Islam and science: The road to renewal - ECONOMIST

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After centuries of stagnation science is making a comeback in the Islamic world

Jan 26th 2013

THE sleep has been long and deep. In 2005 Harvard University produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries combined. The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West: the only living one, the chemist Ahmed Hassan Zewail, is at the California Institute of Technology. By contrast Jews, outnumbered 100 to one by Muslims, have won 79. The 57 countries in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference spend a puny 0.81% of GDP on research and development, about a third of the world average. America, which has the world’s biggest science budget, spends 2.9%; Israel lavishes 4.4%.

Many blame Islam’s supposed innate hostility to science. Some universities seem keener on prayer than study. Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, for example, has three mosques on campus, with a fourth planned, but no bookshop. Rote learning rather than critical thinking is the hallmark of higher education in many countries. The Saudi government supports books for Islamic schools such as “The Unchallengeable Miracles of the Qur’an: The Facts That Can’t Be Denied By Science” suggesting an inherent conflict between belief and reason.

Many universities are timid about courses that touch even tangentially on politics or look at religion from a non-devotional standpoint. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a renowned Pakistani nuclear scientist, introduced a course on science and world affairs, including Islam’s relationship with science, at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the country’s most progressive universities. Students were keen, but Mr Hoodbhoy’s contract was not renewed when it ran out in December; for no proper reason, he says. (The university insists that the decision had nothing to do with the course content.)

But look more closely and two things are clear. A Muslim scientific awakening is under way. And the roots of scientific backwardness lie not with religious leaders, but with secular rulers, who are as stingy with cash as they are lavish with controls over independent thought.

The long view

The caricature of Islam’s endemic backwardness is easily dispelled. Between the eighth and the 13th centuries, while Europe stumbled through the dark ages, science thrived in Muslim lands. The Abbasid caliphs showered money on learning. The 11th century “Canon of Medicine” by Avicenna (pictured, with modern equipment he would have relished) was a standard medical text in Europe for hundreds of years. In the ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi laid down the principles of algebra, a word derived from the name of his book, “Kitab al-Jabr”. Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham transformed the study of light and optics. Abu Raihan al-Biruni, a Persian, calculated the earth’s circumference to within 1%. And Muslim scholars did much to preserve the intellectual heritage of ancient Greece; centuries later it helped spark Europe’s scientific revolution.

Not only were science and Islam compatible, but religion could even spur scientific innovation. Accurately calculating the beginning of Ramadan (determined by the sighting of the new moon) motivated astronomers. The Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) exhort believers to seek knowledge, “even as far as China”.

These scholars’ achievements are increasingly celebrated. Tens of thousands flocked to “1001 Inventions”, a touring exhibition about the golden age of Islamic science, in the Qatari capital, Doha, in the autumn. More importantly, however, rulers are realising the economic value of scientific research and have started to splurge accordingly. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened in 2009, has a $20 billion endowment that even rich American universities would envy.

Foreigners are already on their way there. Jean Fréchet, who heads research, is a French chemist tipped to win a Nobel prize. The Saudi newcomer boasts research collaborations with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and with Imperial College, London. The rulers of neighbouring Qatar is bumping up research spending from 0.8% to a planned 2.8% of GDP: depending on growth, that could reach $5 billion a year. Research spending in Turkey increased by over 10% each year between 2005 and 2010, by which year its cash outlays were twice Norway’s.

The tide of money is bearing a fleet of results. In the 2000 to 2009 period Turkey’s output of scientific papers rose from barely 5,000 to 22,000; with less cash, Iran’s went up 1,300, to nearly 15,000. Quantity does not imply quality, but the papers are getting better, too. Scientific journals, and not just the few based in the Islamic world, are citing these papers more frequently. A study in 2011 by Thomson Reuters, an information firm, shows that in the early 1990s other publishers cited scientific papers from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (the most prolific Muslim countries) four times less often than the global average. By 2009 it was only half as often. In the category of best-regarded mathematics papers, Iran now performs well above average, with 1.7% of its papers among the most-cited 1%, with Egypt and Saudi Arabia also doing well. Turkey scores highly on engineering.

Science and technology-related subjects, with their clear practical benefits, do best. Engineering dominates, with agricultural sciences not far behind. Medicine and chemistry are also popular. Value for money matters. Fazeel Mehmood Khan, who recently returned to Pakistan after doing a PhD in Germany on astrophysics and now works at the Government College University in Lahore, was told by his university’s vice-chancellor to stop chasing wild ideas (black holes, in his case) and do something useful.

Science is even crossing the region’s deepest divide. In 2000 SESAME, an international physics laboratory with the Middle East’s first particle accelerator, was set up in Jordan. It is modelled on CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, which was created to bring together scientists from wartime foes. At SESAME Israeli boffins work with colleagues from places such as Iran and the Palestinian territories.

By the book

Science of the kind practised at SESAME throws up few challenges to Muslim doctrine (and in many cases is so abstruse that religious censors would struggle to understand it). But biology—especially with an evolutionary angle—is different. Many Muslims are troubled by the notion that humans share a common ancestor with apes. Research published in 2008 by Salman Hameed of Hampshire College in Massachusetts, a Pakistani astronomer who now studies Muslim attitudes to science, found that fewer than 20% in Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan believed in Darwin’s theories. In Egypt it was just 8%.

Yasir Qadhi, an American chemical engineer turned cleric (who has studied in both the United States and Saudi Arabia), wrestled with this issue at a London conference on Islam and evolution this month. He had no objection to applying evolutionary theory to other lifeforms. But he insisted that Adam and Eve did not have parents and did not evolve from other species. Any alternative argument is “scripturally indefensible,” he said. Some, especially in the diaspora, conflate human evolution with atheism: rejecting it becomes a defining part of being a Muslim. (Some Christians take a similar approach to the Bible.)

Though such disbelief may be couched in religious terms, culture and politics play a bigger role, says Mr Hameed. Poor school education in many countries leaves minds open to misapprehension. A growing Islamic creationist movement is at work too. A controversial Turkish preacher who goes by the name of Harun Yahya is in the forefront. His website spews pamphlets and books decrying Darwin. Unlike his American counterparts, however, he concedes that the universe is billions of years old (not 6,000 years).

But the barrier is not insuperable. Plenty of Muslim biologists have managed to reconcile their faith and their work. Fatimah Jackson, a biological anthropologist who converted to Islam, quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of genetics, saying that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Science describes how things change; Islam, in a larger sense, explains why, she says.

Others take a similar line. “The Koran is not a science textbook,” says Rana Dajani, a Jordanian molecular biologist. “It provides people with guidelines as to how they should live their lives.” Interpretations of it, she argues, can evolve with new scientific discoveries. Koranic verses about the creation of man, for example, can now be read as providing support for evolution.

Other parts of the life sciences, often tricky for Christians, have proved unproblematic for Muslims. In America researchers wanting to use embryonic stem cells (which, as their name suggests, must be taken from human embryos, usually spares left over from fertility treatments) have had to battle pro-life Christian conservatives and a federal ban on funding for their field. But according to Islam, the soul does not enter the fetus until between 40 and 120 days after conception—so scientists at the Royan Institute in Iran are able to carry out stem-cell research without attracting censure.

But the kind of freedom that science demands is still rare in the Muslim world. With the rise of political Islam, including dogmatic Salafists who espouse a radical version of Islam, in such important countries as Egypt, some fear that it could be eroded further still. Others, however, remain hopeful. Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s president, is a former professor of engineering at Zagazig University, near Cairo. He has a PhD in materials science from the University of Southern California (his dissertation was entitled “High-Temperature Electrical Conductivity and Defect Structure of Donor-Doped Al2O{-3}”). He has promised that his government will spend more on research.

