Launching Muslim-Science.Com
Today, I am formally launching Muslim-Science.Com as a platform to have a serious and rigorous conversation about Science, Technology, Innovation, and Enterpreneurship in the Muslim World. The motivation for doing this has come from both a internal (personal) and external levels. On the personal level, I have, of late, felt the need to aggregate my own writings on the subject under a single platform for easy accessibility and reference. On the external dimension, several recent commentaries on Islam and Science (most notably Nature’s 2006 Supplement, and those by Pervez Hoodbhoy and Ziauddin Sardar, to name only a couple) have made me accutely aware of the need to take on this discussion in a systematic manner. Today, hopefully, I will take the plunge into this very important debate raging not only across the Muslim world but also around the world. Hopefully Muslim-Science.Com will provide the space to carry out that debate.
In recent years, commentaries on the malaise that affects science, technology, and innovation in Muslim countries have often attributed the blame for this lacklustre performance on a host of cultural, religious and historical factors. One line of argumentation asserts that science and Islam are at odds with each other, that there is something inherently peculiar to Islam that restricts freedom of thought and creates bad scientists out of Muslims.
The prescription: Muslims should, at the very least, learn to separate their faith from science to move ahead. Another line of thought takes an opposite approach in that it argues that science flourished in the Islamic world when a truly Islamic society was at it peak and declined with the decline of the values that made up that society. The prescription: In order to revive science in the Islamic world, Muslims must revive Islam in its true form that once encouraged values of observation, critical thinking, and reasoning.
Yet, in an important way, these explanations do not incorporate certain very important elements that may explain the lack of scientific productivity in the Muslim world. They also do not explain the presence of islands of scientific and technological excellence amidst the same religio-cultural milieu (e.g. Pakistan’s HEJ Institute of Chemistry or Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology). They also does not explain the gap between the scientific productivity across institutions within the same country or across different Muslim countries. Finally, they do not explain the difference in scientific productivity between a vast majority of scientists and engineers in the Muslim world who maintain a strongly secular outlook to their everyday lives and professions and their counterparts in the West.
One of the most fundamental problems with these explanations is that they are often highly theoretical and conjectural in nature with little or no empirical evidence to support one way or the other. As a social scientist and a sociologist of science, I know that this is unacceptable and that the scientific community can (and must) do better.
Scholars and policy-makers of science and innovation in the developing world, in general, and the Islamic world, in particular, many of whom are practicing scientists would do themselves a great disservice if they don’t apply the same criteria to evaluate evidence on these critical issues that they use in their own scientific pursuits. It is time that science and innovation policy in the OIC countries be based on solid evidence rather than unproven theories. The world’s scientific community owes this to itself.
Muslim-Science.com will hopefully provide the necessary space to carry out this debate in a more rigorous and systematic manner.
admin @ September 30, 2007