With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Muslim world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? It was not always this way.
My question is this: Why over a billion Muslims with their vast resources, are disengaged from science and creation of new knowledge? My reference is to 57 member state of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
Islam’s Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine.
Muslims created algebra, wrote optics, established the body’s circulation of blood, named stars, and set up universities. Science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed after that. No major invention or discovery has emerged from it for well over seven centuries now.
In the mid-8th century, Muslim conquerors came upon the treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by the caliphs, who patronized visiting scholars from all over. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam such as on the issue of free will versus predestination became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually crushed the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.
Darkness followed for long, punctuated by occasional brilliant spots. In the 16th century, the Turkish Ottomans established an empire with the help of military technology. But there was little enthusiasm for science and new knowledge. In the 19th century, the European Enlightenment inspired a bevy of Islamic reformers: Mohammed Abduh of Egypt, his follower Rashid Rida from Syria, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Jamaluddin Afghani in the Indian subcontinent who exhorted the Muslims to accept ideas of the scientific revolution. Their theological position can be roughly paraphrased as, “The Qur’an tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” That echoed Galileo earlier in Europe.
The 20th century witnessed the end of colonial rule and the emergence of new independent Muslim states, all initially under secular national leaderships. A spurt towards modernization and the acquisition of technology followed. Many expected that a Muslim scientific renaissance would ensue. Clearly, it did not.
Muslim leaders today, realising that military power and economic growth flow from technology, frequently call for speedy scientific development and a knowledge-based society. Often that call is rhetorical, but in some Muslim countries Qatar, the UAE, Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria among others funding for science and education have grown sharply in recent years.
Is boosting resource allocations enough to energize science, or are more fundamental changes required? Scholars of the 19th century, such as the pioneering sociologist Max Weber, claimed that Islam lacks an “idea system” critical for sustaining a scientific culture based on innovation, new experiences, quantification, and empirical verification. Fatalism and an orientation towards the past, they said, makes progress difficult and even undesirable. In the current epoch of growing antagonism between the Islamic world and the West, most Muslims reject such charges with indignation. They feel those accusations add yet another excuse for the West to justify its ongoing cultural and military assaults on Muslims. Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds. The Qur’an, being the unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret the Qur’an’s divine instructions.
Let us look at the state of science in the current Islamic world. A study by academics at the International Islamic University, Malaysia, showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1,000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17 per cent of the world’s science literature, whereas 1.66 per cent came from India alone and 1.48 per cent from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55 per cent, compared with 0.89 per cent by Israel alone. Of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.
The situation may be even grimmer than the publication numbers or perhaps even the citation counts suggest. Assessing the scientific worth of publications is complicated further by the rapid appearance of new international scientific journals that publish low-quality work. Many have poor editorial policies and refereeing procedures. Scientists in many developing countries, who are under pressure to publish, or who are attracted by strong incentives, choose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly commercialized policies of journals. Prospective authors know that editors need to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month and often submit already published papers. For example, chemistry publications by Iranian scientists tripled in five years, from 1,040 in 1998 to 3,277 in 2003. Many scientific papers that were claimed as original by their Iranian authors were in fact had been published earlier.
The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years. Islamic countries show a great diversity of cultures and levels of modernization and a correspondingly large spread in scientific productivity.
Conventional wisdom suggests that bigger science budgets indicate, or will induce, greater scientific activity. On average, the 57 OIC states spend an estimated 0.3 per cent of their GDP on research and development, which is far below the global average of 2.4 per cent. But bigger budgets by themselves are not a panacea. The capacity to put those funds to good use is crucial. One determining factor is the number of available scientists, engineers, and technicians. Those numbers are low for OIC countries, averaging around 400–500 per million people, while developed countries typically lie in the range of 3500–5000 per million.
According to a recent survey, among the 57 OIC member-states, there are approximately 1800 universities. Of those, only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1,500, a small but reasonable number.
