Posted on 01/15/2016 1:35:18 PM PST by nickcarraway
The Muslim world’s past contributions to science and education were extraordinary. The Islamic “golden age,†during which scholarship and learning flourished across the Muslim world, lasted many centuries, and included the establishment of the world’s first universities. Today, however, Muslim-majority countries lag well behind the rest of the world in terms of education and research. This must change if the region is to provide modern jobs and better lives to its booming population and keep up with global development.
As it stands, only one university from the Muslim world — Turkey’s Middle East Technical University — makes the top 100 in an international ranking, and only a dozen or so can be found in the top 400 in various other lists. While there are no international standardized tests in science and math at the university level, fourth-, eighth-, and tenth-grade students in the Muslim world test below the global average in these subjects, according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Program for International Student Assessment. And the gap with students elsewhere is widening.
Moreover, research output — as measured by publications and citations in international journals, as well as patents — is disproportionately low compared to population and financial capabilities. Muslim countries spend, on average, only about 0.5 percent of their GDP on research and development, compared to the global average of 1.78 percent of GDP and the OECD average of above 2 percent. The number of people working in science fields in the Muslim world is also well below the global average.
Eighteen months ago, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan task force of international experts — convened by the Muslim World Science Initiative and the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology, and coordinated by me — set out to explore the sorry state of science in the Muslim world and determine how universities could help to improve the situation. A better understanding of the various issues and possible remedies could enable science to flourish again in the Muslim world, with far-reaching benefits for its economies and societies.
Our review of the state of science at universities in the Muslim world took into account not just budgets and research, but also issues like the status of women in science studies and careers. Moreover, we conducted a thorough review — the first of its kind — of how science is taught at universities in the Muslim world, including pedagogical methods, textbooks, language of instruction, censorship of “controversial†topics (such as the theory of evolution), and the role of religion in science classes.
In a just-released report, the task force concludes that, though the overall state of science in the Muslim world remains poor, much can be done to improve it effectively and efficiently. The task force offers specific recommendations for academic institutions, national policymaking bodies, and other stakeholders, such as science academies, industry associations, and civil-society organizations.
For academic institutions, one major goal should be to build students’ capacity for creative thinking and critical inquiry. To this end, the task force recommends broadening the education of science-focused students to include humanities, social sciences, languages, and communication. At the same time, it calls for the adoption of internationally tried and true teaching methods, particularly “inquiry-based†and “active-learning†approaches. Of course, such a shift would require professors to receive training in these methods.
Professors should also be encouraged to dedicate themselves to writing textbooks and conducting science outreach, not just publishing more papers. This recommendation may be surprising, given the Muslim world’s low research productivity. But the reality is that such efforts will produce more real-world benefits than a single-minded focus on publication, which can inadvertently encourage plagiarism and junk science. The task force has recommended that national policymaking bodies grant universities more space to innovate (especially in curricula) and evolve (in research programs and collaborations), each in its own way, according to its strengths and weaknesses. And it has called on all institutions to embrace meritocracy and shun gimmicks likes paying for “collaborations†to boost publications. A quick rankings boost is never worth the risk of reputational damage in the longer term.
These steps require a bottom-up program of change. That is why the task force has now put out an open call for universities across the Muslim world to join a voluntary Network of Excellence of Universities for Science (NEXUS). Overseen by the task force, this self-selected peer group — comprising university administrators and faculty who recognize that change must start from within — will implement the steps that the task force has devised.
The hope is that once the first group of universities’ efforts begin to bear fruit, more institutions will join. The resulting momentum will create pressure for ministries, regulators, and other policymaking bodies — which may be the most resistant to change — to take complementary steps. — Nidhal Guessoum is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. ©Project Syndicate
Exactly like liberals. No way they can lift their constituents up so they try to make everyone else as miserable as their lemmings.
That’s just so much more fay-er.
Big Mo and his savages raided Persia, Turkic countries, India, and Christian lands.
They looted anything they could take back to Arabia. They kidnapped and enslaved all they did not slaughter. That included the intellects, who they pressed into slavery.
That’s your “golden” age
Actually, this “golden age” started before the invention of islam and declined as islam invaded and destroyed countries and civilizations. There is nothing golden about barbarism.
Revisionism Non-sense!?! Euclid created geometry and other Greeks created trigonometry and calculus. Babylonian and Greek algebra preceded the Arabs.
Islamic scientific and cultural contributions are certainly a long time past. About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for and from dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as People of the Book became hazardous. Concurrently, men of Saladin’s character, who Dante placed in the highest level of purgatory, disappeared from prominence. The Sufism of Saladin was guided into a form of Unitarianism and no longer stressed an individual relationship with God that could have not only directed followers to the true living God, but could have exalted individuals in society. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Someone else would have to prove causation, but such simultaneous extinctions do provide compelling evidence to me of Islam becoming a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
I’m afraid it’s been a long time since I did the research, including reading a lot of early books, Church Fathers, philosophers, and others, but the basic difference between God and Allah (apart from the Trinity and the Incarnation of Jesus) is that the Christian God is a God of rationality, whereas Allah is completely arbitrary.
God’s rationality is more than we can fully understand, but we can work on it. Allah—not.
The difference between YWHW and the false god of Islam is the difference between righteousness and evil. God has revealed Himself as holiness, loving, merciful, forgiving, eternal, willing to have personal relationships with his creation. He is not a being who needs to be appeased; that has been done through the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is rational, having illustrated the concepts of mathematics and logic in His creation of the world.
The islamic idea is an arbitrary being, who although can be merciful, metes out this according to his whim; the receiver of it unknowning until it is after death. Their idea of their god is a distant being, aloof from his worshippers, being appeased only through rituals and works. One can never know if enough has been done to merit salvation and one can never do enough to worship that god fully.
Adonai and the islam god are two complete different concepts. One is true; islam is false.
Algebra and trigonometry are Indian, specifically aryan, constructs and were appropriated by the Egyptians long before the invention of islam. Just because something is arabic, or egyptian doesn’t make it islamic.
That statement has long been disproven ... the so-called "extraordinary Arab achievements" were lifted from others not Arabs or muslims. Their only claim to fame as it were is that they preserved the knowledge gained by non-muslim others. However, that preservation was only necessary because they were busily destroying everything that was not in the koran or contradicted it; just look to the JV, ISIS today, destroying ancient ruins just as the Varsity did.
There was nothing "submerged" - that's just silly. The only accredited invention attributed to a muslim was by a Palestinian - using a cellphone to trigger a bomb.
Someone else would have to prove causation, but such simultaneous extinctions do provide compelling evidence to me of Islam becoming a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
"Prove causation?" Are you serious? You sound like you've had your nose buried in books for so long that you've forgotten to come up for air. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no original thoughts to begin with. Any ideas attributed to them are simply taqyyia. They got everything from someone else or elsewhere and took credit for it. Next you'll be trotting out that old canard of muslims inventing the zero.
PS: when responding please use paragraphs, thank you.
Pure and unadulterated taqyyia. All of which was not created but preserved. All of which came from Persian (Farsi) and Hindu thought thousands of years old.
The Library burning is attributed to Julius Caesar during the Alexandrine War which accidentally started the fire. The library was partially rebuilt or had an annex that was preserved and that could have been burned hundreds of years later by the muslim hordes, but even that is likely a 12th century fabrication.
Muslims only preserved but neither invented nor borrowed. They used what was useful (only that which the koran sanctioned) and destroyed the rest; which included classical western civilization and classical Christianity.
Muzzies never invented anything, never discovered anything worthwhile but stole every last bit of knowledge they purport as theirs. Another short version.
Not quite. Some ancient Greeks may have utilized some ideas or principles that foreshadowed calculus, true, but an actual rigorous and systematic theory of differential/integral calculus wasn't created until Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz did so independently of each other in the 17th century.
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