This article confirms much of what Archbishop Carey was pilloried for saying a couple of years back about the appalling lack of any contributions to knowledge by the Muslim world. I suppose if a non-Christian says it, and throws in a bit of bigotry toward Christians so to seem even-handed, it’s okay. When Carey said it the same folks feigned outrage.
The bifurcation of Islamic and Christian civilisations has a more sensible explanation than the one offered in the article.
Islamic culture is certainly inventive.
1. We invent airplanes, they invent [i] flying airplanes into buildings [/i] .
2. We invent the internet, they invent [i] beheadings on the internet [/i] .
3. We invent vaccines, they invent [i] mailing anthrax [/i] .
4. We invent skyscrapers, they invent [i] (see No. 1)…. [/i]
The Pope Benedict quoted Emperor Manual II Paleologos of the Byzantine Empire. The emperors words were, he said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. Not entirely true but it does make me ponder.
More books are translated into Spanish each year than have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years:
“[A]bout 330 books are translated each year into Arabic. [S]ince the 9th century AD a total of some 100,000 books have been translated into Arabic, a total that approximates the number of books translated into Spanish each year. In other words, the Spanish-speaking world is receiving translated books at a rate 300 times that of the Arabic-speaking world. In per capita terms, each year one new book is translated into Arabic for every 600,000 of the world’s 200 million Arabic speakers, while one new book is translated into Spanish for every 3000 of the world’s 300 million Spanish speakers.”
http://www.baghdadmuseum.org/en/index.php?title=Year_Zero_for_the_Archaeology_of_Iraq
Here’s a question: How are we, as Christians, doing in promoting scientific inquiry among ourselves? Are we encouraging believers to pursue truth through rigorous analysis of Creation, or are we choosing willful ignorance for the sake of certain questionable literalistic theologies? I look at the common false dichotomies that Christians proclaim that pit faith against science (always to the detriment of the Gospel) and I wonder, is this article to be the fate of our churches as well?
I must also confess disgust at the blatant bigotry of comments #1 and #4 that assume that both the billion plus muslims of this world are uniformly or even predominantly inclined to terrorist action, and that such action is the fully characterizes Islam. There is a time and place to carefully analyze the link between Islamic teachings and terrorist action, but comments on this particular article are not that time. Such hollow caricatures lack both wisdom and charity; they dishonour all our witness.
# 7 – glad I brought a smile to your face !
Actually I can think of a lot of Christians promoting scientific inquiry, even some whose theology you would find ‘questionable’ – & which theology isn’t? & Muslims do learn science, but mainly in the ‘West’ or India. Ask yourself what Saudi Arabia has done with the billions it has received for sitting on the world’s biggest oil deposits (well, we know the answer to that: madrassas in Africa, prostitutes and casinos in London – oh, there I go bigoting again …). Heck, they didn’t even discover, extract or refine the oil.
#7, you are missing the point. Which is that Muslim societies are no longer notable in any field other than the mass destruction of innocents.
That is NOT all there is to those societies, but they have no other prominence [i]compared to the rest of the world.[/i]
More books are translated into Spanish each year than have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years:
That’s a shocking statistic!
#7:I must also confess disgust at the blatant bigotry of comments #1 and #4 that assume that both the billion plus muslims of this world are uniformly or even predominantly inclined to terrorist action, and that such action is the fully characterizes Islam.
The comments may be incorrect (I don’t know) but they are certainly not “blatantly bigoted”. The Muslim world still remains largely reluctant to address the issue of terrorism. Until that happens, it is a legitimate argument that there is something inherent in Islam that encourages terrorism.
#8: You asked what Saudi Arabia spends their oil money on? The more useful answer is foreign aid and US armaments. They’re among the world’s top countries for spending on both of those items. That second one amuses me.
I also see a great many Christians advocating serious scientific inquiry, which is why this article isn’t about us today. But I also see a great many Christians placing themselves at war with the scientific community and demanding any scientist who wishes to not be declared apostate agree with the church’s scientific edicts and then work backwards to somehow validate them. It’s the traction that the latter group appears to be gaining that concerns me since it both isolates Christians from the progress of science, and isolates scientists from Christianity.
#9: Is that an issue of actual prominence of just bad PR? For example, if you actually look at it, they’re a lot better at building sky-scrapers (see Dubai) than knocking them down despite #4’s claims.
Gammell [#7 & 12]: American fundamentalists erred grievously in pitting scripture against science. Good analyses of this error and its doleful consequences can be found in George Marsden’s book, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Eerdmans 1991) and Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans 1994).
