C
Captain Compassion
Guest
The religious state of Islamic science
Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim
lands remains stuck in the past -- and why the Golden Age of
Mesopotamia wasn't so golden after all.
By Steve Paulson
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/08/13/taner_edis/print.html
Aug. 13, 2007 | In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a
Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut
was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain
questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five
daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How
can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may
sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite
seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more
than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.
This story illustrates the obstacles that face scientists in Muslim
countries. While it's always risky to draw generalizations about
Islam, even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far
behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for
Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.
What's so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic
world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During
Europe's Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities
were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim
scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and
mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the
spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a
backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?
Taner Edis, the author of "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and
Religion in Islam," is in a unique position to examine these
questions. He grew up in Turkey, the son of a Turkish father and an
American mother, and now teaches physics at Truman State University in
Missouri. Though he comes from a Muslim country, his family wasn't
religious. Today, Edis calls himself an "Enlightenment rationalist."
"I am a bit of a physics chauvinist," he writes in his book. "I think
that according to the best of our current knowledge, our world is an
entirely natural, physical place that does not depend on any
supernatural powers."
Edis didn't move to the United States until he was 20, so I was
surprised to discover that he has no trace of a foreign accent. It
turns out English was his first language; only later did he pick up
Turkish on the streets. Edis often travels back to Turkey, where he's
been watching, with a mixture of fascination and alarm, the
sophisticated creationist movement that sprang up in Turkey and is now
spreading throughout the Muslim world. I talked with Edis about the
difficulties of reconciling science with Islam and the quest for an
"Islamic science."
How would you assess the state of scientific knowledge in the Islamic
world?
Dismal. Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science
vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific
community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming
from Muslim lands.
But Islamic countries seem to be very open to using modern technology.
Are you saying that's different from doing original scientific
research?
Yes, it's important to distinguish between basic science in, say,
physics or biology, and more technology-oriented work. Muslims have
been trying to catch up to Western countries for the past couple of
centuries. Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put
their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there
are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the
contribution to scientific research is much lower.
I suppose they could just import the science that's developed in the
West. Is this really a big problem?
Falling further behind in something like condensed matter physics
means that you'll have a harder time adapting technologies that are
going to be based on this new knowledge of physics. And you're
excluding Muslims from the creation of new technologies. It
permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in
those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology
and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life.
If you're a Muslim and you're worried about the military weakness of
Muslim countries compared to Western imperialist powers, you're going
to see that today's warfare depends a lot on high-tech developments.
If you're worried about the Muslim world falling under the thumb of
economically advanced Western powers, well, the modern economy depends
on technology and science. This is not a controversial statement in
the Muslim world. Even the most conservative Muslim realizes that the
Islamic world is at a severe disadvantage right now in science and
technology. The West has done a much better job. And somehow, Muslims
are going to have to do better.
Is there outright hostility to science in Muslim countries?
Not at all. In fact, you'll typically find that, at least
superficially, they are very positive about science. Even many devout
Muslim apologists say Islam is supposed to be a scientific religion --
a religion that supports science down to the last detail. But this
notion of a science-positive Islam is often combined with ignorance
about the details of science and an openness to some deeply
pseudoscientific ideas.
Yet there was a time, from the 9th through the 12th centuries, when
Islam was arguably the center of the scientific world.
Very much so. If you're talking about the proto-scientific thought
that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action was
taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a
land of barbarians -- intellectually, totally negligible. In fact,
Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn't just preserve it.
But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science.
What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific
intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the
scientific revolution, that took place in Europe.
Today, it's something of an impediment for the Muslim world to
continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that
the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to
obscure some very important differences between modern science and
medieval thinking. They did some very interesting things in medicine
and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy
and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of
nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in
Europe, but in almost an occult sense.
But those things were also mixed together in Europe's scientific
revolution several centuries later. Isaac Newton was fascinated by
alchemy and astrology.
Indeed. I often say that all I learned about alchemy I learned from
reading Isaac Newton. But in Europe, you had a three-way interplay
between science, orthodox religion and more occult religious
alternatives. You could have interesting alliances. These end up being
separated through historical accident -- I don't see anything special
about Western Christianity that sets it apart from Islam -- and they
go their separate ways. This type of separation never really happened
in the Muslim Middle East.
Many historians would disagree with your assessment that what Muslim
scholars did during the Golden Age wasn't real science. They point to
major discoveries in mathematics, physics and chemistry. And they say
later European discoveries owe a direct debt to Muslim scientists. For
instance, didn't Copernicus use the mathematical work of Iranian
astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system?
