Islam and Science, Pervez Hoodbhoy , Zed Books Ltd., 1991 ISBN 1-85649-025-4 (Paperback), Foreword by Prof Abdus Salam.
"About 700 years ago, Islamic civilization almost completely lost the will and ability to do science. Since that time, apart from attempts during the Ottoman period and in Mohammed Ali's Egypt, there have been no significant efforts at recovery. Many Muslims acknoledge, and express profound regret at, this fact. Indeed, this is the major preoccupation of the modernist faction in Islam. But most traditionalists feel no regret -- in fact, many welcome this loss because, in their view, keeping] a distance from science helps preserve Islam from corrupting, secular influences."
"Scientific development and ideology are indivisibly linked. Hence the fundamental question: is the Islamic faith in harmonious complementarity with the science of the natural world or is there, an irreconciliable conflict between the metaphysical system based on faith and demands of reason and empirical enquiry?"
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Page 4:
"At the heart of the dispute is the fundamental issue: science is a secular pursuit, and it is impossible to for it to be otherwise. The secular character of science does not mean that it necessararily repudiates the existence of Divine. But it does mean that the validation of scientific truths does not rely on any form of spiritual authority; observation, experimentation, and logic are the sole arbiters which decide what is true or false. Scientists are free to be as religious as they please, but science recognizes no laws outside its own."
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"The elites which rule Muslim countries today have shown little ability - or even desire - to address the myriad problems and challenges of a modern world. Of these, the development of science and rational culture are perhaps the most important."
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"Often, diabolical theories of international conspiracy, with varying degrees of credibilityj, are invoked as explanation fro Muslim Scientific backwardness. But these are not very fulfilling. Indeed, the damage to the collective self-esteem cannot be undone by such means, and thoghtful Muslims must seek sounder reasons."
"In seeking an explanation for scientific underdevelopment, one must recognize at the outset that the environment for science in Islamic country is replete with paradoxes."
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Chapter 4/Page 29:
"Muslim modernists and pragmatists have persistently sought to amalgamate the new with the old. But their attitude towards science is oftentimes a schizophrenic one, particularly in those Muslims countries where orthodoxy wields state power."
"This point is exemplified by the views expressed by the Saudi delegates to a high level conference held in Kuwait in 1983. The ostensible aim of the conference, attended by rectors from 17 Arab universities, was to identify and remove bottlenecks in the development of science and techonolgy in the Arab world. But a simple topic dominated the proceedings: is science Islamic? The Saudis held that pure science tends to produce 'Mu'tazilite tendencies' potentially subversive of belief. Science is profane because it is secular; as such in their opinion - it goes agains Islamic beliefs. Hence, recommended the Saudis, although techonology should be promoted for its obvious benefits, pure science ought to be softpedalled."
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Chapter 4/Page 35:
"There are, on paper, 133 science and technology institutions in Pakistan. In size they range from large research and development organizations such as the PAEC (atomic energy), PCSIR (industrial research) and SUPARCO (space research) to small units occupying only a few rooms of office space. Equipment is generally plentiful, salaries are 30-50 percent higher than in the neighbouring India, and perks such as foreign travel are common. The organizations maintain public relations offices, have good access to the state media, send employees for overseas training, and organize conferences all year around. On the face it there are signs of busy, productive, and effective activity. But, with some exceptions, theiry scientific research output is miniscule by any reasonable standard, and the impact on the technology that exists or the national economy is imperciptible. Pakistan's nuclear program, which is by far the most advanced in the Muslime countries, if often held up as a symbol of the nation's technial prowess. But the only declared achievement of signficance is the reasonably successful operation of, and fuel fabrication for, the single Canadian supplied reactor located in Karachi, KANUPP. Unlike India, Pakistan cannot hope to design and construct its own reactors in the foreseeable future, which is why it entered into a deal in 1990 for purchasing a turn-key French supplied reactor."
