By MARY-JANE DEEB
The keynote address by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, at the Library's recent symposium on "Islam, Science and Cultural Values," focused on clearing up a number of misconceptions. Nasr argued in his presentation, titled "Islamic Critique of Modern Sciences—Problems and Challenges," that there is a confusion between science and technology: one is abstract or pure science, while the other is practical or applied science. In the Muslim world today, governments encourage the development of technological training at the expense of scientific education, he said.
Nasr also criticized Western views about the acquisition of knowledge, which emphasizes science over all other ways of "knowing." He said that in Islam all reality is part of the Divine and therefore cannot be understood separately from it; and he criticized Western views of agnosticism and skepticism.
The October symposium was co-sponsored by the Library's African and Middle Eastern Division and its John W. Kluge Center, with the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding of Georgetown University, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion program.
The first panel included George Saliba, professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University; Osman Bakar, holder of the Malaysia Chair of Islam in South East Asia at Georgetown University; and Mustanir Mir, director of Islamic Studies at Youngstown State University. They discussed the development of scientific thought in the Muslim world since the beginning of Islam.
Saliba argued that Islam synthesized and built upon the scientific knowledge of two great civilizations: ancient Greece and Ptolemaic Egypt, and Byzantium. He discussed examples of the scientific work carried out by Arab and Muslim scholars in the 9th and 10th centuries in the fields of mathematics and astronomy in Abbasid Baghdad.
Baqar raised different questions altogether, including whether one could speak of Islamic science at all. He argued that science is not value-free and does not function in a vacuum, but that it is culturally determined. What is studied and why it is studied is often a function of considerations other than simply the search for knowledge. For example, he noted that vaccines were developed in response to epidemics, and the space program had political as well as scientific goals. Consequently, one could maintain that the considerations that determine which scientific project would get priority in terms of funding, training or staffing might be different in Muslim countries than in the West, and, therefore, shape the scientific pursuit of knowledge in different ways.
As discussant on this panel, Mir maintained that the development of science and its decline in Muslim societies are related to cultural factors. When a society declines socially, economically and politically, then the pursuit of scientific research and education is no longer a priority.
Participants in the second panel were Ahmad Dalal, chair and professor of Arabic Language, Literature and Linguistics at Georgetown University; Ebrahim Moosa, a research professor of religion at Duke University; and Ibrahim Kalin, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, who acted as discussant.
Dalal argued that the Manichean division between Islam and science is an artificial one. He maintained that the Quran does not address scientific matters as such. While it accepts the pursuit of knowledge, it focuses on matters of faith and man's behavior in this world. If one wants to search for what Islam has to say about science, then it should be in the interpretation of the Quran rather than in the Quran itself.
Moosa looked at the mediatory role of the men of religion, the 'ulama', who interpreted what was 'scientifically' acceptable and what was not. He discussed how language shaped the way science was understood in the Muslim world. And he argued that 'Western' science often had colonial 'markings,' which meant that local political resistance led in some cases to resistance to all forms of knowledge imparted by the colonial power.
The last panel looked at the future of science in the Muslim world. The speakers were Syed Nomanul Haq, a professor of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies in the department of history of art at the University of Pennsylvania; and Karim Ahmed, program director at the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Georgetown University. John Boright, the executive director of the Office of International Affairs of the National Academy of Sciences, was the chair and discussant on the panel.
The lack of a vibrant tradition of liberal arts at the universities in the Muslim world, according to Haq, has had a corrosive effect on the development of scientific thinking. He argued that universities and institutions of higher learning are training people in the applied sciences, who become technicians while believing themselves to be scientists. That, he said, leads to a culture of arrogance, in which technicians believe they have an answer to every problem faced by society. Haq said that this state of affairs is leading to a reduction of knowledge; and like the keynote speaker, he insisted that technology is not science and that the confusion of the two has led to the decline of real scientific research and development in the Muslim world. He maintained that if Muslim leaders were serious about scientific education they should get their people "to write poetry and compose music"—because it is only this kind of abstract thinking that can lead to the pursuit of real scientific knowledge.
Karim Ahmed concluded the symposium by stating that great discoveries in science are often made by the dominant political powers. And, reflecting on something that George Saliba had said earlier, he noted that scientific discovery is often a response to the needs of "empire." The greatest contributions that Muslims made to science was when they were the leaders of a powerful empire, especially between the 9th and 12th centuries.
The fear expressed by some Muslims today, according to Ahmed, is not so much about science per se as it is about the Western perspective on science, which separates that which is 'scientific' from that which is based on faith and religion. This duality is unacceptable in Islam, because the Creator and His creation cannot be separate entities. Ahmed, however, expressed the hope that intellectual discussions such as this one at the Library of Congress would help address more creatively the relationship between Islam and science.
Mary-Jane Deeb is an Arab world area specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.