Science and
the Islamic World
By Dr. Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
Abbasid Caliph Al-Mamun (786-833), a noted poet
himself, was a great patron of the arts and sciences.
The House of Wisdom or the Institute of Higher
Learning that he founded more than twelve centuries
ago in Baghdad attracted a large number of linguists
and scholars from around the world who came in
quest of new knowledge.
The scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim, who worked
there made impressive contributions to science,
medicine, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy.
Numerous prized books and manuscripts were translated
from Greek, Sanskrit and Latin into Arabic, while
Arab researchers enriched the classic texts with
their own critical and erudite commentaries. Books,
such as the Aristotle’s Metaphysics and
Theology as well as Galen’s entire collection
of medical treatise were rendered into Arabic.
Many books were also translated from Arabic into
Latin and served to transmit the cumulative knowledge
of the East and ancient Greece to Europe.
The remarkable feature of the Institute was that,
in an era of religious orthodoxy and ecclesiastical
intolerance, it placed no restrictions on the
intellectual thought processes and permitted scholars
unprecedented freedom to pursue knowledge wherever
it took them. Royal and public patronage joined
hands to usher in the golden era of Islamic science
that was to last for many centuries.
In time, the majestic Islamic metropolises, Baghdad,
Cordoba and Damascus, became centers of excellence,
acquiring renown for their unrivalled universities
and advanced civilization. The writings of two
medieval Muslim physicians and philosophers, Ibn
Sena (Avicenna, 980-1037) in Central Asia and
Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198), in Cordoba are
often credited with providing the stimulation
that helped launch the European renaissance. Both
scholars in their treatises emphasized the importance
of logic and reason in understanding natural phenomena,
rooted in principles established by Aristotle
nearly a millennium earlier. Ibn Sena’s
celebrated work, The Cannon of Medicine, was translated
into Latin and disseminated throughout Europe
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and
was to serve as the standard medical text for
hundreds of years. Spanish-Muslim philosopher,
Ibn Rushd, in his dissertations argued that there
was no contradiction between logic and science
on the one hand and religion on the other, as
both had valid claims on rationality. Perhaps,
the last medieval Muslim scholar who made a major
contribution to human knowledge was the anthropologist
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1395) whose Muqaddamah is recognized
as the earliest, landmark study of the rise and
fall of human civilizations.
After flourishing for many centuries, the splendid
age of Islamic science seems to have ended around
the fifteenth century. For a long time, Muslims
had kept only sparse contacts with Europeans,
believing they had little to learn from them.
Momentous developments, such as the Renaissance,
Reformation and Industrial Revolution, seem to
have passed them by, leaving them behind in many
branches of knowledge, including science and technology.
In recent times, Muslim scientists working in
their own countries have not made any remarkable
discoveries. Out of a total of 787 Nobel Laureates
who received the prize since its inception over
a century ago, only nine have been Muslims; among
these only two, Ahmad Zewail of Egypt and Abdus
Salam of Pakistan, were recognized for their contributions
to science. However, neither of them worked in
his native country. The other seven were Nobel
Peace Prize winners or honored for their contributions
to literature.
The technology gap between the Muslim world and
the West is now attracting worldwide concern.
International agencies, such as the United Nations
and UNESCO, have set up various panels to examine
the root causes of this growing disparity. The
highly prestigious international science journal,
Nature, in an unprecedented move, devoted a whole
section of its November 2006 issue to the analysis
of the contemporary relationship between Islam
and science. The journal has relied for its conclusions
on the statistical database collected from 57
members of the organization of Islamic countries
(OIC), representing some 1.2 billion people. The
findings are both sobering and distressing. This
essay is based on the data drawn mostly from the
Nature article.
In reality, attempts to collect meaningful data
from all 52 Islamic countries proved fruitless.