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"Given that per capita income in Pakistan ($350) and India ($300) are not much different, the huge discrepancy in levels of scientific achievement must be sought elsewhere. This explanation lies in education."Chapter 4/Page 37:
"..., but the objectives of education were tacitly taken to be essentially universal. modernistic ones. However, following the coup of 1977 which brought General Zia-ul-Haq to power, the military government, in alliance with political parties of fundamentalist orientation, declared its intention of creating an Islamized society and a new national identity based exclusively on religion. Education immediately became a key instrument to be used towards this end. Consequently, a number of important changes were officially decreed. These include the following:General Zia and his followers pursued their concept of Islamized education with great seriousness, and most of the above decrees were implemented at least to some degree. But zealotry was tempered with pragmatism when powerful interests were at stake. For example, the government left almost untouched the exclusive set of expensive, private, English medium schools to which military officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy citizens send their children. Elite institutions such as the Karachi Grammar School, Aitchison College, Burn Hall, and many others, boast of a content and quality of education which is comparable to the better ranking schools in the West. In contrast to Urdu medium schools - which are intended for the masses - these provide instruction of a modern and basically secular character to roughly one percent of the the population. Apart from relatively minor changes, they continued to function during the Zia era as in the years before."
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"The successor civilian government of Benazir Bhutto, which was not known for seeking bold initiatives, did not dare make any meaningful changes during its tenure in office. With the demise of her government and the accession to power of the Islamic Democratic Alliance, it is almost certain that the Islamization of education will be accelerated."
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"From colonial time onwards, the assumption had been that modern education was necessary for social progress - and that social progress was desirable. This was explicitly renounced in 1977. Instead, the restoration of past Islamic glories was declared as the goal."
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Chapter 4/Page 39-40:
Lost and buried in the dusty archives of Harvard's Widener Library is Ph.D. dissertation, submitted in 1964 to that university by a Pakistani student, Wali Muhammed Zaki, entitled "The Attitude of Pakistani Science Teachers Towards Religion and Science".
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The results of Zaki's research are as follows:
There are several counts on which one can fault the above study. ...... But is this the reason why Zaki's dissertation met the fate of obscurity and oblivion?
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Chapter 4/Page 40-41:
Since 1985, Pakistan's ministry of Science and Technology has been sending several hundred students every year to the US an the Britain for Ph.D. work in scientific and technical fields.
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For example, in 1985-86, 187 students were sent to the US for the Ph.D. work. As of 1991, only 9 had received Ph.Ds. abd 39 have been given M.Scs. In the same year, 191 students were sent to the UK. Of these, 65 received Ph.Ds. This relatively larger number indicates the less rigorous nature of the British system.
On 29 January 1986, the Centre of Basic Sciences in Islamabad administered a test designed by the Nobel prize winning physicist, Samuel Ting. About 130 students from all over Pakistan, and with qualifications ranging from M.Sc. to M.Phil. to Ph.D. took the test. Students are allowed to bring any notes and books they wanted. This 5-hour long test consisted of 200 multiple choice questions on various aspects of physics. Since each quesion had three alternative answers, random guessing would give an average score of 67 marks. Students who scored more than 160 would be granted admission to MIT.
Not a single student passed. Not one came anywhere close to the pass mark. The highest recorded score was 113, and the average score was 70 - a scant 3 points above that which a group of illiterated would have attained, had they been allowed to randomly tick off the answers.
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Chapter 4/Page 43-45:
"The de-emphasis of secular subjects, and reduced levels of performance in these, is in considerable measure a result of fundamental changes in educational priorities. The emphasis on religious and nationalistic indoctrination has caused most literary works to be replaced by moralizing essays, classical poetry by religious poetry, and the teaching of history and geography to be confined to that of Muslim periods and areas. The vision of of a universalistic world civilization remains hidden from the pupil's view. Most importantly, the role of reason and creativity in the learning process has been denigrated."