I don't disagree with any of this. Muslims inherited the precursors of
science developed in antiquity and developed this much further. Still,
I have to emphasize how such ancient and medieval ways of thinking
about nature are different than what we understand as modern science.
Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very
selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are
similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that
seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers
took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern
science.
It's hard to avoid comparisons between Islam and Christianity. For
centuries, the Christian church had as much control over European
culture as Islamic thinkers did over Muslim cultures. And yet science
flourished in Europe, starting especially in the 1600s. Why did the
scientific revolution happen in Christian Europe and not in the
Islamic world?
That's a very big question. There is no answer that I can give you
that would command a consensus of historians of science. My perception
is that a number of factors came together so that scientific
institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of
church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into
emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too
late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to.
At a certain point, the Vatican no longer objected to scientists who
examined the physical world. They distinguished between the study of
the natural world and the spiritual world. As far as I can tell, this
split never happened in the Islamic world.
Sure, but that concession by the conservative Catholic hierarchy was
done at a point when nobody in science really cared what they thought
anyway. It was not as if the Catholics could censor or stop science in
the late 19th century.
But that happened much earlier. If you go back to the 17th and 18th
centuries, the cat was really out of the bag, wasn't it?
Yeah, but if you want to talk about the Catholic Church seeking an
accommodation with modernism and science, you really have to come into
the 19th and 20th centuries. If you're looking at the Islamic context,
the story is different because Islam doesn't have any central church
authority. The influence of Islam on scientific institutions comes
through the general culture and the authority of religious scholars.
Why was it so much harder for science to take root in the Muslim
world?
It was harder for science to achieve intellectual and institutional
independence. This was not restricted just to science. In the Western
world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from
religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a
precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world,
law was never entirely disentangled from religion. Islamic culture has
not been as supportive of intellectual independence for different
areas of life.
Did science actually decline in the Islamic world in the 14th or 15th
centuries? Or is it just that science in Europe exploded a little
later, leaving science in the Islamic world far behind?
It depends on which historian you consult. The older point of view has
been that Islamic intellectual life and science went into a period of
decline after the Golden Age. But nowadays, many historians argue that
science in the Islamic world continued to develop at its own pace. I
don't know if I would entirely agree. But it's definitely true that
much more emphasis has to be put on Europe taking off and therefore a
relative gap opening. It's not so much a story of Islamic decline as
Europe inventing an entirely new way of thinking about the natural
world and really making a break with medieval ways of thinking. That
didn't happen in the Islamic world.
Didn't Western colonialism also contribute to the decline of science
in the Islamic world? Colonial rule often marginalized Muslims and
dismissed the value of Islamic culture. In Indonesia, the Dutch even
closed Islamic institutions and banned Muslims from universities until
1952.
All of this is correct. There is no overarching cause that
single-handedly accounts for Muslim backwardness in science. Western
colonialism has much to answer for. But then, I did not set myself the
impossible task of disentangling all the reasons behind Muslim
difficulties in science. What I can do, I hope, is to say something
useful about the present, particularly how conservative Muslim thought
continues to struggle with science.
Many Muslim thinkers talk about trying to resurrect and tap into the
past glory of Islamic science. Are you saying this is a mistake?
Yes and no. If you go back to the 9th through the 12th centuries, some
practices were useful, such as being more open to intellectual
currents from many directions. But other things are not going to be
helpful. If you look into the literature on Islam and science, one of
the names you will very soon encounter is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is
a Muslim philosopher of science. He works in the United States but has
origins in Iran.
He teaches at George Washington University. Clearly, he has a
distinguished academic position.
That's right. Seyyed Hossein Nasr says he's trying to revive certain
distinctly Muslim ways of thinking about the universe. But it's a
revival of all the strands of classical Islamic thought, including
those strands which are very antithetical to science as we understand
it today.
Where does this actually create problems?
One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern
Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe
as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the
independence of science from religious institutions. It's precisely
this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western
world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial
concept. There is a tendency to say that science should operate under
the guidance of religious concerns. I think this is one of the
obstacles facing science in the Islamic world.
But this is complicated. Everyone agrees that Western science has been
successful at what it does. And yet I'm willing to bet that many
Islamic thinkers would say the price of scientific success in the West
has been too high. Once science was divorced from religion, you could
argue that it was only a matter of time before secular values would
triumph, atheism would become a viable option, and the modern world
would end up with the rampant materialism and consumerism that we have
today. A lot of Islamic thinkers don't want that version of Western
science.
