Of the main causes that lead to obesity in those living in poverty, a poor diet is the most instrumental. In Loretta Shwartz-Nobel’s article “America’s Wandering Families”, Schwartz Nobel interviews two homeless mothers about their current impoverished situation and their eating habits. One homeless mother of one is quoted saying, “I bought a lot of rice and beans and Bisquick mix…bags of cereal…and powdered milk because it is cheaper and it lasts longer” (Schwartz-Nobel 257) while the other single parent describes how her meals consist of “potatoes and some macaroni and cheese, the cheep things to go with dinner” (260). These desperate mothers only eat such unhealthy and unbalanced meals because, due to their impoverished state, it is all they can afford. Diets such as these, which include high calories and fat, are the main causes of childhood obesity that, in most cases, is carried into adulthood.

Nobel is not alone in her discovery of poor quality in diet among those living in poverty. In Kristen Wiig Dammann and Chery Smith’s article on the research of obesity in low-income women, “Factors Affecting Low-Income Women’s Food Choices and the Perceived Impact of Dietary Intake and Socioeconomic Status on their Health and Weight”, Dammann and Smith state, “Research has suggested that because diets high in refined grains, added sugars, and added fats generally cost less than healthful diets composed of lean meats and fresh fruits,… the poorer segment of the population has greater exposure to an unhealthful diet” (Dammann and Smith 242). The authors believe that due to the poorer population’s lack of income, they are exposed to more unhealthy foods because much healthier foods, such as fruit and lean meats, are more expensive and unappealing to a consumer with a small budget. This is not to say that the impoverished have a blurred view of healthy and non-healthy foods. Dammann and Smith quote a subject of their research who says, “I can’t set myself aside and get all the right, proper, $3 tomatoes and broccoli and cauliflower…I don’t have the money for it, and yes I do know what I’m supposed to eat” (248). These struggling parents have a great understanding of the healthy foods that they and their families need, but a problem that one family after another runs into is that they cannot afford the healthy foods required for a balanced diet. This leads to the parents as well as the children to become overweight or even obese.

One could easily assume that these low-income or homeless overweight families are not trying hard enough to handle their problems, that it is not the food that is the problem but the lifestyle of which these Americans live. In the article “The Wages of Sin” by Francine Prose, Prose describes how studies of the overweight often misconstrue their lifestyles, causing false information to be spread. Prose goes on to say, “Such prejudice has been found to derive from the widely accepted notion that fat people are at fault, responsible for their weight and appearance, that they are…lacking in the equalities of self-denial and impulse control that our society values” (Prose 198). The majority of people believe that the overweight are at fault for their own unhealthy lifestyle and that all the blame should be placed on them. People that accuse with these beliefs are ignorant to the many different factors and issues that the poor and overweight must cope with on a daily basis.

Physical activity can be considered the best way to lose weight and stay healthy. When applied to the overweight living in poverty, living a physical active lifestyle is hard to accomplish. In their article, “Diet, nutrition and the prevention of excess weight gain and obesity”, authors Swinburn, Caterson, Seidell, and James believe, “Poorer neighborhoods tend to have fewer recreation amenities, be less safe, and have a higher concentration of fast food outlets” (Swinburn, Caterson, Seidell, and James 133). Those living in such poverty-stricken neighborhoods not only have nowhere to be physically active, but are also surrounded by nutrition lacking restaurants that only increase their obesity. In Russel Lopez and Patricia Hynes’s article “Obesity, Physical Activity, and the Urban Environment: Public Health Research Needs”, Lopez and Hynes believe the root of this problem is due to lack of awareness. When describing a research hypothesis on physical activity in suburban and urban settings, the authors explain, “the resultant findings were largely suburban in focus, [and]…research on overweight, physical activity and the urban built environment…of inner cities has yet to be done” (Lopez and Hynes 170). What is happening is that a lack of attention is being paid towards low income neighborhoods who are suffering due to their inability to be physically active. With the focus being centered on populations with a lacking obesity problem, the overweight living in low income, urban areas are suffering. In her article “Deprivation Amplification Revisited”, Sally Macintyre provides a different reason for a lack of recreational amenities. Macintyre states, “Differences between areas are solely due to differences in the personal characteristics of the residents” (Macintyre 33). Macintyre is implying that suburban residents and urban residents live their lifestyles because of who they are. She believes suburban residents are hard workers rewarded with a wealthy community while urban residents are lazy and ignorant, thus their economic status is just another symptom of their personality. What is not taken into consideration is to the countless families that are born into their current situation of wealth or poverty and how many have no choice but to live unhealthy lifestyles. This leads to the unfortunate impoverished to have no access to nice fitness facilities or grocery stores stocked with the healthiest foods. Instead they are left with fast food restaurants and corner stores that only sell chips and soda.

