Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Asking 'Islam's Quantum Question'

Can science and Islam be reconciled? A conversation with Nidhal Guessoum.

by Rod Dreher

Revolution is in the air throughout the Arab Muslim world. For some Muslims, hope for political change entails hope for cultural change. And for Algeria-born astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum, a professor of physics at the American University of Sharjah, the "Arab 1848," as some have called it, opens up the possibility that the Arab Muslim world can join the global scientific mainstream. His new book, Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science, explores the history of scientific thought in Islam, examines where Muslim intellectual culture went wrong, and offers a constructive way forward for science and religion among 1.6 billion of the world’s people. Guessoum recently spoke to BQO.

The United Nations has issued several Arab Human Development Reports over the past decade. They point out how much the Arab world lags in democracy, civil liberties, education, and economic progress. The UN documents are particularly hard on Arab societies for their "stagnation" in scientific research, pointing out, for example, that the number of scientists and engineers working in research and development in Arab countries is roughly one-third of the global average. Do you think that the recent and ongoing revolutions across the Arab world will be good for science?

All sectors of activity in the Arab society have suffered during these decades of autocratic rule, from politics and economics to culture, science, and human rights. In my view, that stagnation and continuous falling behind was due to three factors: dictatorship (denial of basic freedoms), corruption (financial and moral), and nepotism and cronyism.

The mediocrity of the Arab world’s performance in academic and scientific fields is well documented in various reports, some of which you have mentioned. To give just a few examples: out of 1,000 or so universities in the Arab world, only two or three are in world’s top 500 — and they are ranked between 400 and 500; while the Arab world’s population makes up about five percent of the world’s and its financial resources are much larger than that, only 1.1 percent of the world’s scientific production comes out of the Arab region; the number of frequently cited scientific papers is 43 per million people in the USA, 80 in Switzerland, and 38 in Israel; it is 0.02 in Egypt, 0.07 in Saudi Arabia, 0.01 in Algeria, and 0.53 in Kuwait.

One of the reasons for the mediocre state of research in the region is the very low budget allocated for science: the fraction of the GDP spent on scientific research is 0.2 percent on average in the Arab world (0.05 percent in Saudi Arabia), compared to a world average of 1.2 percent.

Another important reason is the absence of fair and objective standards and measures of quality. Too often, scientists are hailed and decorated by officials and make it to prominent positions of leadership and visibility when their research was never of any substantial value, while more meritorious researchers are denied any credit and are even pushed down, simply because they did not play by the (corrupt) system’s rules of the game.

Now can we expect serious improvements on this front from these democratic revolutions? I believe so. At least censorship will greatly diminish now, and arbitrary and capricious decisions will (hopefully) be replaced by objective and constructive ones, so that research will not be evaluated (for funding and for promotion) on personal grounds, but rather on meritocratic grounds, and with transparent procedures.

In "Islam’s Quantum Question," you relate a shocking story about a supposedly scholarly scientific conference held in Kuwait in 2006, in which presenters talked seriously about pseudo-scientific topics, such as Qur’anic ways to combat the evil eye. You decry this as nonsense, but say that this kind of religious-science hodgepodge is widely accepted in Islamic society, even among the educated elite. Why?

It is actually much worse than that. First, that conference was the eighth in a series, held every two years by the "International Commission on Scientific Signs in Qur’an and Sunna" (Sunna refers to Prophet Muhammad’s Tradition, i.e., statements and acts): there's an English website, alongside a huge Arabic website and others in eight additional languages. Secondly, the topics discussed are not just related to the evil eye, but how certain Qur’anic verses contain predictions on the laser, iron abundance on Earth, various facts of geology and physics, and a long list of topics systematically mixing scientific issues with acrobatic references to the scriptures. Even "training workshops" for "young scholars" are organized by such institutions, which receive generous funding from various governments. And, what is worse, many of the practitioners of this field are scientists and academics.

As astonishing as this may be, this is the biggest trend in the cultural landscape of the Muslim world nowadays! And few voices are countering this "theory."

Why and when did this phenomenon come to exist and become such a dominant cultural trend? That is explained in my book, but suffice it to say that both science and religious education have been hugely deficient in recent times in this region, combined with a feeling that "despite our temporary lag behind other nations, what we have (our religion and tradition) is truly special" — to the point of being well ahead of modern science in various predictions.

You write that many in the West either don’t know about or downplay the contributions to science and the scientific method made by early Muslim scholars and thinkers. Can you give some examples?

There are many such examples. One can simple pick most books on the history of science, or civilization, more generally, and see the few pages — if any — devoted to centuries of Muslim culture and the significant contributions made by Muslim scholars. How many people know that algebra was invented by Al-Khwarizmi, in the early 9th century, essentially from scratch? That the field of optics was revolutionized and launched on a correct basis by Ibn Al-Haytham, whose seminal book we celebrate the thousandth anniversary of this year? That Avicenna’s book on medicine was used in Europe well into the 17th and 18th centuries? I have heard countless lectures where a Western speaker essentially jumps from the Greek period to the Renaissance with barely a sentence or two mentioning the Arabs as having "preserved and transmitted" the great ancient heritage.

Why did the work done in this Golden Age of Islamic scholarship not continue to bear fruit?