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The years of General Zia's rule also saw the virtual extinction of intellectual activity in Pakistani universities. Public lectures, debates, drama, musical events and even mushairas (poetry recitals) were virtually banished from the campuses. In part this was due to the efforts of university authorities obsessed with the desire to maintain law and order, and in part to active threats by religious student groups who consider drama and music as un-Islamic. The latter force has not disappeard with Zia's death.
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With the intention of preserving the universities from the unwanted change, there has evolved an elaborate system whereby the university faculty is selected so that contamination by the germs of intellectual and professional competence is avoided as much as possible. This task of sanitization is one which the university selection boards are entrusted with. The means by which this task is accomplished includes, among others, forcing candidates to answer questions wholly unrelated to their subject of specialization, and which bear no relevance to any possible professional activity of the candidate.
This point is well illustrated by successive meetings in 1987 and 1988 of the selection board of Quaid-e-Azam University, which is considered to be Pakistan's premier university. The candidates... ...were confronted with questions like this:
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Candidates who refused to submit themselves to such questioning wer generally turned away. The government of Benazir Bhutto did not repudiate the policy, and the successor IJI government has reaffirmed it.
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"Whether Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, fundamentalism is essentially about once and for all revalation. Knowledge is inevitably finite; it consists in whatever has been revealed. For fundamentalist, therefore, any increase in knowledge consists only of finding new interpretations of holy writ. Fundamentalists often claim that every major discovery of modern science was long anticipated in the holy scriptures of their faith. Read the text carefully, they say, and you will find it is there. But if you dont find it, either you have not done a good job at reading or the so-called scientific fact is false."
"...let me quote from a recently published book on the sciences of ancients India [1]. The author, who appears to be an ardent believer in the Hindu faith as well as Hindu supremacy, asks his readers to ponder on Bhagavad Gita 2-16 which says: 'What does not exist cannot come into existence, and what exists cannot be destroyed'. This line, proclaims the author triumphantly, is definitive proof that a pillar of modern physics - the law of conservation of matter and energy - was also known to the Ancients thousands of years ago. It establishes the divine nature of the Gita, and proves that there is nothing new which has been added to the stock of human wisdom since the time the scriptures were set down."
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"Still others are greatly satisfied that human rebirth is now a scientifically established fact, choosing to believe certain parapsychologists who claim that the moment a man dies his mass suddenly decreases by 50 grams. This is clear indication, they say, that the atman (spirit) has left the body in preparation for making a new being somewhere else. None of these observations, however has ever been shown to be repeatable or to have survived careful investigation. They are this rejected by scietists."
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"Certain exegetes of the Holy Qur'an have also attempted to derive scientific facts from the Holy Book in a manner much like that described above. Among these Maurice Bucaille is by far the most prominent and widely read."
[1] Nem Kumar Jain, Science and Scientists in India, (Delhi, Indian Book Gallery, 1985). p.1
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Chapter 6/Page 67-68:
Maurice Bucaille:
"A French surgeon who turned spiritualist, Monsieur Bucaille shot into prominence thorughout the Islamic world with the publication of his exegesis, The Bible, The Qur'an and Science."
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"Bucaille's method is simple. He asks his readers to ponder on some Qur'anic verse and then, from a variety of meanings that could be assigned to the verse, he pulls out one which is consistent with some scientific fact. He thereupon concludes that, whereas the Bible is often wrong in the description of natural pheonomena, the Qur'an is ivariably correct and that it correctly anticipated all major discoveries of modern science."
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"He ends the discussion of each topic with the ritual conclusion that the marvelous agreement of Qur'anic revelations with the scientific fact is proof of its miraculous nature."
"Whereas Monsieur Bucaille appears eminently satisfied with his methodology, Muslims who wish to combine reason with faith will readily detect at least two fundamental flaws in it even though` they accept the divine nature of Qura'n."