This is a dilemma for many people in the Muslim world who are thinking
about science and religion. On the one hand, there is a desire to
catch up, especially in the technological realm which underpins the
military and commercial superiority of the Western world. On the other
hand, there is a desire to adopt modern science in such a way that
local religious culture is not corrupted. So yes, they are very
concerned not to go down the Western path. You can find many Muslim
thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing
science to operate independently of religious constraints. However,
that is the way modern science has achieved the success it has. So
it's hard to negotiate between these options.
I don't want to sound like I'm describing the Muslim world as a
monolithic entity with no differences between Muslims. There is a very
heated internal debate in Muslim countries about how to respond to the
modern West, and science is only one concern. Some say the Islamic
world has to secularize. Turkey has for many decades been an example
of taking a more secular path and adopting westernization full scale.
It has had some successes, though it hasn't fully taken root. But a
lot of people think if you try and westernize totally -- if you
separate science from religion and you separate politics from religion
-- then you end up with the more compartmentalized modern society that
we're familiar with in the West. And they're reacting against it. The
intellectual options in the debate over science and religion are very
similar to what we have in the West. What's different is the
historical background and the institutional landscape. In the Islamic
world, the liberal option is much weaker compared to what we have in
the Western world.
By "the liberal option," do you mean reading sacred texts as metaphor
rather than literal truth? For instance, liberal Christians don't take
the creation stories in Genesis as scientific fact. They read these
stories more as poetry. Are you saying that option, for the most part,
doesn't exist for Muslims because the Quran is seen as a text that's
been handed down from God?
It would be an overstatement to say that option does not exist, but it
has a much weaker social position. Let me give an example. Here in the
United States, the mainstream scientific community has a big problem
with creationist movements and intelligent design. As scientists, one
of our closest allies in trying to combat creationism is the liberal
religious community. It's much more effective to send somebody to a
school board meeting who's not a scientist but actually a priest or
rabbi or minister in a more liberal denomination and to explain that
they don't see a conflict between teaching evolution and religion. But
in the Muslim world, this is much more difficult because the public
affinity toward creationism is much stronger. Darwinian thinking
really hasn't penetrated the popular discourse. Plus, it's very hard
for scientists who work in Muslim countries to find liberal religious
figures who would go out there and publicly say Darwinian evolution is
not a problem for Islam.
How does this play out in schools? Ultimately, doesn't this come down
to what is mandated by governments, either at the national level or
the local level?
What happens depends very much on which Muslim country we're talking
about. In many Muslim countries, you don't have much creationism, but
only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first
place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional
science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public
creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we've seen creationism
appearing in Turkey's official science textbooks that are taught in
high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement
for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world.
Can you tell me about the leader of this big creationist movement in
Turkey, the man who goes by the name Harun Yahya?
Harun Yahya is a pseudonym. It's supposed to be a pseudonym for a
Turkish religious leader whose name is Adnan Oktar. However, the
amount of material that's put out under the name of Harun Yahya is
absolutely immense. There are hundreds of books, articles, DVDs,
tapes, magazines, all under the name Harun Yahya. So this is clearly
not the production of one single person. Indeed, Adnan Oktar doesn't
have the kind of educational background even to successfully fake a
pseudoscience. The operation is distributing material in Europe and
the United States. They mainly target a Muslim audience, but it's a
modern Muslim audience. So they tend to target countries such as
Turkey.
Did this movement come over from America? Was Harun Yahya inspired by
American creationists who proselytized in Turkey?
No. There is some American influence, but it's fairly minimal. The
Turkish creationists have taken the initiative and gotten in touch
with organizations like the Institute for Creation Research in
California. And what they've taken from American creationists are
basically ideas and strategies for how to get creationism into
textbooks. So Islamic creationism is an indigenous movement which is
inspired by some aspects of Western creationism.
Is the critique of Darwinism basically the same as what you'd find
from American creationists?
Much of the rhetoric is similar. There are only so many ways you can
argue against evolution, only so many ways you can say the fossil
record doesn't tell you what the biologists say. But there are also
differences. For example, in American creationist circles, one of the
stronger options is "Young Earth creationism." People who read the
Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000
years ago, literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer
about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as
committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim
creationists are almost invariably "Old Earth creationists." They tend
to think of Noah's flood as a local event -- not such a big thing --
unlike the American creationists who think of the flood as the major
geological event in earth history. So there are lots of differences
that adapt creationism to the Islamic context.
What about the idea that human beings have a common ancestor with
chimpanzees?
That's definitely a no-no. And this goes beyond creationism. It goes
beyond Harun Yahya. By and large, because the Quran is fairly explicit
about the special creation of humans -- Adam and Eve and so forth --
you will find that Muslims will typically be very reluctant to allow
for human evolution.
I'm curious about your own background. Was Islam ever an important
part of your life?