Most did not have any documented information to
contribute. However, it was possible to draw upon
the official records from 22 countries. The average
annual spending on research and development (R&D)
in these countries is about 0.34 percent of their
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of a country’s
total economic output, compared to the global
average that is nearer to 2.4 percent. Turkey
and Malaysia are exceptions; their spending on
science relative to their income is highest among
the Muslim countries and is comparable to that
spent by some non-Muslim countries with equivalent
GDPs. Pakistan is grouped with the low-income
countries of the OIC, Bangladesh, Mauritania,
and Uganda, and its spending is estimated to be
about 0.3 percent of its GDP. However, the picture
has brightened recently for Pakistan as the Musharraf
Government has considerably boosted the spending
on science and is making a serious effort to stimulate
research.
The neglect of science becomes most glaring in
the case of oil-rich countries, such as Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and Brunei, which spend a lower
percentage of their income than even poor countries,
such as Pakistan, Sudan and Senegal. The reasons
are not hard to find; their priorities lie elsewhere.
Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria and
Oman spend about 7 percent of their GDP on military
hardware, an enormous sum, which has earned them
the dubious distinction of being the world’s
top spenders on armaments. In a felicitous move,
Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Iran, Morocco and Tunisia,
according to the Word Bank, have substantially
increased their spending on education.
The overall neglect of science is reflected in
the number of researchers per million people in
the Muslim world estimated during 1996-2003. Muslim
countries had some of the lowest ratios, an average
of 500 researchers per million people, as compared
to over 5,000 in Japan, Sweden and Finland. Only,
Jordan fared better, with 2,000 researchers. Not
surprising, with so few active scientists, the
scientific output of Muslim countries has been
miserly. The National Science Foundation estimated
that in 2003, 699,000 scientific articles were
published worldwide. The average number per million
population was 137; however, for OIC member countries
the number dropped to 13. Turkey again was an
exception, having achieved a remarkable publication
record of 6, 224 articles per year, with Iran
and Egypt coming next, with each publishing about
1,800 articles. Turkey’s spectacular success
is attributed to its modern and progressive educational
system, reformed after the 1923 revolution, emphasizing
teaching of science and mathematics.
The lack of emphasis on science and education
has influenced multiple facets of knowledge. According
to the Arab Human Development Report prepared
by a group of 26 Arab scholars, on the average,
only about 300 books are translated into Arabic
annually. Just one European country, Greece, translates
five-times more books than the entire Arab world.
It is estimated that since the reign of Caliph
Al Mamun, spanning a period of more than one thousand
years, a mere 100,000 books have been rendered
into Arabic from all sources,
A number of reasons have been advanced to explain
the decline and degeneration of science in the
Arab/Muslim world, provoking a lively debate among
scholars and intellectuals. Dr. Nader Fergany,
the lead author of the Arab Human Development
Report, and a contributor to Nature’s section
on Islamic science, believes that the primary
reason is not so much a deficit in investments
in research; the overarching deficiency is the
absence of democratic institutions in the Islamic
world and a tradition that smothers all dissent
and free expression, a vital prerequisite for
the generation of new, innovative ideas. Institutions
of learning, such as universities and colleges,
in the West serve as crucibles where new theories
are tested and vigorously debated. Arab/Muslim
countries do not encourage public expression of
dissent or deviation from established, long-embedded
convictions.
Many scholars believe that today’s global
culture and the advent of the information age
offer an unprecedented opportunity to the Islamic
world to catch up with the Western science by
acquiring knowledge so freely available through
the abundant sources of mass communication. There
are steps that can be taken readily. Dr. Fergany
recommends that an important first measure would
be the reversal of the brain drain. If sufficiently
powerful incentives are offered, they may lure
back some of the bright scientists working in
the West to their homelands. All these measures
need careful, long-term planning. Whether in today’s
political climate, when Muslims in the Arab Middle
East are engaged in fratricidal conflict of mutual
annihilation, anyone is particularly concerned
about the lack of scientific progress remains
an open question.
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