Released from the restrictive control of the former regimes, scientists in Arab countries see a chance for progress. Scientists in Tunisia say they are already seeing promising reforms in the way university posts are filled. People are being elected, rather than appointed by the regime. The political storms shaking the Middle East could promote not only democracy, but revive scientific freethinking, too.

Islam and science: The road to renewal | The Economist

 

[Cherokee]

Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, for example, has three mosques on campus, with a fourth planned, but no bookshop.

Strange .

The Saudi government supports books for Islamic schools such as “The Unchallengeable Miracles of the Qur’an: The Facts That Can’t Be Denied By Science” suggesting an inherent conflict between belief and reason.

While i can agree there were "Islamic Scientists" , i am not sure how many eminent scientists , if any , Saudi Arabia has produced in last couple of millenia of existence .

A Muslim scientific awakening is under way.

This doesn't even makes sense .

And the roots of scientific backwardness lie not with religious leaders, but with secular rulers, who are as stingy with cash as they are lavish with controls over independent thought.

Protecting Mullahs and Targeting Seculars , are we ? How many seculars have ruled middle east and North Africa in past many centuries ?

Pervez Hoodbhoy, a renowned Pakistani nuclear scientist, introduced a course on science and world affairs, including Islam’s relationship with science, at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the country’s most progressive universities. Students were keen, but Mr Hoodbhoy’s contract was not renewed when it ran out in December; for no proper reason, he says. (The university insists that the decision had nothing to do with the course content.)

And you say Science is Making a comeback .

Research published in 2008 by Salman Hameed of Hampshire College in Massachusetts, a Pakistani astronomer who now studies Muslim attitudes to science, found that fewer than 20% in Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan believed in Darwin’s theories. In Egypt it was just 8%.

And you say science is making a comeback .

A study in 2011 by Thomson Reuters, an information firm, shows that in the early 1990s other publishers cited scientific papers from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (the most prolific Muslim countries) four times less often than the global average. By 2009 it was only half as often. In the category of best-regarded mathematics papers, Iran now performs well above average, with 1.7% of its papers among the most-cited 1%, with Egypt and Saudi Arabia also doing well. Turkey scores highly on engineering.

Turkey has always been progressive , Iran became one (Sanctions helped).


In my humble opinion , author has no idea what is he writing and mixing up a lot things .

Author will pick up problems in Pakistan and expound them in Middle east .
Like he gave example of seculars being Stingy about money one of the reason for backwardness of muslims in Science completely oblivious to fact ME has never been secular .

Then he will pick up "1001 inventions" doha chapter and call it science making a comeback when they are showcasing several centuries old inventions ( and still beating chests about it , a strange quality if i may add)

This whole article was garbage .

Only thing True was Iran's and Turkeys comeback in science and he is calling it Islam's comeback to science . we are yet to see Europeans and Americans harping about Chistianity comeback to Science or China and east asia about Buddhist comeback to science or India about Hindu comeback to Science or Israel about Jews comeback to science.

Separate Science from Religion and you will see change .

 

[Kompromat]

"Knowledge and wisdom is the lost inheritance,of a momin." Iqbal

 

[Cloakedvessel]

Pakistan's foremost intellectual and most vocal supporter of scientific rationality, sees things somewhat different on the matter. He makes more sense than the author from the OP. It does not really make a difference how many universities you establish, how much flashy tools you import from abroad, it doesn't matter how many academic writings you publish. What matters is the mindset of asking how and why and the scientific method of reasoning, that is not much rooted in the scientific communities of many Muslim countries.

Interview: Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy on Science, Religion and Politics:


Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy needs no introduction to Pakistanis and non Pakistanis alike. Eminent Pakistani physicist and activist, Professor Hoodbhoy wages a lone battle for secularism, rationalism and skepticism in Pakistan. He is also author of the books: Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality and Education and the State Fifty Years of Pakistan.

We are proud to have him here on Rational Hub, and congratulate him on his recent appointment as the member of Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters in U.N.

1. What would you say, is the root cause of today’s rampant anti-intellectualism and anti-science mentality?

Irrationality and opposition to science have always spread through those who profit from exploiting human fears of the unknown. The religious ones spread terror with their terrible threats of eternal hell, and unlimited suffering if we deviate from some imagined true path. Today the vendors of spiritual bliss are doing roaring business, preying upon weak minds and spirits, and dwelling upon the fear of death and the unknown. They reject scientifically valid theories such as biological evolution, and battle to limit research and inquiry into nature. Such people should have gone with the dinosaurs but for multiple reasons this has not happened. You see them everywhere, but in my country there are perhaps more of them than elsewhere.

2. Why is religious extremism so rampant in Pakistan, in your view?

I don’t think that there is just one single reason. Think of a bomb. To make one you need the explosive, oxidizer, trigger, shell, etc. None of these alone can do the job. The same goes for religious extremism in Pakistan. One ingredient is to be found in the country’s genesis. Pakistan was brought into being on the slogan that Muslims simply cannot live alongside Hindus. This wove religion into the national fabric. But, in spite of this, as well as rampant poverty and illiteracy, Pakistan could still have moved in a progressive, secular direction. This appeared to be happening in the first couple of decades after independence but then other factors kicked in. In the 1980′s, all progressive trends were reversed after Pakistan and the United States created an international jihad consortium for fighting against the Soviet Union. Religion was pushed down people’s throats in Afghanistan and Pakistan, education was drastically changed and fashioned into a propaganda tool, and the mass media became a means for indoctrination. This strategy created the infrastructure for fashioning the mujahideen into a force that ultimately defeated the Soviets. But it also created the fanatics who later attacked their former masters, both American and Pakistani.


3. Is there an inherent incompatibility between science and religion, as religion often make scientific claims? Is it realistic to expect religion to be divorced from scientific inquiry entirely?

Studying religion will not bring any one closer to scientific truth. I know of no religious text – Torah, Bible, or Quran – that provides the basis of a scientific theory or experiment, or that has led to the making of a machine or a piece of scientific equipment. The greater the distance we put between science and religion, the better. Religion is fine if limited to those “large questions” about which science has nothing to say: the purpose of human life, the question of whether the universe has a creator and what his game is, etc. But when religion makes claims about the physical universe and invokes miraculous happenings, then the clash with science is almost certain. Science firmly rejects miracles, which necessarily assume the suspension of physical law.

4. Was quite disturbed to see the dishonesty shown by Hamza Tzortzis in your recent debate against him, and I am glad that you didn’t engage him anymore.

When some LUMS students asked me to debate Tzortsis, I hadn’t heard of the man but agreed to a discussion on religion and rationality. Later I learned that he’s a Greek convert to Islam and a professional proselytizer. Anyhow, in this first – and last – encounter with him, I discovered that the man was a glib talker but didn’t know what he was talking about. He used some big words, invoking Einstein’s general relativity, M-theory, Stephen Hawking, black holes, etc. He bandied these things around and used them to make sweeping statements about Islam, science, and philosophy. So, to make sure we were talking about the same thing, I asked him to explain what exactly general relativity and M-theory were about. But, being a psychology graduate, he could not do that. Now that he stood exposed before the audience, he lost his temper and accused me of being anti-Islam and anti-Muslim. I could not take such nonsense, and decided there was no point in debating a dangerous charlatan.

5. Have you looked into the whole Kalam Cosmological Argument? Does it have any merit at all, from a scientific perspective?

