Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

Physics Today ^ | August 2007 | Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy

[amchugh]

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.

[amchugh]

Please try to ignore the sentence about climate change. The main reason I posted the article was for the discussion of scientific development in Islamic countries.

[The Great RJ]

It is ironic that a society that has a 6th century world view on women's rights, freedom of belief and religious tolerance as well as a hatred of Western civilization, they embrace 21st century Western technology for purposes of jihad.

Isn't there a fatwah someplace that denounces using the Internet? For example, Hitler's atomic weapons program was hindered by the fact that most of the best nuclear physicists were Jewish and he would not tolerate "Jewish" science in Germany.

[MrB]

discussion of scientific development in Islamic countries

They've discovered fire, and the other three elements earth, air, and water as well.

Pretty soon they'll invent the (finger quotes)"wheel".

[LiteKeeper]

read and comment on this later - I do have some thoughts on this subject.

[SIRTRIS]

Islam is both utterly incompatible with modernity and incapable of being reformed. Islam is against creation! also, islam means submission to something already created and never to be changed.

[amchugh]

Fundamentalist Islam may be incompatible with science (arguably fundamentalist Christianity is as well), but there is a history of scientific discovery in Islamic cultures in the 10th through 14th centuries, especially in math and optics. What changed?

[SIRTRIS]

"...history of scientific discovery in Islamic cultures" oh geee, Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. They encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization. Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini). This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the "foreign" culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab "accomplishments" ! You ask what's changed... islam has not hence Muslim's continue their expropriated your math dogma well, the fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see History of Babylonian Mathematics, Neugebauer).

[amchugh]

So you are saying this wikipedia article on the invention of calculus is BS? I'm no math historian so I'm not going to argue the point if you make the claim.

[SIRTRIS]

Geee, did you check the source in detail that I posted first? Secondly, “always look up stream”, Edwards Deming quote . The Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called “Golden Age of Islam” came to an end (about 850 A.D.). Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see Nestorian Influence on Islam and Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World). Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards.