I read a very thought-provoking article today by Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years.
http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml
It was interesting to read and realize that things I accept as commonplace are unusual in many Islamic nations. What I came away with is the general impression that, while Islam is compatible with science, there are numerous factors in current Islamic leadership and society which retard growth. The main points I drew were:
- Suppression of women — particularly requiring the veil — leads to an environment in which fewer people are willing to speak up, with fewer contributions by women and men.
- Science and religion are still at odds in some ideological areas, and when the nation is Islamic, science loses.
- Most Muslim countries are still poor, despite the exception of a few oil-rich states.
- Native languages do not cope well with science.
- Few scientific works are translated into native languages.
- The scientific method is alien 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.”
- Religious experience is believed to have scientific credence, with the resulting lack of testable hypotheses. “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.”
- The West financially and ideologically supported fundamentalist Islam for many years because it suited its colonial and resource needs. A rise in fundamentalism comes at the expense of Enlightenment thinking, and corresponds to a fall in scientific innovation.
All is not lost, however, and Hoodbhoy sees a future in which the Islamic communities which brought us Algebra and astronomy are again full participants in advancing science. He believes, however, that it will require a fairly radical shift in Muslim thinking which “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.” Most importantly, though, he does not think that real scientific progress can occur while these endless clashes with the West continue.
“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.”