No. The Turkish side of my family is very secular. Some of my Turkish
relatives are somewhat observant, but even they are very
liberal-minded about their Islam. So I grew up in a very nonreligious
household.
Do you consider yourself a Muslim?
No, I'm not. I'm not a religious person.
Why have you chosen to live in the United States rather than in
Turkey?
Being part American and part Turkish, I have to choose one. I'm
equally at home in both countries. But if you're going to have a
career teaching physics, and an intellectual life in general, the
United States is an easier place to do this. It has more resources,
and it's just more comfortable to do science in the United States.
What makes it hard to be a physicist in Turkey?
First of all, factors that have nothing to do with religion. Turkey is
a poor country. The amount of resources that they can devote to basic
scientific investigations is very low. The physics department in
Turkey where I got my undergraduate degree had some very good
teachers, but the resources we had were fairly poor compared to any
American university. I got my Ph.D. in the United States, and I've
been here ever since. It really is much easier to stay in the United
States.
There are some Muslims who talk about the need for an "Islamic
science" that's quite distinct from Western science. They say we
shouldn't separate knowledge of the physical world from knowledge of
the spiritual world because they are interconnected. And they often
argue that science should have an ethical dimension. We shouldn't just
do science for the sake of knowledge. We should always be concerned
about the moral outcomes. Does it make sense to talk about an Islamic
science?
There are efforts to formulate a more Islamic science. The people who
have this ethical context in mind are thinking not so much about
physics or biology, but social science and applied science. Why are we
doing this? And how can we include ethical and social concerns in our
studies of the world? Debates about this take place among Western
scientists as well. It's perfectly legitimate. What gets more
interesting -- and from a mainstream scientific view, more dubious --
is the notion that you can take an Islamic point of view and allow
these faith-based, revealed ideas to constrain how you investigate the
world.
I'm assuming most scientists would say science is science. If it's
done well, it doesn't matter who does it.
And many devout Muslim thinkers would agree with that.
The London-based writer and critic Ziauddin Sardar has argued that
"Western science is inherently destructive and does not, cannot,
fulfill the needs of Muslim societies." He says Western science has
become an ideology that's highly efficient but is also dehumanizing.
Such sentiments are not difficult to come by in the Islamic world. A
lot of these issues are matters of debate among Muslim intellectuals
and people who are devout. There's no single point of view. I can also
quote conservative Muslim intellectuals who say, "No, science is
science except for a few exceptions here and there." But this idea of
Islamizing science -- to give a specifically Islamic flavor to science
-- has been very attractive to a good number of intellectuals in the
Islamic world. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive
development.
What would it mean to Islamize science?
The hope for Islamizing science is to defuse the threat that modern
science poses toward more overtly religious ways of perceiving the
world. In all areas of natural science, we seem to be converging on a
purely naturalistic description of how the world works. And so
concepts like supernatural agents or revelations start looking out of
place to the way modern science has come to describe the world. And
that's an issue for devout Muslims. So they would imagine, perhaps, a
Muslim biology that includes concepts of divine design in the very
notion of how you do biology in the first place.
There are a lot of people in the United States -- liberal Christians,
Jews and Buddhists - who also complain about what they call
"scientism" -- the idea that science explains all there is in the
world. It obliterates the spiritual life. These people also tend to be
fully supportive of evolution, but they say science can only explain
so much.
You can find Muslim thinkers making similar pronouncements.
"Scientism" and "reductionism" have become stock accusations in
religious circles. I don't know if there's much more content here than
saying, "I don't like naturalistic ideas."
You have been outspoken in your criticisms of science in the Islamic
world and, by implication, the stranglehold that certain ways of
Islamic thinking have had on science. Do you get flak for that?
Not really. First of all, these are points of view that many
liberal-minded Muslims would agree with. My criticism of the state of
science in Islamic lands is not dependent on my judgment about the
existence of the supernatural. And Muslims themselves, even very
conservative Muslims, are very aware that the Islamic world has a
problem in science. As long as a secular person like myself is not
doing some sort of Islam-bashing but has something genuine to
contribute, even conservative Muslims can be very positive about
engaging in this debate. Generally, my relations with Muslim
creationists have been very cordial. I think the science they're
putting out is complete nonsense. But that doesn't mean we have to be
personally hostile.
So is there a way for Muslims to create a scientific culture that
would really take root and flourish?
I don't know. My preference would be that the more liberal strains of
Islam would gain more power, so that science and technology can be
more autonomous from religious and moral concerns. Without this, I
don't see the Islamic world taking a trajectory in science that's
going to be similar to the Western world's. However, in the end, this
is not something for me to decide. I'm an outside critic, being over
here.