How does the development of civilization take place? Civilization has an intimate relationship with
science; they progress together. But when scientific progress surpasses civilization, the latter
meets its end. Take, for instance, the history of Egypt and Greece. As long as the scientific
progress of these two countries did not supersede civilization, civilization prospered very well in
both countries. But when science produced abundant enjoyments the civilization of both countries was
destroyed because science occupied a higher position than civilization. What is science? Science is
that which teaches the proper use of material things. If science gradually attains a high state of
development without a corresponding advancement in civilization, it only paves the way for destruction
instead of benefiting humanity. So, the study and practice of science should not be given a higher
place than civilization. In India, from the Tantric period to the Gupta period, civilization and
science progressed side by side, and science never enjoyed greater prestige than civilization. The
Gupta period was the golden era of India. After the end of the Gupta era, scientific progress was
overlooked; this resulted in degradation and downfall. In the Pathan period, there was neither the
development of civilization nor the progress of science, and as a result the progress of society was
impeded. For the all-round progress and development of human society, both civilization and science
have to be encouraged. Where there is development of civilization there is intellectual development as
well. So, for both civilization and science, intellectual knowledge is indispensable.

Spiritual or intuitional development is possible through the happy blending of science and civilization.
Even where there is no such blending, intuitional progress may be possible, but if science and
civilization is harmonized, intuitional progress is accelerated. Therefore, a man of wisdom should
progress by blending these two. It is useless to think of intuitional progress without this harmony.

What is our duty today? We shall cultivate science, but we must pay equal attention to the development
of civilization. The progress of science today is greater than in the the days of old, but civilization
in those days was certainly of a higher order. In the present age, civilization is waning since science
is again supreme. But as developed as science is today, if civilization is again elevated, humans can
reach greater heights than ever.

–P. R. Sarkar (1921-1990) is the propounder of PROUT (The Progressive Utilization Theory). Considered a
“renaissance man” in his native India, Sarkar is a spiritual teacher, philosopher and the author of
more than 200 books on spirituality, economics, agriculture, biopsychology, linguistics, and more. In the
late 1960s, Sarkar established a large eco-village complex called Ananda Nagar in West Bengal, India.
Ananda Nagar features schools, colleges, alternative medical facilities, and organic farms that serves
the people in more than a dozen surrounding villages. He also established hundreds of neo-humanistic
schools and kindergartens, as well as the relief organization AMURT. During the 1980s, while living in
Calcutta, Sarkar composed 5018 songs, which today are popularized by well known Indian classical
musicians and singers.

Volume 9, No. 2, Summer 2002 [Exact date not known]

This postmodern moment perhaps captured the angst of the conference. This angst was a mixture of: (1) calls for more basic science and textbooks for students; science that better reflects the basic human needs of food, shelter, energy; and science that is self-sustaining and independent of external monies or models; (2) Big Western science that could develop new laser, informatic and nuclear technologies; and (3) science that better reflects the worldview of Islam.

Amidst all the calls for transformation, even by individuals who had been at the helm of the scientific establishment for the last twenty years, it was clear that science in Muslim nations, particularly Pakistan, had taken many wrong turns. Even the correct turns had turned out disastrously because of policy commitments towards Big Science. While nations like Malaysia focused on products that had commercial gain or ensured the reduction of the power of the feudal class, most Muslim nations remain committed to wars, both imaginary and real, with neighbours.

Instead of developing commercial science or local science that could meet basic needs and create better health conditions for women and children, nuclear strategies and Big Science were paramount. The costs for Muslim nations are now quite evident – a terrifying low literacy rate, low numbers of graduates and high malnutrition, to mention a few obvious indicators. The effects of colonialism, external and internal, seem to remain, as do pre-Islamic dynastic battles.

