By
Pervez Hoodbhoy
02 Jan 2021
EXCEPT for
some defiant holdouts, most Muslims have come to accept the printing press,
loudspeaker, weather forecasts, cameras and television, blood transfusions,
organ transplants, and in-vitro fertilisation. Earlier fears that technology
will destroy their faith are disappearing. Although religious extremists have
killed polio vaccine workers by the dozens, Pakistanis are likely to accept the
Covid vaccine more easily than Americans. This is progress.
The Salatcard product size in the palm of your hand. (Images via
Salatcard)
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Technology
for religious rituals is also becoming popular. For example, you may buy a
small gadget called the SalatCard which uses proximity sensors to count the
number of Rakats performed during prayers. Also available online is an
environmentally friendly Wazu (ablution) machine using visual sensors.
Responding to public complaints of muezzins with rasping voices or bad
pronunciations, Egypt’s government is carrying out an experimental airing in
113 mosques of Cairo where a computer will initiate the standardised Azan at
exact times. A few years ago multiple fatwas would have lambasted such
innovations. But not anymore.
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What of
science, the fount of technology? Consuming technology does not, of course,
resolve conflicts between science and religion. Nor does it necessarily mean
that science as a way of looking at the world is gaining ascendancy. The latter
motivated the 2020 Task Force Report on Culture of Science in the Islamic
World. Led by Prof Nidhal Guessoum (Sharjah) and Dr. Moneef Zou’bi (Jordan), with
input from Dr Athar Osama (Pakistan), their online survey gives some hints.
At one
level the results are encouraging. Their survey of 3,500 respondents, chosen
mostly from Arab countries and Pakistan, shows knowledge of basic scientific
facts as slightly better than in developed countries. The authors concede that
this surprising result is probably because relatively educated and
internet-savvy respondents were chosen. Still, one hopes that this is not too
inaccurate.
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But even if
true, knowing facts about science is unconnected with having a scientific
mindset. The difference is like that between a USB memory stick (where you dump
data) and a CPU chip (which is the decision-making brain of your laptop or
smartphone). The first is passive, relatively simple and cheap. The second is
active, extremely complex and costly.
Correspondingly,
the traditional mindset takes knowledge to be a corpus of eternal verities to
be acquired, stockpiled, disseminated, understood and applied but not modified
or transformed. The scientific mindset, on the other hand, involves ideas of
forming, testing and, if necessary, abandoning hypotheses if they don’t work.
Analytical reasoning and creativity is important, simple memorisation is not.
Going
through the report, it is unclear to me whether the questions asked — and the
answers received — have helped us understand whether Muslims are moving towards
a scientific worldview. Perhaps the organisers thought that asking difficult
questions upfront is too dangerous. But the strong emphasis they place upon
freedom, openness and diversity as a condition for nurturing science is
praiseworthy.
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Also Read: Islam, Science and the Muslim Predicament
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Here’s why
science — and developing a scientific mindset — is so difficult and alien.
Humans are never completely comfortable with science because it is not
commonsense. In our daily lives one sometimes has to struggle against science.
As children we learned that actually it’s the earth that moves and yet we still
speak of the sun rising and setting!
Another
example: heavier things fall faster, right? This is so obviously true that
nobody tested it until Galileo showed 400 years ago that this is wrong.
Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if the laws of physics and biology lined up with
our naïve intuition and religious beliefs? Or if Darwin was wrong and living
things didn’t evolve through random mutation? Unfortunately, science is
chock-full of awkward facts. Getting to the truth takes a lot of work. And so
you have to be very thorough and very curious.
Historically,
lack of curiosity is why Muslim civilisations were ultimately defeated. After
the Arab Golden Age petered out, the spirit of science also died. The
17th-century Ottoman sultans were rich enough to hire technologists from Europe
to build ships and cannons (there were no Chinese then) but they could not
produce their own experts from the ulema-dominated educational system. And when
the British East India Company brought inventions and products from an England
humming with new scientific ideas, the Mughals simply paid cash for them. They
never asked what makes the gadgets work or even how they could be duplicated.
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Also Read:
Science and Religion
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Without a
scientific culture, a country can only consume and trade. Pakistan functions as
a nation of shopkeepers, property dealers, managers, hoteliers, accountants,
bankers, soldiers, politicians and generals. There are even a few good poets
and writers. But there is no Pakistani Covid vaccine. With so few genuine
scientists and researchers it produces little new knowledge or products.
That 81
Pakistanis were recently ranked in the world’s top two per cent of scientists
by Stanford University turned out to be fake news. Stanford University was not
involved in this highly dubious ranking. This was confirmed to me over email
last week by Prof John Ioannidis of Stanford University. He, together with
three co-authors, had been cited as the source.
What will
it take to bring science back into Islam? The way may be similar to how music
and Islam — which in principle are incompatible — are handled in Muslim
countries today. It is perfectly usual for a Pakistani FM radio station that is
blaring out Lady Gaga’s songs to briefly pause, broadcast a pre-recorded azan
in all its dignified solemnity, and then resume with Beyoncé until the next
azan. Although the choice of music is quite abysmal, there is a clean
separation of the worldly from the divine.
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Separation
is the key! When Galileo famously said “the Bible teaches us how to go to
heaven, not how the heavens go”, he was arguing the domains of science and
belief do not overlap. This is how the West, China, and India developed modern
scientific cultures. Centuries earlier, Muslim scholars had readily absorbed
Greek learning while keeping their religious beliefs strictly personal. This
made possible major discoveries and inventions. Whether one likes it or not,
there is no other way to develop a culture of science.
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Pervez
Hoodbhoy is an Islamabad based physicist and writer.
Original
Headline: Muslims and technology
Souuce: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-science/muslim-scholars-absorbed-greek-learning/d/123957
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