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossessed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim
lands remains stuck in the past -- and why the Golden Age of
Mesopotamia wasn't so golden after all.
By Steve Paulson
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/08/13/taner_edis/print.html
Aug. 13, 2007 | In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a
Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut
was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain
questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five
daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How
can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may
sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite
seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more
than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.
This story illustrates the obstacles that face scientists in Muslim
countries. While it's always risky to draw generalizations about
Islam, even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far
behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for
Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.
What's so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic
world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During
Europe's Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities
were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim
scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and
mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the
spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a
backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?
Taner Edis, the author of "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and
Religion in Islam," is in a unique position to examine these
questions. He grew up in Turkey, the son of a Turkish father and an
American mother, and now teaches physics at Truman State University in
Missouri. Though he comes from a Muslim country, his family wasn't
religious. Today, Edis calls himself an "Enlightenment rationalist."
"I am a bit of a physics chauvinist," he writes in his book. "I think
that according to the best of our current knowledge, our world is an
entirely natural, physical place that does not depend on any
supernatural powers."
Edis didn't move to the United States until he was 20, so I was
surprised to discover that he has no trace of a foreign accent. It
turns out English was his first language; only later did he pick up
Turkish on the streets. Edis often travels back to Turkey, where he's
been watching, with a mixture of fascination and alarm, the
sophisticated creationist movement that sprang up in Turkey and is now
spreading throughout the Muslim world. I talked with Edis about the
difficulties of reconciling science with Islam and the quest for an
"Islamic science."
How would you assess the state of scientific knowledge in the Islamic
world?
Dismal. Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science
vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific
community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming
from Muslim lands.
But Islamic countries seem to be very open to using modern technology.
Are you saying that's different from doing original scientific
research?
Yes, it's important to distinguish between basic science in, say,
physics or biology, and more technology-oriented work. Muslims have
been trying to catch up to Western countries for the past couple of
centuries. Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put
their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there
are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the
contribution to scientific research is much lower.
I suppose they could just import the science that's developed in the
West. Is this really a big problem?
Falling further behind in something like condensed matter physics
means that you'll have a harder time adapting technologies that are
going to be based on this new knowledge of physics. And you're
excluding Muslims from the creation of new technologies. It
permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in
those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology
and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life.
If you're a Muslim and you're worried about the military weakness of
Muslim countries compared to Western imperialist powers, you're going
to see that today's warfare depends a lot on high-tech developments.
If you're worried about the Muslim world falling under the thumb of
economically advanced Western powers, well, the modern economy depends
on technology and science. This is not a controversial statement in
the Muslim world. Even the most conservative Muslim realizes that the
Islamic world is at a severe disadvantage right now in science and
technology. The West has done a much better job. And somehow, Muslims
are going to have to do better.
Is there outright hostility to science in Muslim countries?
Not at all. In fact, you'll typically find that, at least
superficially, they are very positive about science. Even many devout
Muslim apologists say Islam is supposed to be a scientific religion --
a religion that supports science down to the last detail. But this
notion of a science-positive Islam is often combined with ignorance
about the details of science and an openness to some deeply
pseudoscientific ideas.
Yet there was a time, from the 9th through the 12th centuries, when
Islam was arguably the center of the scientific world.
Very much so. If you're talking about the proto-scientific thought
that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action was
taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a
land of barbarians -- intellectually, totally negligible. In fact,
Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn't just preserve it.
But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science.
What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific
intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the
scientific revolution, that took place in Europe.
Today, it's something of an impediment for the Muslim world to
continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that
the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to
obscure some very important differences between modern science and
medieval thinking. They did some very interesting things in medicine
and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy
and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of
nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in
Europe, but in almost an occult sense.
But those things were also mixed together in Europe's scientific
revolution several centuries later. Isaac Newton was fascinated by
alchemy and astrology.
Indeed. I often say that all I learned about alchemy I learned from
reading Isaac Newton. But in Europe, you had a three-way interplay
between science, orthodox religion and more occult religious
alternatives. You could have interesting alliances. These end up being
separated through historical accident -- I don't see anything special
about Western Christianity that sets it apart from Islam -- and they
go their separate ways. This type of separation never really happened
in the Muslim Middle East.
Many historians would disagree with your assessment that what Muslim
scholars did during the Golden Age wasn't real science. They point to
major discoveries in mathematics, physics and chemistry. And they say
later European discoveries owe a direct debt to Muslim scientists. For
instance, didn't Copernicus use the mathematical work of Iranian
astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system?
