A New Dawn for Arab Science?
By Rod Dreher – Director of Publications
The ongoing revolutions sweeping the Middle East and North Africa have observers the world over anticipating a new openness to political freedom in the Arab Muslim world. One Muslim astrophysicist hopes that political and social change will usher in a new openness to science in the Islamic world as well.
Nidhal Guessoum, a professor of physics at the American University of Sharjah (UAE), says that science in Arab society has been blighted from years of autocracy. Dictatorship, corruption, and cronyism have held back the development of science, he says, but now the light of freedom stands to dispel the darkness.
“At least censorship will greatly diminish now, and arbitrary and capricious decisions will, hopefully, be replaced by objective and constructive ones,” says Guessoum.
In its five Arab Human Development Reports since 2002, the United Nations has documented what Guessoum calls “the mediocrity of the Arab world’s performance in academic and scientific fields.” Much of that, he says, can be blamed on a failure of Arab governments to support scientific research, and the promotion of scientists into leadership positions for political reasons, as opposed to true merit.
But as Guessoum explains in his new book Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science, the region’s shift toward religious literalism has also kept science from thriving.
He writes, for example, about a lavish 2006 conference in Kuwait, put on by a foundation seeking to prove that the Qur’an predicts scientific findings. Muslim scientists and academics, many with lavish government funding, participated in comically pseudo-scientific discussions about how the Qur’an relates to science—including the best ways to combat the “evil eye.”
“As astonishing as this may be, this is the biggest trend in the cultural landscape of the Muslim world nowadays!” Guessoum says. “And few voices are countering this ‘theory.’” He does, on the other hand, construct and present, a harmonious way to reconcile modern scientific knowledge, including Darwinian evolution, with the Islamic beliefs and worldview.
It wasn’t always this way in the Muslim world. Though many Westerners don’t realize it, Arab Muslims were among the world’s leading scientific thinkers in the medieval period. Scholars still argue over why this intellectual fruitfulness declined, but one reason often cited is a university system that evolved to serve religious ends at the expense of other disciplines.
Yet Guessoum, who is himself a faithful Muslim, contends that it is possible for science and Islam to complement each other while respecting the integrity of each.
“There is, I believe, a way to do real science while still preserving one’s tradition and identity, though not with a fundamentalist and static mindset,” he says. “Science forces one to broaden his or her mind and evolve, and one must accept the possibility of evolution, even in one’s religious views. But that is—in my view—a plus, not a loss.”
Guessoum’s view is shared by the John Templeton Foundation, to which he serves as an advisor. The Foundation has worked with Guessoum on programs and initiatives to expand scientific education and awareness in the Muslim world. Michael J. Murray, who oversees the Foundation’s programs department, says that Muslim scholars have in the past been at the forefront of using research in the sciences to better understand the nature of spiritual reality.
“However, integrative theological research of this sort has not been typical within contemporary Islamic scholarship, in spite of the fact that so much recent empirical and conceptual work has relevance for Islamic theology and thought,” Murray says. “In keeping with Sir John Templeton’s vision of expanding and deepening our understanding of God, the Foundation is keen to support a revival of scholarship of this sort.”
The Templeton Foundation is now developing new initiatives to advance science and scholarship in the Muslim world. Meanwhile, Guessoum, whose full interview with the TR can be read here, continues the struggle from Sharjah, speaking out both for science and for Muslim scientists under threat from religious hostility. Recently on the Science and Religion blog Irtiqa, Guessoum defended Usama Hasan, an accomplished Muslim scientist living and working in Great Britain, who has been persecuted and threatened by Islamic religious leaders for defending evolution.
“I don’t know if something like this could happen nowadays in any other culture but the Muslim one. What a shame!” Guessoum writes. “We all must speak up against such despicable acts and attacks. And we must continue to spread knowledge and civil discourse.”
Religiously Rich, Materially Poor
With turmoil in the Muslim world in the news, Duke University’s Timur Kuran is receiving favorable media attention for his new book The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, in which the professor of economic and Islamic studies examines why the Muslim world lags so far behind the West economically. The Foundation provided grant support for Kuran’s work on the book through the Spiritual Capital Research Program of the Metanexus Institute.
Writing in The New York Times, op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof praised The Long Divergence for offering “the best explanation yet for why the Middle East has lagged.” According to Kristof, Kuran argues that what holds the Mideast back is neither the Islamic religion nor colonialism, “but rather various secondary Islamic legal practices that are no longer relevant today.”
Kuran himself spoke to the popular public radio program Marketplace about his book, telling host Kai Ryssdal that political instability and a lack of social trust depress economic development in the region. Kuran says he’s pessimistic about the Middle East’s economic prospects in the short run, but is “quite optimistic” in the long term. “And the reason is that all of the key ingredients for economic modernization and political modernization are there,” Kuran says. “What’s lacking right now is the will and leadership.”
Evolution and Infinity
In other book news, famed geneticist Francis Collins and science/religion scholar Karl Giberson have published The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions, a non-fiction volume for the general reader that tackles difficult and controversial questions in the religion-and-science dialogue in a style that is both intelligent and accessible. Collins is the founder of the Templeton-supported BioLogos Foundation, for which Giberson serves as vice president. Learn more about BioLogos’s efforts to advance a civil, well-informed conversation about faith and science at the BioLogos Forum.
Priest and cosmologist Michael Heller, winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize, has teamed with W. Hugh Woodin, one of the world’s leading mathematicians, to edit the just-published essay collection Infinity: New Research Frontiers. The book features contributions from over a dozen thinker across academic disciplines—including mathematics, physics, cosmology, philosophy, and theology—who grapple with the meaning the idea of infinity has for our understanding of reality and intellectual potential. The book is based on a 2006 conference on “New Frontiers in Research on Infinity” jointly organized by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California, and the John Templeton Foundation.