I am sure it has some interest for those who study history and, in particular, the history of thought. The Kalam Cosmological Argument argues for a prime mover – God – and says that He is the first cause from which all others are derived. It’s basically a theistic point of view and provides some kind of a rationale for the existence of the world. People in old times had some quaint ideas of our cosmic origins – such as believing that the earth was placed on the back of a giant turtle – and they are always fun to read about. But Kalam is utterly irrelevant to anything connected to modern cosmology, which is based on equations and observations.

6. Now speaking of something you’ve been vocally critical of – Agha Waqar Ahmed’s water-kit. Sure, the whole thing was silly and downright ridiculous, but it was quite surprising to see how this was endorsed by authorities and even scientists in Pakistan. Now you can understand how some lay people fall for such scams, due to their lack of skepticism. But it’s quite appalling to think this was supported by some scientists and authorities, isn’t it? What, in your opinion, is the reason for such lack of skepticism, even among scientists?

Basic scientific principles are memorized beautifully, just as religious verses are. But the scientific method has not been internalized by most of those who teach or learn science in Pakistan’s colleges and universities. Yes, it was quite amusing to see our two most celebrated nuclear heroes, Dr. A.Q. Khan and Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, make fools of themselves by supporting a scam artist. The guy claimed that he could make a car run on plain water as fuel by electrolyzing the water. One did not have to be a scientist to know that it was nonsense. If such a thing was possible, then the rest of the world would have done it a long time ago.

7. How rampant is populism in Pakistani politics? And how has the general populace contributed to that?

We have two angry messiahs. One is a man called Tahir-ul-Qadri, a Canadian citizen and mullah who mysteriously parachuted into Pakistani politics and led 25,000 people in a march to occupy Islamabad. The second is Imran Khan, a cricketer with right-wing views who supports the Taliban in just about everything they do. Both are men of fine oratory – the former being more gifted. They promise to kick wicked leaders out of government, reward the righteous, and deliver a new Pakistan. Before a coup-plagued nation that has spent many decades under military rule, they preach to adulating under-30 crowds about the corruption of the present rulers. But neither dares to touch Pakistan’s real issues. Both are careful to castigate only the corruption of civilians; there is nary a word about the others.

8. Could you tell us a bit about the relationship between Prof. Abdus Salam, yourself and Prof. Weinberg?

Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg are stellar scientists who won the Nobel Prize in 1979 for unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces. I took a course in quantum mechanics from Weinberg at MIT in 1973. He and I have subsequently been in communication over the years and I am awed by the amount of physics he knows, and his clear-headedness. I knew Salam much better, although our principal interaction was on matters of religion, science, and politics rather than physics. He wrote the preface to my book on Islam and science, and we co-authored an article as well elsewhere. We agreed to disagree on some things – he was totally enamored with Islam. Sadly, he is considered a heretic by most Muslims because of certain doctrinal differences with mainstream Islam.

9. A personal question, if you don’t mind, why did you return to Pakistan after your doctorate at MIT? Did you ever regret your decision?

In the 1970′s, people like me had hoped to be agents of positive change, and that’s why we returned. I have never regretted it, but things in Pakistan haven’t got better. In fact the trend is towards more injustice, skewed income distributions, and religious fanaticism. It’s clear that there are no quick fixes to our problems and that the struggle is going to be long and hard.

10. Your contract with LUMS ended in December, and has not been renewed without offering any valid reasons. Why do you suspect this is due to their ideological or political bias?

The university administration refused to listen to the 1000 students and faculty who petitioned the administration to renew my contract, as well as all members of the physics department – with the significant exception of the chairman. So the reason for getting rid of me does not seem to be an academic one. What exactly it was remains a mystery to me. They won’t say what it is, although the dean accused me of attempting to “fix the world”. I guess they don’t like how I think about things.

11. Do you think your vocal criticism of Islamists might probably make your search for another job way harder despite your reputation as a physicist, in Pakistan? Are you planning to move abroad by any chance?

That’s precisely the reason, but since I am not running for president it doesn’t bother me. I’m not moving out of Pakistan. I’ve invested too much of my life here, and there’s too much that remains to be done. Getting another university job looks difficult but I haven’t lost hope. Let’s see.

Interview: Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy on Science, Religion and Politics - Rational Hub Blogs

 

[Cloakedvessel]

Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

Internal causes led to the decline of Islam's scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy
August 2007, page 49

This article grew out of the Max von Laue Lecture that I delivered earlier this year to celebrate that eminent physicist and man of strong social conscience. When Adolf Hitler was on the ascendancy, Laue was one of the very few German physicists of stature who dared to defend Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. It therefore seems appropriate that a matter concerning science and civilization should be my concern here.

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.

It was not always this way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood.

Such negative feelings must be checked before the gulf widens further. A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life on our planet—climate change and nuclear proliferation.

First encounters

Islam's encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and 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 inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.1

A long period of darkness followed, punctuated by occasional brilliant spots. In the 16th century, the Turkish Ottomans established an extensive empire with the help of military technology. But there was little enthusiasm for science and new knowledge (see figure 1). In the 19th century, the European Enlightenment inspired a wave of modernist Islamic reformers: Mohammed Abduh of Egypt, his follower Rashid Rida from Syria, and their counterparts on the Indian subcontinent, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Jamaluddin Afghani, exhorted their fellow Muslims to accept ideas of the Enlightenment and 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 European colonial rule and the emergence of several new independent Muslim states, all initially under secular national leaderships. A spurt toward modernization and the acquisition of technology followed. Many expected that a Muslim scientific renaissance would ensue. Clearly, it did not.

What ails science in the Muslim world?

Muslim leaders today, realizing 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 United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria among others—official patronage and funding for science and education have grown sharply in recent years. Enlightened individual rulers, including Sultan ibn Muhammad Al-Qasimi of Sharjah, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar, and others have put aside some of their vast personal wealth for such causes (see figure 2 and the news story on page 33). No Muslim leader has publicly called for separating science from religion.

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 toward the past, they said, makes progress difficult and even undesirable.

In the current epoch of growing antagonism between the Islamic and the Western worlds, most Muslims reject such charges with angry indignation. They feel those accusations add yet another excuse for the West to justify its ongoing cultural and military assaults on Muslim populations. Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and science may account for the slowness of progress. 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 and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions.

In defending the compatibility of science and Islam, Muslims argue that Islam had sustained a vibrant intellectual culture throughout the European Dark Ages and thus, by extension, is also capable of a modern scientific culture. The Pakistani physics Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam, would stress to audiences that one-eighth of the Qur'an is a call for Muslims to seek Allah's signs in the universe and hence that science is a spiritual as well as a temporal duty for Muslims. Perhaps the most widely used argument one hears is that the Prophet Muhammad had exhorted his followers to "seek knowledge even if it is in China," which implies that a Muslim is duty-bound to search for secular knowledge.

Such arguments have been and will continue to be much debated, but they will not be pursued further here. Instead, let us seek to understand the state of science in the contemporary Islamic world. First, to the degree that available data allows, I will quantitatively assess the current state of science in Muslim countries. Then I will look at prevalent Muslim attitudes toward science, technology, and modernity, with an eye toward identifying specific cultural and social practices that work against progress. Finally, we can turn to the fundamental question: What will it take to bring science back into the Islamic world?
Measuring Muslim scientific progress

The metrics of scientific progress are neither precise nor unique. Science permeates our lives in myriad ways, means different things to different people, and has changed its content and scope drastically over the course of history. In addition, the paucity of reliable and current data makes the task of assessing scientific progress in Muslim countries still harder.