I don't disagree with any of this. Muslims inherited the precursors of
science developed in antiquity and developed this much further. Still,
I have to emphasize how such ancient and medieval ways of thinking
about nature are different than what we understand as modern science.
Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very
selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are
similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that
seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers
took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern
science.
It's hard to avoid comparisons between Islam and Christianity. For
centuries, the Christian church had as much control over European
culture as Islamic thinkers did over Muslim cultures. And yet science
flourished in Europe, starting especially in the 1600s. Why did the
scientific revolution happen in Christian Europe and not in the
Islamic world?
That's a very big question. There is no answer that I can give you
that would command a consensus of historians of science. My perception
is that a number of factors came together so that scientific
institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of
church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into
emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too
late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to.
At a certain point, the Vatican no longer objected to scientists who
examined the physical world. They distinguished between the study of
the natural world and the spiritual world. As far as I can tell, this
split never happened in the Islamic world.
Sure, but that concession by the conservative Catholic hierarchy was
done at a point when nobody in science really cared what they thought
anyway. It was not as if the Catholics could censor or stop science in
the late 19th century.
But that happened much earlier. If you go back to the 17th and 18th
centuries, the cat was really out of the bag, wasn't it?
Yeah, but if you want to talk about the Catholic Church seeking an
accommodation with modernism and science, you really have to come into
the 19th and 20th centuries. If you're looking at the Islamic context,
the story is different because Islam doesn't have any central church
authority. The influence of Islam on scientific institutions comes
through the general culture and the authority of religious scholars.
Why was it so much harder for science to take root in the Muslim
world?
It was harder for science to achieve intellectual and institutional
independence. This was not restricted just to science. In the Western
world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from
religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a
precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world,
law was never entirely disentangled from religion. Islamic culture has
not been as supportive of intellectual independence for different
areas of life.
Did science actually decline in the Islamic world in the 14th or 15th
centuries? Or is it just that science in Europe exploded a little
later, leaving science in the Islamic world far behind?
It depends on which historian you consult. The older point of view has
been that Islamic intellectual life and science went into a period of
decline after the Golden Age. But nowadays, many historians argue that
science in the Islamic world continued to develop at its own pace. I
don't know if I would entirely agree. But it's definitely true that
much more emphasis has to be put on Europe taking off and therefore a
relative gap opening. It's not so much a story of Islamic decline as
Europe inventing an entirely new way of thinking about the natural
world and really making a break with medieval ways of thinking. That
didn't happen in the Islamic world.
Didn't Western colonialism also contribute to the decline of science
in the Islamic world? Colonial rule often marginalized Muslims and
dismissed the value of Islamic culture. In Indonesia, the Dutch even
closed Islamic institutions and banned Muslims from universities until
1952.
All of this is correct. There is no overarching cause that
single-handedly accounts for Muslim backwardness in science. Western
colonialism has much to answer for. But then, I did not set myself the
impossible task of disentangling all the reasons behind Muslim
difficulties in science. What I can do, I hope, is to say something
useful about the present, particularly how conservative Muslim thought
continues to struggle with science.
Many Muslim thinkers talk about trying to resurrect and tap into the
past glory of Islamic science. Are you saying this is a mistake?
Yes and no. If you go back to the 9th through the 12th centuries, some
practices were useful, such as being more open to intellectual
currents from many directions. But other things are not going to be
helpful. If you look into the literature on Islam and science, one of
the names you will very soon encounter is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is
a Muslim philosopher of science. He works in the United States but has
origins in Iran.
He teaches at George Washington University. Clearly, he has a
distinguished academic position.
That's right. Seyyed Hossein Nasr says he's trying to revive certain
distinctly Muslim ways of thinking about the universe. But it's a
revival of all the strands of classical Islamic thought, including
those strands which are very antithetical to science as we understand
it today.
Where does this actually create problems?
One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern
Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe
as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the
independence of science from religious institutions. It's precisely
this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western
world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial
concept. There is a tendency to say that science should operate under
the guidance of religious concerns. I think this is one of the
obstacles facing science in the Islamic world.
But this is complicated. Everyone agrees that Western science has been
successful at what it does. And yet I'm willing to bet that many
Islamic thinkers would say the price of scientific success in the West
has been too high. Once science was divorced from religion, you could
argue that it was only a matter of time before secular values would
triumph, atheism would become a viable option, and the modern world
would end up with the rampant materialism and consumerism that we have
today. A lot of Islamic thinkers don't want that version of Western
science.