Although the relatively slow pace of scientific development in Muslim countries cannot be disputed, many explanations can and some common ones are plain wrong. For example, it is a myth that women in Muslim countries are largely excluded from higher education. In fact, the numbers are similar to those in many Western countries: The percentage of women in the university student body is 35 per cent in Egypt, 67 per cent in Kuwait, 27 per cent in Saudi Arabia, and 41 per cent in Pakistan, for just a few examples. In the physical sciences and engineering, the proportion of women enrolled is roughly similar to that in the US. However, restrictions on the freedom of women leave them with far fewer choices, both in their personal lives and for professional advancement after graduation, relative to their male counterparts. The near-absence of democracy in Muslim countries is also not an especially important reason for slow scientific development. It is certainly true that authoritarian regimes generally deny freedom of inquiry or dissent, cripple professional societies, intimidate universities, and limit contacts with the outside world.
But no Muslim government today, even if dictatorial or imperfectly democratic, remotely approximates the terror of Hitler or Joseph Stalin regimes in which science survived and could even advance.
Another myth is that the Muslim world rejects new technology. It does not. In earlier times, the orthodoxy had resisted new inventions such as the printing press, loudspeaker, and penicillin, but such rejection has all, but vanished. The ubiquitous cell phone, epitomizes the surprisingly quick absorption of black-box technology into Islamic culture. For example, while driving in Islamabad, it would occasion no surprise if you were to receive an urgent SMS (short message service) requesting immediate prayers for helping Pakistan’s cricket team win a match. Popular new Islamic cell-phone models now provide the exact GPS-based direction for Muslims to face while praying, certified translations of the Qur’an, and step-by-step instructions for performing the pilgrimage. Digital Qur’ans are already popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting prostrations) have made their debut.
Some relatively more plausible reasons for the slow scientific development of Muslim countries have been offered. First, even though a handful of rich oil-producing Muslim countries have extravagant incomes, most are fairly poor and in the same boat as other developing countries. Indeed, the OIC average for per capita income is significantly less than the global average. Second, the inadequacy of scientific literature in traditional Islamic languages Arabic, Persian, Urdu is an important contributory reason. About 80 per cent of the world’s scientific literature appears first in English, and few traditional languages in the developing world have adequately adapted to new linguistic demands. With the exceptions of Iran and Turkey, translation rates are small. But the still deeper reasons are attitudinal, not material. At the base lies the yet unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and social behaviour. That assertion needs explanation. No grand dispute, such as between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, is holding back the clock. Bread-and-butter science and technology requires learning complicated but mundane rules and procedures that place no strain on any reasonable individual’s belief system.
A more pragmatic approach, which seeks promotion of regular science rather than Islamic science, is pursued by institutional bodies such as COMSTECH (Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation), which was established by the OIC. It joined the IAS (Islamic Academy of Sciences) and ISESCO (Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) in serving the “ummah”. But a visit to the websites of those organizations reveals that over two decades, the combined sum of their activities amounts to sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.
One almost despairs. Will science never return to the Islamic world? Shall the world always be split between those who have science and those who do not, with all the attendant consequences? Bleak as the present looks, that outcome does not have to prevail. History has no final word, and Muslims do have a chance. One need only remember how the Anglo–American elite perceived the Jews as they entered the US at the opening of the 20th century. Academics such as Henry Herbert Goddard, the well-known eugenicist, described Jews in 1913 as “a hopelessly backward people, largely incapable of adjusting to the new demands of advanced capitalist societies.” His research found that 83 per cent of Jews were “morons”—a term he 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.
Progress will require behavioral changes. If Muslim societies are to develop technology instead of just using it, the ruthlessly competitive global marketplace will insist on not only high skill levels but also intense social work habits. Science can prosper among Muslims once again. In the quest for modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Muslim world. We must learn to drop the pursuit of narrow nationalist and religious agendas, both in the West and among Muslims.
(The writer is chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i- Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years. This is an abridged version of a recent article that he has written).
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January 2008 |