I will use the following reasonable set of four metrics:

The quantity of scientific output, weighted by some reasonable measure of relevance and importance;
The role played by science and technology in the national economies, funding for S&T, and the size of the national scientific enterprises;
The extent and quality of higher education; and
The degree to which science is present or absent in popular culture.

Scientific output

A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of published scientific research papers, together with the citations to them. Table 1 shows the output of the seven most scientifically productive Muslim countries for physics papers, over the period from 1 January 1997 to 28 February 2007, together with the total number of publications in all scientific fields. A comparison with Brazil, India, China, and the US reveals significantly smaller numbers. A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia2 showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (For more on the OECD, see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.) Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US NSF records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.3

The situation may be even grimmer than the publication numbers or perhaps even the citation counts suggest. Assessing the scientific worth of publications—never an easy task—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 government 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. In addition to considerable anecdotal evidence for these practices, there have been a few systematic studies. For example,4 chemistry publications by Iranian scientists tripled in five years, from 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003. Many scientific papers that were claimed as original by their Iranian chemist authors, and that had been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been published twice and sometimes thrice with identical or nearly identical contents by the same authors. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonably careful referee.

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. Among the larger countries—in both population and political importance—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan are the most scientifically developed. Among the smaller countries, such as the central Asian republics, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan rank considerably above Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Malaysia—a rather atypical Muslim country with a 40% non-Muslim minority—is much smaller than neighboring Indonesia but is nevertheless more productive. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and other states that have many foreign scientists are scientifically far ahead of other Arab states.
National scientific enterprises

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% of their gross national product on research and development, which is far below the global average of 2.4%. But the trend toward higher spending is unambiguous. Rulers in the UAE and Qatar are building several new universities with manpower imported from the West for both construction and staffing. In June 2006, Nigeria's president Olusegun Obasanjo announced he will plow $5 billion of oil money into R&D. Iran increased its R&D spending dramatically, from a pittance in 1988 at the end of the Iraq–Iran war, to a current level of 0.4% of its gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia announced that it spent 26% of its development budget on science and education in 2006, and sent 5000 students to US universities on full scholarships. Pakistan set a world record by increasing funding for higher education and science by an immense 800% over the past five years.

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. Even more important are the quality and level of professionalism, which are less easily quantifiable. But increasing funding without adequately addressing such crucial concerns can lead to a null correlation between scientific funding and performance.

The role played by science in creating high technology is an important science indicator. Comparing table 1 with table 2 shows there is little correlation between academic research papers and the role of S&T in the national economies of the seven listed countries. The anomalous position of Malaysia in table 2 has its explanation in the large direct investment made by multinational companies and in having trading partners that are overwhelmingly non-OIC countries.

Although not apparent in table 2, there are scientific areas in which research has paid off in the Islamic world. Agricultural research—which is relatively simple science—provides one case in point. Pakistan has good results, for example, with new varieties of cotton, wheat, rice, and tea. Defense technology is another area in which many developing countries have invested, as they aim to both lessen their dependence on international arms suppliers and promote domestic capabilities. Pakistan manufactures nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles. There is now also a burgeoning, increasingly export-oriented Pakistani arms industry (figure 3) that turns out a large range of weapons from grenades to tanks, night-vision devices to laser-guided weapons, and small submarines to training aircraft. Export earnings exceed $150 million yearly. Although much of the production is a triumph of reverse engineering rather than original research and development, there is clearly sufficient understanding of the requisite scientific principles and a capacity to exercise technical and managerial judgment as well. Iran has followed Pakistan's example.

Higher education

According to a recent survey, among the 57 member states of the OIC, there are approximately 1800 universities.5 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 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were excluded). There are fewer data available for comparing against universities worldwide. Two Malaysian undergraduate institutions were in the top-200 list of the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2006 (available at Times Higher Education - World University Rankings, education news and university jobs). No OIC university made the top-500 "Academic Ranking of World Universities" compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (see http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/en). This state of affairs led the director general of the OIC to issue an appeal for at least 20 OIC universities to be sufficiently elevated in quality to make the top-500 list. No action plan was specified, nor was the term "quality" defined.

An institution's quality is fundamental, but how is it to be defined? Providing more infrastructure and facilities is important but not key. Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity. Poor teaching owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally, obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent.

Academic and cultural freedoms on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, where I teach, the constraints are similar to those existing in most other Pakistani public-sector institutions. This university serves the typical middle-class Pakistani student and, according to the survey referred to earlier,5 ranks number two among OIC universities. Here, as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on, and sometimes even physical attacks by student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate Islamic norms take place. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the Pakistani government.

As intolerance and militancy sweep across the Muslim world, personal and academic freedoms diminish with the rising pressure to conform. In Pakistani universities, the veil is now ubiquitous, and the last few unveiled women students are under intense pressure to cover up. The head of the government-funded mosque-cum-seminary (figure 4) in the heart of Islamabad, the nation's capital, issued the following chilling warning to my university's female students and faculty on his FM radio channel on 12 April 2007:

The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. . . . Sportswomen are spreading nudity. I warn the sportswomen of Islamabad to stop participating in sports. . . . Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women.6

The imposition of the veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that over time most students—particularly veiled females—have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. This lack of self-expression and confidence leads to most Pakistani university students, including those in their mid- or late-twenties, referring to themselves as boys and girls rather than as men and women.
Science and religion still at odds

Science is under pressure globally, and from every religion. As science becomes an increasingly dominant part of human culture, its achievements inspire both awe and fear. Creationism and intelligent design, curbs on genetic research, pseudoscience, parapsychology, belief in UFOs, and so on are some of its manifestations in the West. Religious conservatives in the US have rallied against the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Extreme Hindu groups such as the Vishnu Hindu Parishad, which has called for ethnic cleansing of Christians and Muslims, have promoted various "temple miracles," including one in which an elephant-like God miraculously came alive and started drinking milk. Some extremist Jewish groups also derive additional political strength from antiscience movements. For example, certain American cattle tycoons have for years been working with Israeli counterparts to try to breed a pure red heifer in Israel, which, by their interpretation of chapter 19 of the Book of Numbers, will signal the coming of the building of the Third Temple,7 an event that would ignite the Middle East.

In the Islamic world, opposition to science in the public arena takes additional forms. Antiscience materials have an immense presence on the internet, with thousands of elaborately designed Islamic websites, some with view counters running into the hundreds of thousands. A typical and frequently visited one has the following banner: "Recently discovered astounding scientific facts, accurately described in the Muslim Holy Book and by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) 14 centuries ago." Here one will find that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and genes was anticipated 1400 years ago.

Science, in the view of fundamentalists, is principally seen as valuable for establishing yet more proofs of God, proving the truth of Islam and the Qur'an, and showing that modern science would have been impossible but for Muslim discoveries. Antiquity alone seems to matter. One gets the impression that history's clock broke down somewhere during the 14th century and that plans for repair are, at best, vague. In that all-too-prevalent view, science is not about critical thought and awareness, creative uncertainties, or ceaseless explorations. Missing are websites or discussion groups dealing with the philosophical implications from the Islamic point of view of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, superstrings, stem cells, and other contemporary science issues.

Similarly, in the mass media of Muslim countries, discussions on "Islam and science" are common and welcomed only to the extent that belief in the status quo is reaffirmed rather than challenged. When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90 000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior. Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets, which had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake. As several class discussions showed, an overwhelming majority of my university's science students accepted various divine-wrath explanations.
Why the slow development?