This is a dilemma for many people in the Muslim world who are thinking
about science and religion. On the one hand, there is a desire to
catch up, especially in the technological realm which underpins the
military and commercial superiority of the Western world. On the other
hand, there is a desire to adopt modern science in such a way that
local religious culture is not corrupted. So yes, they are very
concerned not to go down the Western path. You can find many Muslim
thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing
science to operate independently of religious constraints. However,
that is the way modern science has achieved the success it has. So
it's hard to negotiate between these options.
I don't want to sound like I'm describing the Muslim world as a
monolithic entity with no differences between Muslims. There is a very
heated internal debate in Muslim countries about how to respond to the
modern West, and science is only one concern. Some say the Islamic
world has to secularize. Turkey has for many decades been an example
of taking a more secular path and adopting westernization full scale.
It has had some successes, though it hasn't fully taken root. But a
lot of people think if you try and westernize totally -- if you
separate science from religion and you separate politics from religion
-- then you end up with the more compartmentalized modern society that
we're familiar with in the West. And they're reacting against it. The
intellectual options in the debate over science and religion are very
similar to what we have in the West. What's different is the
historical background and the institutional landscape. In the Islamic
world, the liberal option is much weaker compared to what we have in
the Western world.
By "the liberal option," do you mean reading sacred texts as metaphor
rather than literal truth? For instance, liberal Christians don't take
the creation stories in Genesis as scientific fact. They read these
stories more as poetry. Are you saying that option, for the most part,
doesn't exist for Muslims because the Quran is seen as a text that's
been handed down from God?
It would be an overstatement to say that option does not exist, but it
has a much weaker social position. Let me give an example. Here in the
United States, the mainstream scientific community has a big problem
with creationist movements and intelligent design. As scientists, one
of our closest allies in trying to combat creationism is the liberal
religious community. It's much more effective to send somebody to a
school board meeting who's not a scientist but actually a priest or
rabbi or minister in a more liberal denomination and to explain that
they don't see a conflict between teaching evolution and religion. But
in the Muslim world, this is much more difficult because the public
affinity toward creationism is much stronger. Darwinian thinking
really hasn't penetrated the popular discourse. Plus, it's very hard
for scientists who work in Muslim countries to find liberal religious
figures who would go out there and publicly say Darwinian evolution is
not a problem for Islam.
How does this play out in schools? Ultimately, doesn't this come down
to what is mandated by governments, either at the national level or
the local level?
What happens depends very much on which Muslim country we're talking
about. In many Muslim countries, you don't have much creationism, but
only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first
place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional
science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public
creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we've seen creationism
appearing in Turkey's official science textbooks that are taught in
high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement
for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world.
Can you tell me about the leader of this big creationist movement in
Turkey, the man who goes by the name Harun Yahya?
Harun Yahya is a pseudonym. It's supposed to be a pseudonym for a
Turkish religious leader whose name is Adnan Oktar. However, the
amount of material that's put out under the name of Harun Yahya is
absolutely immense. There are hundreds of books, articles, DVDs,
tapes, magazines, all under the name Harun Yahya. So this is clearly
not the production of one single person. Indeed, Adnan Oktar doesn't
have the kind of educational background even to successfully fake a
pseudoscience. The operation is distributing material in Europe and
the United States. They mainly target a Muslim audience, but it's a
modern Muslim audience. So they tend to target countries such as
Turkey.
Did this movement come over from America? Was Harun Yahya inspired by
American creationists who proselytized in Turkey?
No. There is some American influence, but it's fairly minimal. The
Turkish creationists have taken the initiative and gotten in touch
with organizations like the Institute for Creation Research in
California. And what they've taken from American creationists are
basically ideas and strategies for how to get creationism into
textbooks. So Islamic creationism is an indigenous movement which is
inspired by some aspects of Western creationism.
Is the critique of Darwinism basically the same as what you'd find
from American creationists?
Much of the rhetoric is similar. There are only so many ways you can
argue against evolution, only so many ways you can say the fossil
record doesn't tell you what the biologists say. But there are also
differences. For example, in American creationist circles, one of the
stronger options is "Young Earth creationism." People who read the
Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000
years ago, literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer
about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as
committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim
creationists are almost invariably "Old Earth creationists." They tend
to think of Noah's flood as a local event -- not such a big thing --
unlike the American creationists who think of the flood as the major
geological event in earth history. So there are lots of differences
that adapt creationism to the Islamic context.
What about the idea that human beings have a common ancestor with
chimpanzees?
That's definitely a no-no. And this goes beyond creationism. It goes
beyond Harun Yahya. By and large, because the Quran is fairly explicit
about the special creation of humans -- Adam and Eve and so forth --
you will find that Muslims will typically be very reluctant to allow
for human evolution.
I'm curious about your own background. Was Islam ever an important
part of your life?