"First it will be recognized that the proof of a proposition is meaningful only if the possibility of disproof is also to be entertained. .... Since believers know that it is impossible for the Qur'an to be wrong in any manner, all attempts at 'proving' its divine nature are entirely specious from the start."
"Second, hanging an eternal truth on to the changeable thories of science is a dangerous business."
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"Observe that in Bucaille's book there is not a single prediction of any physical fact which is unknown up to now, but which could be tested against observation and experimentation in the future."
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[This is an extended version of the author's article published in Jan 1988 issue of the Karachi monthly Herald]
There has emerged, in recent years, a remarkable manifestation of orthodox religiousity which is, in essence. an attempt to extend the scope of Islamization in Pakistan beyond the sphere of social concerns and into the domain of natural phenomena. They call it Islamic Science.
Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a long gone medieval age, this new science seeks to establish that every scientific fact and phenomenon know today was anticipated 1400 years ago and that all scientific predictions may, in fact, be based on the study of the Holy Book. Once again, as in medieval times, theology is being crowned as the Queen of Sciences.
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Ordinary secular science, according to the proponents of the new Islamic science, has no business being here in the Land of the Pure. Together with various other foul products of godless secular civilizations - such as capitalism or socialism or democracy - modern science also needs to be unceremoniously shipped back to the West, where it supposedly belongs.
I had the privilege of recently observing at close range the new Islamic Science. The occasion was provided by the international conference on Scietific Miracles of Qur'an and Sunnah, inaugurated by President General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq in Islamabad on October 18, 1987. ...... About half the total conference expenses around 66 lakh rupees ($400,000) - were borne by the brotherly government of Saudi Arabia which often subsidizes such excellent causes. ..... it had been preceeded by two others of a similar nature some months ago in Karachi, as well as many earlier ones. New ones are doubtlessly being planned......
...the following shortlist of rather suggestively titled papers presented at the Scientific Miracles Conference by itself speaks volumes:
Sixty-five other papers of similar nature were also presented by the pious, bearded participants. ......I felt out of my depth, finding even the titles of some sessions to be incomprehensible. For example, one of these was advertised as a Panel Discussion on Things Known Only To Allah.... I was unable to attend, but subsequently have often wondered what secrets the panelists were privy to.
....A selection follows:
Dr Arshad Ali Beg, a senior scientist at the PCSIR has a mathematical formula by which, he says, the degree of munafiqat in a society can be calculated. ..... So everything happens through chemical reactions such as:
Infidels + Teaching of the Prophet -----> Religious Society
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... Science and Technology in the Islamic World, this journal is an important advocate and means of propagation of the new Islamic science. ..... Here is a small sample of articles .... which have actually appeared in this journal in recent issues.
.... the last mentioned paper above, authored by Dr Safdar Jung Rajput, a senior scientist with DESTO (the Defence Science & Technolgy Organization). ...... A summary of his principal results in jinnology, published in the above quoted article, is as follows:
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A senior director of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Mr Bashiruddin Mahmood, in 1980 has recommended that jinns, being fiery creatures, ought to be trapped as a free source of energy.
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Incredible as it may sound, a German delegate to the Islamic Science Conference held in Islamabad in 1983 claimed to have calculated the Angle of God using mathematical topology. He states the angle to be pi/N, where pi = 3.1415927... and N is not defined.
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Look at Figure 2. It contains a formula by which you can calculate the total sawab (reward) earned for namaz, as a function of the number of people praying alongside you. The author of this formula is Dr M. M. Qureshi, ...., ex-chairman of the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University, .......
[Poster's note: Figure not reproduced]
Per-Capita Spiritual Activity =
1.22 2.44 (+ or -) 0.3
( N ) {1 + ( N ) }**(-1)
( N0) { ( N0) }
Total Spiritual Activity =
2.22 2.44 (+ or -) 0.3
( N ) {1 + ( N ) }
( N0) { ( N0) }
[There is a response by Mr Bashiruddin Mahmood and the author's reply to the response]