Islam and Scientific Fundamentalism

[Article first appeared in the June 22, 1993 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), Vol 10 (No. 3), pg. 61.]

A crisis of knowledge of immense proportions overwhelms the contemporary Muslim civilization: The erstwhile "Civilization of the Book" is humbled today under the intellectual thatch of the West. This is an indictment made, paradoxically, in good faith!

Faith, and not science, was the quintessence of the nascent Muslim civilization. The inspiration for the grand synthesis of the seventh century was embodied in the very first command of the Quran: Read (iqra). For the next five centuries this and some eight hundred Quranic exhortations on knowledge (ilm) remained the prime movers behind the triumph of the Muslim intellect. Certainly, the dichotomy of Revelation and reason which, to the arch secularist Ernest Renan, was "the heaviest chain that humanity has ever borne,"
had vanished.

On the contrary, the creative Muslim impulse spread its liberating influence far and wide: It fueled the engine of the European Renaissance. Spain, the then Muslim land closest to mainland Europe, became the bedrock of large-scale knowledge transfer as opposed to today's controversial and shallow-by-content technology transfer.

The floodgates of knowledge unlocked in Muslim Spain left their lasting imprints on every conceivable domain of the Western society. Even the Christian Scholastic Theology was not immune from this cognitive seduction. Indeed, no palpable synthesis was possible without the 13th century rediscovery of Muslim Aristotelian scholarship, as exemplified by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Ironically, coming on the eve of the Columbian triumph, Marilyn Waldman's summation on the Muslims in Spain in The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia is instructive of the past glory:

"Even in defeat, Muslim culture continued to exert its influence, as in Charles V's Renaissance palace in the Alhambra and the cathedral in the middle of the Great Mosque at Cordoba. Muslim culture, as absorbed by Spanish Christians, also indirectly influenced the New World in the form of family honor codes, home design, and the plateresque style of architecture. Romance and Spanish have been filled with Arabic loanwords, be they chemical, culinary, agricultural, technological, social, or scientific. Muslims introduced new crops, such as sugar cane, rice, cotton, and a number of fruits. Their wind-tower technology still heats and cools some Spanish homes, and their irrigation technologies still water some Spanish fields."

Coincidentally, for a Muslim witnessing the celebration of the Columbian myth while writing from a Muslim land (Malay Peninsula) that once posed a challenge to the expansionary aims of the Spanish explorers, history seems to have come full circle "between the geographical extremities of Islamic power."

Given the historical context, and contrary to Francis Fukuyama's assertion, across vast stretches of the Muslim lands neither has history come to an end nor has the last man (or, for that matter, woman) made an appearance. The heroic image of science that unleashed in the West a relentless quest for domination and control of nature never took root in the Muslim psyche. If not for a nostalgic voyage but for the call of justice, it is imperative that Muslim cognitive evolution (and devolution) be examined in an historical perspective.

The historicity of our discourse is important, due mainly to the diametrically opposite Islamic and Western claims to epistemology, or the grounds of knowledge. For Islam, the spiritual and the temporal are the two sides of the same coin. Little wonder, no Muslim "Pope" (there is no ordained clergy in Islam) ever found an occasion to tender an apology for Galileo!

The concept of immanent unicity (tawhid) - which rightly has its Western and Muslim critics because of the Muslim failure in formulating intellectually and socially viable political and power arrangements - is at the heart of Muslim epistemology as well. In theory, and to some extent practice, while religion and science are two different epistemic categories in the Western mind, they are, in the Muslim eye, parts of a continuum complementing each other.

The professed claim of Western science is that of doubt. Yet, the tyranny of the scientific method ossifies the same doubt into a "faith" or a truth-claim. The postmodernist rejection of truth as an Enlightenment value goes beyond that and equates it with a power claim. Conversely, faith constitutes the genesis of quest for knowledge in Islam!

In this respect, those who debate the issues of religion and science without regard to the essential nature of Islamic epistemology are likely to expose their naivete. Our narrative on the Spanish Muslim science notwithstanding, the acculturation of science in other Muslim lands - the accomplishment by the 14th century Syrian astronomer Iba ash-Shatir is a case in point - defies the proclaimed rancor between religion and science. Similarly, disputations and discourses between the "fatalistic" Ash'arites and the "rationalist" Mu'tazilites give credence to Muslim intellectual vibrancy.

Back to the present. Muslims today are at the receiving end of Western domination. As an Ummah (the global Muslim community), they are living through the darkest hour of their history - the genocide in Bosnia, dispossession in Palestine, brutality in Kashmir, denial of freedom in the land of Moros. This reminds us of an akin term, Moors, the Spanish pejorative for Muslims, abject poverty in Muslim Africa, and political repression across Muslim lands (from Algiers to Baghdad to Cairo).

Whether these are a function of the colonial past or a systematic Western exploitation of the Other in the Muslim world is subject to differing interpretations. Without acquiescing to the vagaries of postmodernism on political power, it is the crisis of knowledge that has thrown the Ummah into an abyss. No exotic claims about alien intervention can absolve Muslims of their intellectual docility.

The confusion in today's Muslim world about epistemological intricacies of religion and science is evident at different levels. First there are those who, oblivious of the internal critique of Western science - inclusive of anti-reductionism and feminist radicalism - cling to the alleged value neutrality of knowledge generation. For them, a paradigm shift is yet to be born.

We have, for instance, little hesitation in attending to the call of the first Pakistani Nobel Laureate physicist Muhammad Abdus Salam for fortifying Muslim capabilities in science and technology. But, somehow, the psychedelic images of elementary particles bouncing through the Superconducting Supercollider seem to erect for him new boundaries between religion and science. While he relentlessly pursues the cause of science and technology, he stops short of reconciling his professed Islamic concept of knowledge with modern science and technology. This in spite of his Nobel colleague Steven Weinberg's extravagant claim that physics can act as a moral and cultural force! An exorcism, unified theory style? Is it any different from the affirmed religious orthodoxy?

Second, there are those who keep no secret of the loss of their intellectual identity in applying a reverse logic to the Quran. For them, the normative Book of Guidance is suddenly transformed into a handbook of science and technology. In their zeal to "prove" the eternal truth of the Quran they are light years ahead of the book-burning, book-bashing Creationists of the Southern Baptist United States.

According to their debased ingenuity we are delivered from the burden of studying hard-core science and technology, for all is given in the Quran. From the mysteries of biological reproduction to the morphology of mountains to the nature of intergalactic realm, there is nothing for which they do not have a one-to-one Quranic equivalent. Furthermore, one of the Pakistani scientists (indeed, this imaginative power is not a monopoly of the so-called orthodox) would be happy to enlighten you on how to calculate per-capita spiritual activity. Anyone?

A variation on the same theme but purportedly salvaging the Muslim intellect from suffocating in the secularist void is the so-called Islamization of Knowledge. In its conceptual allegiance to Western science and technology it is no different from that of Muhammad Abdus Salam: It takes the value neutrality of knowledge as a monolith and spins an aura of Islamic terms and ideas around the corpus of substantive knowledge. Lest there be an accusation of harsh criticism, we should say their success in elucidating some aspects of Islamic economics deserves commendation. At the same time it serves to expose internal contradictions of the very idea by showing that any Islamization must address the crucial issue of values.