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% in Egypt, 67% in Kuwait, 27% in Saudi Arabia, and 41% 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, that ultimate space-age device, 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 pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Qur'ans are already popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting bend-downs during prayers) 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 traditional Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, Urdu—is an important contributory reason. About 80% 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. According to a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals and released in Cairo, Egypt, "The entire Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates." The report adds that in the 1000 years since the reign of the caliph Maa'moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.8
It's the thought that counts

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 behavior.

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 bridge engineer, robotics expert, or microbiologist can certainly be a perfectly successful professional without pondering profound mysteries of the universe. Truly fundamental and ideology-laden issues confront only that tiny minority of scientists who grapple with cosmology, indeterminacy in quantum mechanical and chaotic systems, neuroscience, human evolution, and other such deep topics. Therefore, one could conclude that developing science is only a matter of setting up enough schools, universities, libraries, and laboratories, and purchasing the latest scientific tools and equipment.

But the above reasoning is superficial and misleading. Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset 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.

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. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting" activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science. But what explains its meteoric rise in Islam over the past half century? In the mid-1950s all Muslim leaders were secular, and secularism in Islam was growing. What changed? Here the West must accept its share of responsibility for reversing the trend. Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq, Indonesia under Ahmed Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser are examples of secular but nationalist governments that wanted to protect their national wealth. Western imperial greed, however, subverted and overthrew them. At the same time, conservative oil-rich Arab states—such as Saudi Arabia—that exported extreme versions of Islam were US clients. The fundamentalist Hamas organization was helped by Israel in its fight against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization as part of a deliberate Israeli strategy in the 1980s. Perhaps most important, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency armed the fiercest and most ideologically charged Islamic fighters and brought them from distant Muslim countries into Afghanistan, thus helping to create an extensive globalized jihad network. Today, as secularism continues to retreat, Islamic fundamentalism fills the vacuum.
How science can return to the Islamic world

In the 1980s an imagined "Islamic science" was posed as an alternative to "Western science." The notion was widely propagated and received support from governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Muslim ideologues in the US, such as Ismail Faruqi and Syed Hossein Nasr, announced that a new science was about to be built on lofty moral principles such as tawheed (unity of God), ibadah (worship), khilafah (trusteeship), and rejection of zulm (tyranny), and that revelation rather than reason would be the ultimate guide to valid knowledge. Others took as literal statements of scientific fact verses from the Qur'an that related to descriptions of the physical world. Those attempts led to many elaborate and expensive Islamic science conferences around the world. Some scholars calculated the temperature of Hell, others the chemical composition of heavenly djinnis. None produced a new machine or instrument, conducted an experiment, or even formulated a single testable hypothesis.

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's Islamic Summit in 1981. It joined the IAS (Islamic Academy of Sciences) and ISESCO (Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) in serving the "ummah" (the global Muslim community). 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?

leak 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% 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. The latter are not easily reconcilable with religious demands made on a fully observant Muslim's time, energy, and mental concentration: The faithful must participate in five daily congregational prayers, endure a month of fasting that taxes the body, recite daily from the Qur'an, and more. Although such duties orient believers admirably well toward success in the life hereafter, they make worldly success less likely. A more balanced approach will be needed.

Science can prosper among Muslims once again, but only with a willingness to accept certain basic philosophical and attitudinal changes—a Weltanschauung that 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. The struggle to usher in science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy, and pluralism.

Respected voices among believing Muslims see no incompatibility between the above requirements and true Islam as they understand it. For example, Abdolkarim Soroush, described as Islam's Martin Luther, was handpicked by Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the reform of Iran's universities in the early 1980s. His efforts led to the introduction of modern analytical philosophers such as Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell into the curricula of Iranian universities. Another influential modern reformer is Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian who grew up in France. Meddeb argues that as early as the middle of the eighth century, Islam had produced the premises of the Enlightenment, and that between 750 and 1050, Muslim authors made use of an astounding freedom of thought in their approach to religious belief. In their analyses, says Meddeb, they bowed to the primacy of reason, honoring one of the basic principles of the Enlightenment.

In the quest for modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Islamic world. Progressive Muslim forces have recently been weakened, but not extinguished, as a consequence of the confrontation between Muslims and the West. 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.



Pervez Hoodbhoy is chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years.
References

1. P. Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science—Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, Zed Books, London (1991).
2. M. A. Anwar, A. B. Abu Bakar, Scientometrics 40, 23 (1997).
3. For additional statistics, see the special issue "Islam and Science," Nature 444, 19 (2006).
4. M. Yalpani, A. Heydari, Chem. Biodivers. 2, 730 (2005).
5. Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries, Academic Rankings of Universities in the OIC Countries (April 2007), available at [LINK].
6. The News, Islamabad, 24 April 2007, available at [LINK].
7. For more information on the red heifer venture, see [LINK].
8. N. Fergany et al., Arab Human Development Report 2002, United Nations Development Programme, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, New York (2002), available at [LINK]

Science and the Islamic World---The Quest for Rapprochement

 

[Cloakedvessel]

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy: "Islam and Science Have Parted Ways"


Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy (b. 1950) is one of South Asia's leading nuclear physicists and perhaps Pakistan's preeminent intellectual. Bearer of a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he is chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad where, as a high-energy physicist, he carries out research into quantum field theory and particle phenomenology. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and was visiting professor at MIT and Stanford. For some time, he has been a frequent contributor to Britain's leading intellectual journal, Prospect. His extracurricular activities include a vocal opposition to the political philosophy of Islamism. He also writes about the self-enforced backwardness of the Muslim world in science, technology, trade, and education. His many articles and television documentaries have made a lasting impact on debate about education, Islam, and secularism in Pakistan. Denis MacEoin interviewed him by e-mail in October 2009.

Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2010, pp. 69-74

Middle East Quarterly: In 2007, you asked, "With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?"[1] How would you answer that question today? Has anything changed?

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy: Sadly, little has changed. About seven centuries ago, after a spectacular Golden Age that lasted nearly four hundred years, Islam and science parted ways. Since then, they have never come together again. Muslim contributions to pure and applied sciences—measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents, and processes—have been marginal for more than 700 years. A modest rebirth in the nineteenth century has been eclipsed by the current, startling flight from science and modernity. This retreat began in the last decades of the twentieth century and appears to be gaining speed across the Muslim world.

MEQ: What role do you think is played by the ulema in blocking new knowledge by imposing the rulings against innovation?

Hoodbhoy: The traditional ulema are indeed a problem, but they are not the biggest one; the biggest problem is Islamism, a radical and often militant interpretation of Islam that spills over from the theological domain into national and international politics. Whenever and wherever religious fundamentalism dominates, blind faith clouds objective and rational thinking. If such forces take hold in a society, they create a mindset unfavorable for critical inquiry, including scientific inquiry, with its need to question received wisdom.

MEQ: Have religious conservatism and anti-science attitudes among Muslims always been as strong as today? Or were Muslims more pro-science, say, a hundred years ago?

Hoodbhoy: In my childhood, the traditional ulema—who are so powerful today—were regarded as rather quaint objects and often ridiculed in private. Centuries ago the greatest poets of Persia, like Hafiz and Rumi, stripped away the mullahs' religious pretensions and exposed their stupidity. Today, however, those same mullahs have taken control of the Iranian republic. The answer lies just as much in the domain of world politics as in theology. Khomeini developed the doctrine known as "guardianship of the clergy," which gives the mullahs much wider powers than they generally exercised in the past. Instead of being simple religious leaders, they now became political leaders as well. This echoes the broader Islamic fusion of the spiritual and the temporal.
Scientists, Technologists, and Islamists

MEQ: Explaining the emergence of so many Muslim doctors, scientists, engineers, and other technologists as Islamists and, sometimes, as terrorists, Malise Ruthven suggests that a superficial understanding of science leads to a belief in authoritative texts and this slots in with a belief in the infallibility of the Qur'an.[2] What is your explanation?

