Science and the Islamic world

 

Science and the Islamic world

Dr. Syed Amir

Abbasid Caliph, AI-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, he founded more than twelve centuries ago in Baghdad which attracted a large number of linguists and scholars from around the world who came in quest of new knowledge.

 

The scholars, Muslims, and non-Muslims, who worked there made impressive contributions to science, medicines, 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 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, become centers of excellence, acquiring renown for their unrivalled universities and advanced civilization. The writings of two medieval Muslim physicians and philosophers, Ibn Sina (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 Sina's celebrated work, The Canon 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) who's MUQADDAMAH is recognized as the earliest, landmark of the rise and fall of human civilizations.

 

After flourishing for many centuries, the splendid age of Islamic sciences 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 Noble 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 honoured 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 conclusion on the statistical database collected from 57 members of the organization of Islamic countries (QIC), 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 any 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. Much of the available information, unfortunately, paints a dismal picture. 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 GDRs. 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 present government has considerably boosted the spending on science.

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 World Bank, have now 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 ratio, 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 surprisingly, with so few active scientists, the scientific output of Muslim countries has been miserable. The National Science Foundation in America estimated that in 2003,699,000 scientific articles were published worldwide. The average number per million population was 137; however, for QIC members 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 education system reformed after the 1923 revolution that emphasizes the 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 average, only about 300 books are translated into Arabic annually. Just one European country, Greece, translated five times more books than the entire Arab world. It is estimated that since the reign of Caliph AI-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 believe that the primary reason is not so much a deficit in investment in research, the overarching deficiency is the absence of democratic institutions in the Islamic world and a tradition that smoothers 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 the 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 western science by acquiring knowledge so freely available through the abundant sources of mass communication. There are other 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 that may lure back some of the bright scientists working in the West to their homelands. (Courtesy: DAWN)