The religious state of Islamic science

Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim lands remains stuck in the past -- and why the Golden Age of Mesopotamia wasn't so golden after all.

By Steve Paulson

Read more: Books, Islam, Books Features, Atoms and Eden

Aug. 13, 2007 |

In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.

This story illustrates the obstacles that face scientists in Muslim countries. While it's always risky to draw generalizations about Islam, even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.

What's so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During Europe's Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?

Taner Edis, the author of "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam," is in a unique position to examine these questions. He grew up in Turkey, the son of a Turkish father and an American mother, and now teaches physics at Truman State University in Missouri. Though he comes from a Muslim country, his family wasn't religious. Today, Edis calls himself an "Enlightenment rationalist." "I am a bit of a physics chauvinist," he writes in his book. "I think that according to the best of our current knowledge, our world is an entirely natural, physical place that does not depend on any supernatural powers."

Edis didn't move to the United States until he was 20, so I was surprised to discover that he has no trace of a foreign accent. It turns out English was his first language; only later did he pick up Turkish on the streets. Edis often travels back to Turkey, where he's been watching, with a mixture of fascination and alarm, the sophisticated creationist movement that sprang up in Turkey and is now spreading throughout the Muslim world. I talked with Edis about the difficulties of reconciling science with Islam and the quest for an "Islamic science."

How would you assess the state of scientific knowledge in the Islamic world?

Dismal. Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming from Muslim lands.

But Islamic countries seem to be very open to using modern technology. Are you saying that's different from doing original scientific research?

Yes, it's important to distinguish between basic science in, say, physics or biology, and more technology-oriented work. Muslims have been trying to catch up to Western countries for the past couple of centuries. Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the contribution to scientific research is much lower.

I suppose they could just import the science that's developed in the West. Is this really a big problem?

Falling further behind in something like condensed matter physics means that you'll have a harder time adapting technologies that are going to be based on this new knowledge of physics. And you're excluding Muslims from the creation of new technologies. It permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life.

If you're a Muslim and you're worried about the military weakness of Muslim countries compared to Western imperialist powers, you're going to see that today's warfare depends a lot on high-tech developments. If you're worried about the Muslim world falling under the thumb of economically advanced Western powers, well, the modern economy depends on technology and science. This is not a controversial statement in the Muslim world. Even the most conservative Muslim realizes that the Islamic world is at a severe disadvantage right now in science and technology. The West has done a much better job. And somehow, Muslims are going to have to do better.

Is there outright hostility to science in Muslim countries?

Not at all. In fact, you'll typically find that, at least superficially, they are very positive about science. Even many devout Muslim apologists say Islam is supposed to be a scientific religion -- a religion that supports science down to the last detail. But this notion of a science-positive Islam is often combined with ignorance about the details of science and an openness to some deeply pseudoscientific ideas.

Yet there was a time, from the 9th through the 12th centuries, when Islam was arguably the center of the scientific world.

Very much so. If you're talking about the proto-scientific thought that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action was taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a land of barbarians -- intellectually, totally negligible. In fact, Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn't just preserve it. But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science. What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the scientific revolution, that took place in Europe.

Today, it's something of an impediment for the Muslim world to continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to obscure some very important differences between modern science and medieval thinking. They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in Europe, but in almost an occult sense.

But those things were also mixed together in Europe's scientific revolution several centuries later. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy and astrology.

Indeed. I often say that all I learned about alchemy I learned from reading Isaac Newton. But in Europe, you had a three-way interplay between science, orthodox religion and more occult religious alternatives. You could have interesting alliances. These end up being separated through historical accident -- I don't see anything special about Western Christianity that sets it apart from Islam -- and they go their separate ways. This type of separation never really happened in the Muslim Middle East.

Many historians would disagree with your assessment that what Muslim scholars did during the Golden Age wasn't real science. They point to major discoveries in mathematics, physics and chemistry. And they say later European discoveries owe a direct debt to Muslim scientists. For instance, didn't Copernicus use the mathematical work of Iranian astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system?

I don't disagree with any of this. Muslims inherited the precursors of science developed in antiquity and developed this much further. Still, I have to emphasize how such ancient and medieval ways of thinking about nature are different than what we understand as modern science. Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern science.

It's hard to avoid comparisons between Islam and Christianity. For centuries, the Christian church had as much control over European culture as Islamic thinkers did over Muslim cultures. And yet science flourished in Europe, starting especially in the 1600s. Why did the scientific revolution happen in Christian Europe and not in the Islamic world?

That's a very big question. There is no answer that I can give you that would command a consensus of historians of science. My perception is that a number of factors came together so that scientific institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to.

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