But fundamentalist hostility to sound science is an aberration of English-speaking North American Protestants. It is not typical of Christianity, past or present—as Rodney Stark explains in his book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House 2005).
Gammell [#12]: Last time I looked at the subject, Saudi foreign aid went disproportionately to Muslim-ruled countries (including Sudan) and hardline Muslim groups (including Hamas, Wahabi-inspired Muslim clerics, and Islamist madrasas). Saudi money builds an Islamist infrastructure around the world, giving the Saudis’ narrow, intolerant version of Islam a global reach and a prominence it would not otherwise have.
#12, you are STILL missing the point. Muslims can build skyscrapers, sure, but they are not the recognized pioneers in the field.
They are the winners and new champions of killing people they had never met, who did not even think of them for five minutes a day.
#7 Gammell: You are right. My comments in #4 are totally one-sided. Islam does not produce only evil, neither is it the source of all evil in the world today.
I’ll give them credit for algebra, our numbering system (ever try doing math using Roman, or worse, Greek numerals?), naming some stars, Scheherazade, and um,…hummus…. Give me a week & I’ll think of something else.
My point is, what have they done [i] lately [/i] ? In the last 100 years, what have Islamic scholars, working in an Islamic institute, produced that we would want to copy? I really would like to know. I’ll give [i] you [/i] a week.
Pervez Hoodbhoy has become an important voice for the promotion of science education in the Muslim world. He has also become a leader in promoting interreligious dialogue on the broad subject of the dialogue between religion and science. I take anything he says and writes seriously.
I can think of at least three factors in the present state of the study and practice of the sciences in Islamic countries. One is the poor state of higher education generally in the Muslim world. Of a list of the top fifty (or was it 100?) universities in the world published a couple of years ago, not a single university in the Muslim world made the list, though there are some fine ones such as the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur (where all of the courses are taught in English). I know some graduates who are persons of great intelligence and fine scholarship. Recently, the King of Saudi Arabia announced that a lot of that oil money, over a billion in fact, would be spent on building a new university devoted to science and technology in the country. He hopes to attract first-rate scholars and teachers and students. The university will be a haven from the strict Wahhabi social practices (e.g., women and men can attend classes and labs together). A small step in a world of 1.3 billion adherents, but a start.
A second is one referred to in the article, the identification of western science with colonialism, a problem that is only beginning to be addressed in a rational way. We in the West do not have a clue to the impact that the coloniazation of the Middle East by Britain and France from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century has had on the Muslim world. There are understandable reasons that America is seen as a neo-colonial power in the Middle East. Part of the conservative push-back from the spread of modernism in the Islamic world has included a suspicion of modern science.
A third is the point addressed by Sayyid Hossein Nasr, a brilliant scholar of Islam whose work I highly respect. Nasr is a Sufi, and my experience with the Sufi scholars whose writings I have read on science express a suspicion of modern science generally and scientific concepts such as biological and cosmological evolution (which Nasr does not accept). Science is equated by some of them with scientism (which all of us should reject). This may remain a problem in the Muslim intellectual community.
An addendum to my previous note: I have not studied the history of colonial rule over Middle Eastern and South East Asian lands. I wonder whether the British and the French enoucraged or neglected the development of higher education in these areas under their rule. If they did little, then this would have been an obvious factor in the low state of higher education in Muslim countries generally. Can anyone comment on this?
# 19: Britain did a *huge amount to further liberal secondary and higher education in pre-independence India (i.e. India and Pakistan), and as a general rule, the more Christians in an area (e.g. Kerala), the higher the levels of literacy and general education, for girls as well as boys. There are many church colleges esp. in south India, but not of course in Pakistan.
India is of course anglophone in its higher education. Not many scholars in the Muslim world have great proficiency in English or the other European languages, which is a prerequisite for higher study in the sciences. Policies in Malaysia, for example, favoring Malay in education meant they are ill equipped to do science, since there are few such textbooks in Malay; contrast this with anglophone Singapore.
Saudi universities have turned out a lot of graduates in (uncritical) Quranic studies and experts in sharia (just what the world needs). I suspect that the Muslim world’s failure to contribute in science is a reflection of the poor standards of education there overall. Further, I don’t know if there’s that much connection between the salience of a religion in a society and the prominence of science; I think it has much more to do with whether a society has industrialized and technologized (such as China and Japan, in contrast to practically all Muslim countires until recently).
In physics, particularly, English is dominant to such an extent that you would have an extraordinarily difficult time staying current in the field without it.