Hoodbhoy: This question must be disaggregated and examined at many levels. It cannot be answered simply in terms of mere theology—the Bible contains elements of extreme violence and yet the vast majority of scientists who are believing Christians are also peaceful people. What brought about the global Islamist wave is a much more relevant question. It is, in some ways, the Muslim version of anti-colonialism and a reaction to the excesses of the West, combined with an excessive traditionalism.

But let me concentrate on the sociological aspects. To begin with, we need to separate the scientists from the technologists, meaning those who use science in a narrowly functional sense rather than as a means for understanding the natural world. I have never seen a first-rate Muslim scientist become an Islamist or a terrorist even when he or she is a strong believer. But second- and third-rate technologists are more susceptible. These are people who use science in some capacity but without any need to understand it very much—engineers, doctors, technicians, etc.—all of whom are more inclined towards radicalism. They have been trained to absorb facts without thinking, and this makes them more susceptible to the inducements of holy books and preachers.

MEQ: Has this been happening with Pakistan's home-trained scientists?

Hoodbhoy: Our best physics students in Islamabad are often the most open-minded and the least religious. They have enough social strength to keep themselves at a certain distance from the crowd. Among my colleagues, something similar takes place; the weakest ones professionally are the ones who demonstrate the greatest outward religiosity. I see a strong correlation between levels of professional competence and susceptibility to extremist philosophies.

MEQ: Is the situation the same in India?

Hoodbhoy: Yes, there, too, I find anti-science attitudes rare among scientists but rather common within the technological and professional classes, both Hindu and Muslim. The latter type of people pray for rain, attribute earthquakes to the wrath of God, think supplications to heaven will cure the sick, seek holy waters that will absolve sin, look to the stars for a propitious time to marry, sacrifice black goats in the hope that the life of a loved one will be spared, recite certain religious verses as a cure for insanity, think airliners can be prevented from crashing by a special prayer, and believe that mysterious supernatural beings stalk the earth. Their illogic boggles the mind.

MEQ: Does the fact that Indians and Pakistanis have both constructed nuclear weapons indicate that science now is firmly implanted on South Asian soil?

Hoodbhoy: To an extent, yes, but the battle against irrationality has a long way to go. For example, India's 1998 nuclear tests were preceded by serious concern over the safety of cattle at the Pokharan test site for religious reasons. Former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh wrote, "For the team at the test site—which included President Kalam, then the head of the Defence Research and Development Organization—possible death or injury to cattle was just not acceptable."
The Prohibition of Debate

MEQ: It seems that Muslims today are hampered by a culture that refuses to take on board the prerequisites for scientific and other intellectual progress—the Enlightenment insistence on freedom of speech and thought to enable open discourse and free debate. Even in the West since the Rushdie affair, Islamists seek to use the law to prohibit debate about Islam. Do you see a way to put an end to this pattern?

Hoodbhoy: On the scale of human history, the Enlightenment is a very recent phenomenon, barely four hundred years old. One must be hopeful that Muslims will catch up. The real question is how to shake off the dead hand of tradition. The answer lies in doing away with an educational system that discourages questioning and stresses obedience. Reform in the Muslim world will have to begin here. At the core of this problem, lies the tyranny that teachers exert over their students. In Urdu, we say that the teacher is not just a teacher—he is also your father. But in our culture, fathers are considered all-wise, which means that teachers cannot be questioned.

MEQ: Is this kind of education a source of authoritarianism?

Hoodbhoy: It is both a source and an inevitable consequence of authoritarianism. Instead of experiencing science as a process of questioning to achieve understanding, students sit under the watchful eyes of despots while they memorize arbitrary sets of rules and an endless number of facts. X is true and Y is false because that's what the textbook says. I grind my teeth whenever a student in my university class gives me this argument.

MEQ: How can countries like Pakistan develop a scientific mindset?

Hoodbhoy: College and university come much too late; change must begin at the primary and secondary school level. Good scientific pedagogy requires the deliberate inculcation of a spirit of healthy questioning in the classroom. Correct attitudes start developing naturally when students encounter questions that engage their mind rather than their memory. For this, it is important to begin with tangible things. One does not need a Ph.D. in cognitive studies to know that young people learn best when they deal with objects that can be understood by visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic means. As their experience grows, students learn to understand abstract concepts, to manipulate symbols, to reason logically, to solve theorems, and to generalize. These abilities are destroyed, or left woefully undeveloped, by teaching through rote memorization.

MEQ: What, then, should normal practice consist of?

Hoodbhoy: Teachers posing such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How can we check the correctness of our measurements? What is the evidence? How are we to make sense out of our results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.
Religion Trumps Science

MEQ: You have said, "No Muslim leader has publicly called for separating science from religion."[3] Do you detect any real movement by Muslim secularists and scientists to reverse this trend?

Hoodbhoy: Nothing of this kind is visible in Pakistan, but I see this happening in Iran, the most intellectually advanced country of the Muslim world, a country that boasts an educational system that actually works. Ayatollah Khomeini was quite content to keep science and Islam separate—unlike Pakistan's leaders who have made numerous absurd attempts to marry the two. Khomeini once remarked that there is no such thing as Islamic mathematics. Nor did he take a position against Darwinism. In fact, Iran is one of the rare Muslim countries where the theory of evolution is taught. This may be because Shi'ites, as in Iran, have a different take on evolution than Sunnis and are generally less socially conservative as well. Shi'i women may wear the chador or hijab [head covering] but never a burqa [full body covering]. I've seen women taxi drivers in Tehran but never in New York City. Moreover, Iran is a front-runner in stem-cell research—something which George W. Bush and his administration had sought to ban from the United States.

MEQ: How far have madrasas in Pakistan, especially the Deobandi schools, made intellectual progress hard or impossible for society as a whole?

Hoodbhoy: The Deobandi-Salafi-Wahhabi axis of unreason does not seem capable of accommodating the premises of science—causality, an absence of divine intervention, and scientific method. Ever since Khwaja Nizam-ul-Mulk of Persia established madrasas in the eleventh century, these schools have stuck to their pre-scientific curriculum. However, they became dangerous when the Saudis used their petro-dollars in the 1970s to export Wahhabism across the world. Thousands of new madrasas were established in Pakistan by the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia to provide fodder for the great joint, global jihad against the Soviets. The CIA provided madrasas with millions of Qur'ans, as well as tens of millions of textbooks published in America designed to create a jihadist mindset among young Afghans resident in Pakistan.[4] These madrasas eventually became nurseries for the Taliban.

MEQ: Have no attempts been made to reform the madrasas?

Hoodbhoy: Following the 9/11 attacks, General Pervez Musharraf was prodded by the Americans to initiate a madrasa reform project aimed at broadening the madrasa curriculum to include the teaching of English, science, mathematics, and computers. Huge sums were spent but to no avail. These misogynist bastions of anti-modernism and militancy cannot be reformed. The Pakistani state literally cowers before them. They have the power to bring every Pakistani city to a halt. On the other hand, in East Africa, India, or Bangladesh, one sees that madrasas can be quite different. While conservative, they do permit teaching of secular subjects. Some even have small minorities of non-Muslims, which would be unheard of in a Pakistani madrasa.

