Muslim-Science.Com

Welcome to the home of Muslim Scientists, Technologists, Innovators, and Entrepreneurs’ Network. Muslim-Science.Com is designed a platform for a dialogue among Muslims and between Muslims and other communities about the state of science and technology in the Muslim World and the influence of Muslim faith on the former.

Commentaries on the malaise that affects science and technology in Muslim countries have often attributed the blame for this lackluster 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 and anything in between does 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) and 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 highly simplistic explanations is that they are often highly theoretical and conjectural in nature with little or no empirical or historical 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. Yet, these opinions are often taken as “truth” and an article of faith by a large number of different stakeholders, not the least important of which are Western policy-makers and the media. 

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 Muslim World is based on solid evidence rather than unproven theories or conjectures. The world’s scientific community owes this to itself.

In addition to trying to bring empirical rigor–or at the very least highlight the lack of it–there is also a dire need to engage in a broader philosophical debate about Islam and Science in a manner that acknowledges the relative influences of a host of social, cultural, political, and economic factors alongside the that of the true character of Islam’s belief system on the enterprise of science and technology in the Muslim World.

A serious, honest, systematic, and rigorous debate on this issues is definitely warranted. Without endoring any particular viewpoint (unless clearly specified), Muslim-Science.com will hopefully provide the necessary space to carry out this debate in a more rigorous and systematic manner.