No. The Turkish side of my family is very secular. Some of my Turkish
relatives are somewhat observant, but even they are very
liberal-minded about their Islam. So I grew up in a very nonreligious
household.
Do you consider yourself a Muslim?
No, I'm not. I'm not a religious person.
Why have you chosen to live in the United States rather than in
Turkey?
Being part American and part Turkish, I have to choose one. I'm
equally at home in both countries. But if you're going to have a
career teaching physics, and an intellectual life in general, the
United States is an easier place to do this. It has more resources,
and it's just more comfortable to do science in the United States.
What makes it hard to be a physicist in Turkey?
First of all, factors that have nothing to do with religion. Turkey is
a poor country. The amount of resources that they can devote to basic
scientific investigations is very low. The physics department in
Turkey where I got my undergraduate degree had some very good
teachers, but the resources we had were fairly poor compared to any
American university. I got my Ph.D. in the United States, and I've
been here ever since. It really is much easier to stay in the United
States.
There are some Muslims who talk about the need for an "Islamic
science" that's quite distinct from Western science. They say we
shouldn't separate knowledge of the physical world from knowledge of
the spiritual world because they are interconnected. And they often
argue that science should have an ethical dimension. We shouldn't just
do science for the sake of knowledge. We should always be concerned
about the moral outcomes. Does it make sense to talk about an Islamic
science?
There are efforts to formulate a more Islamic science. The people who
have this ethical context in mind are thinking not so much about
physics or biology, but social science and applied science. Why are we
doing this? And how can we include ethical and social concerns in our
studies of the world? Debates about this take place among Western
scientists as well. It's perfectly legitimate. What gets more
interesting -- and from a mainstream scientific view, more dubious --
is the notion that you can take an Islamic point of view and allow
these faith-based, revealed ideas to constrain how you investigate the
world.
I'm assuming most scientists would say science is science. If it's
done well, it doesn't matter who does it.
And many devout Muslim thinkers would agree with that.
The London-based writer and critic Ziauddin Sardar has argued that
"Western science is inherently destructive and does not, cannot,
fulfill the needs of Muslim societies." He says Western science has
become an ideology that's highly efficient but is also dehumanizing.
Such sentiments are not difficult to come by in the Islamic world. A
lot of these issues are matters of debate among Muslim intellectuals
and people who are devout. There's no single point of view. I can also
quote conservative Muslim intellectuals who say, "No, science is
science except for a few exceptions here and there." But this idea of
Islamizing science -- to give a specifically Islamic flavor to science
-- has been very attractive to a good number of intellectuals in the
Islamic world. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive
development.
What would it mean to Islamize science?
The hope for Islamizing science is to defuse the threat that modern
science poses toward more overtly religious ways of perceiving the
world. In all areas of natural science, we seem to be converging on a
purely naturalistic description of how the world works. And so
concepts like supernatural agents or revelations start looking out of
place to the way modern science has come to describe the world. And
that's an issue for devout Muslims. So they would imagine, perhaps, a
Muslim biology that includes concepts of divine design in the very
notion of how you do biology in the first place.
There are a lot of people in the United States -- liberal Christians,
Jews and Buddhists - who also complain about what they call
"scientism" -- the idea that science explains all there is in the
world. It obliterates the spiritual life. These people also tend to be
fully supportive of evolution, but they say science can only explain
so much.
You can find Muslim thinkers making similar pronouncements.
"Scientism" and "reductionism" have become stock accusations in
religious circles. I don't know if there's much more content here than
saying, "I don't like naturalistic ideas."
You have been outspoken in your criticisms of science in the Islamic
world and, by implication, the stranglehold that certain ways of
Islamic thinking have had on science. Do you get flak for that?
Not really. First of all, these are points of view that many
liberal-minded Muslims would agree with. My criticism of the state of
science in Islamic lands is not dependent on my judgment about the
existence of the supernatural. And Muslims themselves, even very
conservative Muslims, are very aware that the Islamic world has a
problem in science. As long as a secular person like myself is not
doing some sort of Islam-bashing but has something genuine to
contribute, even conservative Muslims can be very positive about
engaging in this debate. Generally, my relations with Muslim
creationists have been very cordial. I think the science they're
putting out is complete nonsense. But that doesn't mean we have to be
personally hostile.
So is there a way for Muslims to create a scientific culture that
would really take root and flourish?
I don't know. My preference would be that the more liberal strains of
Islam would gain more power, so that science and technology can be
more autonomous from religious and moral concerns. Without this, I
don't see the Islamic world taking a trajectory in science that's
going to be similar to the Western world's. However, in the end, this
is not something for me to decide. I'm an outside critic, being over
here.
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossessed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net