MEQ: You point out the emergence of low-quality scientific periodicals in Iran and elsewhere, in which scientists publish articles of a poor standard. Also, most Muslim countries tolerate outright plagiarism in Ph.D. theses and published books.[5] What do you suppose is responsible for such self-defeating behavior that clearly acknowledges the superiority of properly assessed articles and dissertations yet accepts the second- and third-rate?

Hoodbhoy: I call this "paper pollution." The rapid increase in substandard publications and plagiarism is the consequence of giving large incentives for publishing research papers. Some contain worthwhile research but most do not. I consider certain ambitious individuals in government to be at fault for allowing, and even deliberately encouraging, poor quality theses and books fit for nothing but the waste basket. This problem can be handled using the current administrative machinery; just remove these incentives and punish plagiarism with sufficient severity.
Open War between Muslims

MEQ: You have said, "Here [at Quaid-i-Azam University], as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on."[6] This is also seen in numerous Muslim schools in the United Kingdom, where even chess was banned and compared to "dipping one's hand in the blood of swine."[7] These attitudes prevent talented young Muslims from achieving success as actors, directors, dancers, musicians, composers, artists, and writers. Your thoughts on changing this situation?

Hoodbhoy: There is open war between those Muslims who stand for a liberal, moderate version of the faith and those who insist on literalism. The unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and social behavior is now playing itself out in ever more violent ways. Most Pakistanis, while Muslims, want their daughters to be properly educated; Islamic extremists, however, are determined to stop them. On most campuses, religious vigilantes enforce their version of Islam on the university community by forcing girls into the veil, destroying musical instruments, forbidding men and women from being together, and putting a damper on cultural expression.

MEQ: Do the Taliban play a role in this arena?

Hoodbhoy: Yes, as of early 2009, they had already blown up 354 schools[8] and they issued a decree that no girls in Pakistan may be educated after February 15, 2009. In their view, all females must stay at home. In October, educational institutions across Pakistan shut down after a suicide bomber blew himself up after walking into the girls' cafeteria of the International Islamic University [in Islamabad] while, simultaneously, another bomber targeted male students.[9]

MEQ: Islamists bombed an Islamic university?

Hoodbhoy: Indeed, this episode sent shock waves across the country because the International Islamic University is a conservative institution where most women dress in burqas and very few wear normal clothes. But even this does not placate the extremists.

Muslims are at war with other Muslims. If the radicals win, or can at least terrify the moderates into following their restrictions, then there will be no personal and intellectual freedom and hence no thinking, ideas, innovations, discoveries, or progress. Our real challenge is not better equipment or faster Internet connectivity but our need to break with mental enslavement, to change attitudes, and to win our precious freedom.

[1] Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, "Science and the Islamic World—The Quest for Rapprochement," Physics Today, Aug. 2007, p. 1.
[2] Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (London: Granta Books, 2002), pp. 117-21.
[3] Hoodbhoy, "Science and the Islamic World," p. 2.
[4] Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, "The ABCs of Jihad in Afghanistan—Courtesy, USA," The Washington Post, Mar. 23, 2002.
[5] Hazem Zohny, "Iran urged to stamp out plagiarism," SciDevNet (London), Oct. 26, 2009; "Iran's Science Minister Accused of Plagiarism," Payvand Iran News (Mountain View, Calif.), Sept. 24, 2009.
[6] Hoodbhoy, "Science and the Islamic World," p. 6.
[7] Denis MacEoin, Music, Chess and Other Sins (London: Civitas, 2009), p. 101.
[8] The Guardian (London), Jan. 20, 2009.
[9] Dawn (Karachi), Oct. 21, 2009.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy: "Islam and Science Have Parted Ways" :: Middle East Quarterly

 

[FaujHistorian]

......

......


Religion - becomes strong by solidifying old myths and traditions

Science - becomes strong by destroying and superseding old myths and traditions.


Religion and science are like oil and water.

They cannot mix and should not be mixed.


Thus Islam as a religion cannot be mixed with science (period).

 

[Cloakedvessel]

Islam Analysis: Knowledge economies remain elusive

Building a knowledge society in the Islamic World requires structural change — not fads and symbolism, argues Athar Osama.

Last month, a special report by The Economist magazine announced the dawn of the third industrial revolution, built on the idea of individualised production powered by 3D printers and nano devices that create objects atom by atom. [1]

It talked of a not-so-distant age when the global centre of gravity of production — which in the 1970s moved to developing countries like China, Malaysia, Taiwan — will revert to the developed world, in order to be nearest to the 'brains'.

For the developing world in general, and the Islamic World in particular, this could mean the loss of a significant economic opportunity. Thus it is all the more important, even if the more difficult, for Islamic countries to create a knowledge economy before they are bypassed.

Mixed progress

In 2003, the UN Development Programme issued a second edition of its Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), which looked at developments in freedom, knowledge and women's empowerment, deficits identified in the 2002 first edition of the report. [2]

Almost a decade on, progress towards these goals has been uneven. There are notable and highly visible achievements, such as Education City in Doha, the creation of elite and large universities in Saudi Arabia, and Qatar setting itself an ambitious target — which it is largely following through on — of increasing spending on research and development to 2.8 per cent of its GDP. [3]

But the picture is mixed, as reflected in a 2008 report from the Brookings Institution. This noted that Arab countries spent on average five per cent of their GDP on education between 1965 to 2003 — higher than the three per cent average for Asia and Latin America — but questioned the effectiveness of this spend. [4]

For despite the investment in education, Arab countries still lag a representative set of Latin American or Asian countries in academic achievement. The report also found a mixed record on a range of governance measures, such as accountability, corruption, and rule of law.

Speaking at a conference in 2009, Shamshad Akhtar, regional vice president of the World Bank for the Middle East and North Africa, acknowledged that there had been progress in areas such as broadening education and increasing the use of information and communication technology.

But she added that at the same time, "other regions have made even more rapid progress in these same areas, so that the region is further behind comparators and competitors today on the knowledge economy index than it was".

Defining terms

In recent years, much of the focus has been on trying to establish universities to provide better access to tertiary education. But though necessary, tertiary education alone will not be sufficient to create a knowledge-based economy.

One reason for the slow progress is confusion about what the term "knowledge economy" or "knowledge-based economy" actually means.

The World Bank has described the knowledge economy as one in which "organisations and people acquire, create, disseminate, and use knowledge more effectively for greater economic and social development." [5]

However clarity ends there. The framework put forward by the bank has four dimensions: economic and institutional regime; educated and skilled workforce; efficient innovation system; and information and communications technologies. To assess the status of each dimension, it identifies 148 structural and qualitative variables.

We need a better definition of what knowledge is, and how it can be used, to produce a more accurate index of the knowledge economy in developing countries. For instance, a farmer working in Egypt or Pakistan uses knowledge of land management transferred through generations. Yet this knowledge is hardly captured in modern indices of the knowledge economy.

Although traditional knowledge serves the farmer well, greater access to new science-based information could help if weather patterns or soil quality change due to climate change, for example.

But these intricate details and complex facets of the creation, dissemination, and use of knowledge are difficult to capture and quantify. They receive short shrift when policymakers follow the latest fads in development, such as creating world class universities.

Structural change

The Islamic World needs to move away from fads and symbolic moves, and make a sustained effort to bring about structural change and introduce new incentives (such as those that will attract better quality teachers) for producing, obtaining and using knowledge in society.

As Rima Khalaf Hunaidi of UNDP rightly notes in the 2003 Arab development report, "There is … a pressing need for deep-seated reform in the organisational, social and political context of knowledge."

This reform must begin with education at the primary level. In most Islamic countries, the curriculum is too rigid to allow creative thinking, critical inquiry, and free flow of ideas. Students are mostly spoon-fed by an authoritarian figure — the teacher — and discouraged from questioning.