This is a question which continues to be debated. Some attribute the decline of Islamic rational thought to internal religious factors, including the attacks by the more conservative scholars, particularly Al-Ghazzali’s critique of Islamic/Hellenistic philosophy. Others refer to external effects, such as the 13th century Mongol invasion, the break-up of the Islamic empire and its loss of economic dominance with the rise of Renaissance Europe, and the wave of European colonization in the 19th century. Others claim that philosophers continued to produce important works well into the 17th century — thinkers like Mulla Sadra, for example. Others attribute the intellectual decline to the inefficiency of the higher educational system, which created universities that did not allow for the strong transmission of rational thought and knowledge, but rather were much more suited to religious learning.

You write that the idea that science is a values-neutral intellectual enterprise is a myth. What are the metaphysical bases of mainstream science, and how do they differ from your idea of a viable Islamic approach to science?

In my book, I review various propositions and positions, particularly within contemporary Islamic culture. There is a variety of views on that issue, ranging from S. H. Nasr’s "Scientia Sacra" to Abdus Salam, the late Nobel Prize winner in Physics, who saw science as universal, objective, and essentially values-neutral. My position is a cross between Salam’s and that held by [Ziauddin] Sardar, who insists on the necessity to impose ethical principles on science.

Now, the idea that scientists work from a completely objective, neutral-mind perspective is indeed a myth. Scientists are human. They have their own beliefs and convictions, and they get influenced by them, consciously or unconsciously, at least in the way they interpret various findings and construct a worldview from the scientific results. The research methods are universal and the results must be checked and validated by the world’s scientific community, but the topics that one may choose to focus on, and the conclusions that one may draw from some findings are often subjective.

The West has gained enormously from the Scientific Revolution, but the power of religion in Western civilization has declined sharply. Is it wrong for a faithful Muslim to worry that if Islamic countries open themselves more fully to science, and the kind of intellectual liberty the practice of science requires, then Muslim civilization will see the same kind of decline in religion that the West has experienced?

I don’t quite agree that the Scientific Revolution is responsible for religion’s loss of dominance in the west. The secularization trend is much broader and deeper than the methodological naturalism imposed by modern science.

Having said this, I do agree that modern science and modernity more generally require a certain kind of intellectual liberty to address all kinds of topics without taboos or censorship, and conservative elements in society — particularly Muslim society — certainly will balk at that.

But as we have witnessed in the ongoing Arab revolutions, people do strive for freedom, and no matter how many constraints and red lines we impose, people and freedom will always triumph, sooner or later.

What do I say to a fellow Muslim who expresses concern about the future of faith in a society more open to science? First and foremost, I say: let us please study and understand science correctly — its content, its history, and its philosophy. I cannot stress how important it is to really understand the evolution and current practice of science and its debates. There is, I believe, a way to do real science while still preserving one’s tradition and identity, though not with a fundamentalist and static mindset. Science forces one to broaden his or her mind and evolve, and one must accept the possibility of evolution, even in one’s religious views. But that is — in my view — a plus, not a loss.

Why do you consider the widespread rejection of Darwinian evolution in the Islamic world such a critical touchstone for the future of science in Islamic civilization?

The theory of evolution is a classic case of what I noted above: a) being ready to conduct and/or understand science and its results on objective grounds; b) realizing that scientific findings are prone to various interpretations within different worldviews (materialistic conclusions vs. theistic interpretations of evolution); c) being willing to reshape one’s religious views to mesh with the scientific knowledge. The theory of evolution forces Muslims to check and reconsider their current approaches to both science and religion. In particular, literalistic interpretations of the scriptures are found to be untenable, at least on some, perhaps many, issues. And people must realize that they cannot just pick and choose on the scientific "menu" what to accept and what to reject — on the basis of some old transmitted views.

A Christian scientist I know said to me that he was once at a scientific conference in Europe, and a Muslim scientist whispered to him, "You and I are the only people in this room who believe in God." And it might have been true. On the other hand, the Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund has found in her survey of scientists that a surprising number of them do believe in God, though they tend to keep quiet about it. Clearly there is more common ground between religion and science than many fundamentalists (religious and scientific) wish to believe. Is there in this finding a base on which to build dialogue between science and religion both within civilizations, and between Islam and the West?

Such surveys have been conducted for many decades now, and they’ve always shown that while scientists have less faith or religiosity than the general public, there is still a substantial fraction of them — between one third and two thirds — who believe in God or practice a religion. There are some subtleties here, regarding the "God" that various people, including scientists, believe in, and the extent of their adherence to a given religion. So, no great surprise there. Likewise for the fact that in Western academia, believers tend to keep a low religious profile, at least to prevent the impression that one’s religious faith may affect one’s objectivity in teaching and research, as well as to prevent strong personal disputes.

In Muslim lands, the situation is very different. Secularists and neutrally non-religious academics are a very small minority — though, again, not as small as in the general population — and the pressure is on them to keep a low profile. And there is, in Muslim culture, a huge desire to find a proper relation between faith and reason, between religion and science. And this can definitely be an important platform of civilizational dialogue between Islam and the West, for two main reasons. First, a sophisticated line of research has been recently developed in the West in the field of "Religion and Science," which Muslims can benefit from. Second, Islamic culture has never seen any serious conflict between science and religion, and does not see religiosity in academia as anything to keep under wraps. Meetings, workshops, exchange programs, media appearances, and the like could constitute some of the ways by which such dialogues could be conducted.