Addressing this gap will require experimenting — fairly rapidly — with approaches and ideas, to discover what works. Two noteworthy, albeit nascent, experiments to induce creative thinking and critical inquiry at an early age through robotics-based learning tools are happening at National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) [6] and a private after-school programme at Robotics Lab in Pakistan. [7]

Only when the Islamic World can produce free-thinking citizens will there be any hope of the emergence of a meaningful knowledge society.

Islam Analysis: Knowledge economies remain elusive - SciDev.Net

Islam Analysis: Money can't buy quality research

Some Muslim countries' powerful financial incentives to make quick progress in research could backfire, cautions Athar Osama.

Over a decade ago, several governments in the Islamic world woke up from decades of slumber to begin investing heavily in science and innovation. A funding boost helped set up new universities, enhance research grants, and send thousands of students to do PhDs in the developed world.

The regulators and ministries that rolled out these ambitious efforts cautioned against judging their effectiveness and viability too soon, pointing to the limited scientific capacity in these countries. It was popular to say, 'let's build a critical mass (quantity) first and worry about raising the standard (quality) later'.

But there was clearly something amiss: some policies seemed either deficient or simply wrong-minded. And evidence of this is beginning to pile up.

Evidence of misguided priorities

The picture emerging is one of a mindless race to secure international publications and increase university rankings using 'shopping sprees' for highly cited academics, plagiarism and even outright academic fraud.

A recent article published in Science highlights a practice, prevalent in at least a couple of Saudi Universities, of engaging prolific academics on so-called part-time contracts that pay handsomely in exchange for spending a couple of weeks on campus — and, critically, on condition that the university name is added to their ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) index profiles. The index is one of the factors included in world university rankings.

This results in an artificially higher number of papers published by that university, and hence a higher ranking.

The article notes that this practice is similar to UK universities 'shopping' for prolific scientists just before research quality assessments, in order to ensure a higher evaluation and funding for future research.

But there is a fundamental difference: while one may question the timing of UK universities hiring a prolific scientist, it is not a fraudulent practice in and of itself. But claiming credit for a scientist who does not engage in meaningful research with researchers at the university in question, or using work unaffiliated with the university to bump up rankings, is certainly suspect.

Plagiarism and academic fraud

Seemingly sensible policies — such as encouraging academics to publish more — can also backfire if they are badly designed or implemented.

In Pakistan, a strong emphasis by the country's Higher Education Commission (HEC) on a "publish and get paid" policy has created a culture of plagiarism and academic fraud, according to preliminary evidence that appeared recently in the Pakistani press.

Writing in a reputed English language national daily, Isa Daudpota, a senior administrator at Air University in Islamabad, alleges to have collected evidence of a fraudulent publishing racket that involves "international" and "peer-reviewed" journals, most of which are electronic. [2]

Although many are based in Africa, among other places, in reality they were created and run by Pakistani academics and their 'friends' abroad, says Daudpota.

These fraudulent journals may contain suspect or even fictitious names on their editorial boards, or may use names without permission. And participating academics can publish or even review their own work by nominating a non-existent professor as a reviewer.

Analysing the CVs of HEC-approved professors, Daudpota finds preliminary evidence that some professors (mainly having done their PhDs at local universities with relatively lax standards) are more likely to publish in such journals. But so far, the HEC appears to be treating these revelations as isolated cases rather than a systemic problem.

No shortcuts

Muslim countries are not alone in using financial incentives to increase their publishing performance. China and India — two emerging scientific powers — also struggle with similar challenges. [3-5]

Financial incentives also lead to more publications in the industrialised world. But research by Franzoni and colleagues suggests they encourage submissions regardless of quality, while career incentives improve the quality of scientific papers. [6]

In the developing world, where the norms of quality and integrity have yet to take root, policymakers have a responsibility to enforce scientific integrity and ethics.

First, instances of misguided use of financial incentives, plagiarism, and academic fraud must be tackled with zero tolerance and exemplary punishments to individuals and institutions. This would set a precedent and send a message that it does not pay to cheat.

And rather than being treated as isolated instances, such cases should be probed for systemic problems that may tarnish a country's academic reputation in the long term.

Second, future policies aimed at promoting scientific research must consider unintended consequences. Quality must come first, even if quantity and speed of reforms are compromised, and intrinsic motivators such as the satisfaction of creating new knowledge must be preferred over financial rewards.

Many aspiring governments in the Muslim world are eager to invest in science, and naturally, expect to reap rewards. But they must realise that there is no shortcut to joining the world's scientific elite.

There are many things money can buy overnight, but the ability to carry out quality scientific research is not one of them.

Athar Osama is a London-based science and innovation policy consultant. He is the founder and CEO of Technomics International Ltd, a UK-based international technology policy consulting firm, and founder of Muslim-Science.com.

Islam Analysis: Knowledge economies remain elusive - SciDev.Net

 

[XTREME]

......

......


Religion - becomes strong by solidifying old myths and traditions

Science - becomes strong by destroying and superseding old myths and traditions.


Religion and science are like oil and water.

They cannot mix and should not be mixed.


Thus Islam as a religion cannot be mixed with science (period).

The more I study science, the more I believe in God. - Einstein

 

[FaujHistorian]

The more I study science, the more I believe in God. - Einstein

The more I study science, the more Umras I go for (41 Umras and next year ticket already booked) - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more Hujj I go for - Noteinstein

The more I study science, the more Qadianis I kill (2 graveyards destroyed too) - - Noteinstein

The more I study science, the more Shia Imabargash I atttack - - Noteinstein

The more I study science, the more rokcets I throw from Lebanon to Israel - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more I say 5 times prayers - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more rozas I keep in Ramzan - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more lotas I take to Tablighi Jamat Ijtima - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more girls school I destroy - Noteinstein



And the list goes on and on and on.


Just keep in mind that Einstein's reference to God was much personal, and lot less Islamic-Umma's God.


So please do not mix them.


Thank you

 

[scorpionx]

@FaujHistorian:
Sir, today science and religion are bound to mix. If today someone tells me to believe that a God's idol is drinking milk,its science that tells me it's a hoax not miracle. Correct me if i am wrong.

 

[Azazel]

The more I study science, the more I believe in God. - Einstein

Well,Einstein's God is certainly not yours.According to him concept Abrahamic God is "naïve" and "childlike".He believed in the God of Baruch Spinoza,He believed in a God that is abstract and impersonal,it was a pantheistic God.Don't quote him unless you completely know what he is all about.

 

[Wright]

The only Islamic country showing promise is Yemen.

 

[XTREME]

The more I study science, the more Umras I go for (41 Umras and next year ticket already booked) - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more Hujj I go for - Noteinstein

The more I study science, the more Qadianis I kill (2 graveyards destroyed too) - - Noteinstein

The more I study science, the more Shia Imabargash I atttack - - Noteinstein

The more I study science, the more rokcets I throw from Lebanon to Israel - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more I say 5 times prayers - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more rozas I keep in Ramzan - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more lotas I take to Tablighi Jamat Ijtima - Noteinstein

The more I study science the more girls school I destroy - Noteinstein



And the list goes on and on and on.


Just keep in mind that Einstein's reference to God was much personal, and lot less Islamic-Umma's God.


So please do not mix them.


Thank you

Sorry brother. I had idea that you are non-Muslim.
But please do respect my religion.

 

[Azazel]

Sorry brother. I had idea that you are non-Muslim.
But please do respect my religion.

Just being curious,Where did he disrespected your religion??Or are you one of those who take offense on just about everything.