In the midst of the utter failure of Big Science and Western science, there have been calls for Islamic science. Islamic science was originally meant to unleash creativity, to recover the traditional categories of tawheed (unity), ilm (knowledge) and khalifa (humans as trustees) of a science based on an alternative worldview, one that was not modernist in orientation, ie., framed around the values of the nation-state, reductionism, methodological individualism, materialism, and military expansionism.

However, Islamic science in Pakistan during the political terror of the 1980s came to mean science focused on legitimating itself through the categories of the Islamic ontological position. Thus, it was argued that relativity theory and big bang theory all had their roots in the Quran. This fusing of the eternal with the temporal is problematic for numerous reasons.

First, science is based on changing boundaries of knowledge. If evidence changes as it did from the Newtonian to the Quantum worldview, what then of the Quran?

In addition, the attempt at fusion wrongly concludes that knowledge should branch out of the Quran, not conclude in the Quran. Focused on ilm, the Islamic world view is an invitation to thought and reflection, but not when it is based on dying or dead modernist categories from nationalism. The fusion of Islamic ontology with Islamic science led to attempts to mathematize the inspirational, the sublime, leading to bad science and bad religion.

This is not to say that the Quran does not give clues of an alternative worldview more balanced in its ontology, one where reality, for example, might consist simultaneously of material and non-material factors.

The conference eventually did move forward, even if reviewers damned it without attending it or reviewing Conference papers. In addition to developing a critique of Western science and not acceding to an entirely cultural definition of Islamic science, the conference touched upon the politics of policy-making. Science was not seen merely as a desire to know, but as a system of thought. And it was seen as an enterprise, one where individual scientists have little control over the larger process of what they discover, do, and how they do it. In this sense, science is cultural and civilisational. A non-Western science, like a non-Western theory of development, would be less committed to the alliance between capital, nation and science and imagine instead a science that empowered individuals and solved local problems even as it tried to become universal.

Unfortunately, not enough was said about practical examples of an alternative science. Instead the critique of the West was done not only against the backdrop of “Best Western” but against the history of Muslim glories. One participant even argued that science can be done only by believers, with non-Muslims unable to conduct true science.

Fortunately for most, Islam was a moral space, a pluralistic and tolerant one that provided a defense against modernity. But this moral space is constantly under threat as instrumental rationality leads to Muslim money going not for Third World local development but to speculative markets. It is this form of rationality that does not allow for the creation of a true community.

The West has thus become ubiquitous; Muslims have internalized it, even going so far as to assume that science is value-free, acultural and apolitical. Revivalist or fundamentalist Islam thus is not a creative response to this modernist self but a reaction that merely reinforces the values of the West. The endeavour for true Islamic science, in contrast, would ask whether a different science can be created, with different research questions and different ways of working together. Islamic science, like Western science, however, would claim to be universal, with results repeatable.

While delegates debated the positions of Islamic science, Western science, Islamic ontology and the world political economy which frames who gets what, recent technologies promise to transform the ground of this debate.

For example, genetic engineering threatens to soon transform the private space of our individual genes to public space, where they can be bought and sold. Not only will plants and other resources be patented by the technologically advanced – so will our very selves.

Not only will the natural be under threat, the conventional view of Reality – considered stable for centuries – is being undermined as well. Virtual reality, epistemological deconstruction and cultural melange all challenge the view that there is an essential or permanent reality.

Computer developments will soon make it difficult to discern what is created and what is natural. The view of the world of Man as the centre of all things is equally contentious, with challenges from feminist and other perspectives that remind us that plants, animals and robots (technologies) have equal demand on our conceptual space.

Finally, sovereignty has become riddled with holes, and God, nation, and self all appear far more undefined than they have for centuries. Though how these transformations will play themselves out cannot be predicted, they do promise a postmodern world in which we will all be strangers. For Muslims and others committed to spiritual perspectives of reality and others who live and work on the margins of industrialism and neo-realism – the social movements, the indigenous peoples – the world is already, however, unfamiliar.

The post-decolonisation project has been to transform Western reality, or at least to create spaces of familiarity and recover historical categories silenced by modernization. This conflicts with national projects, which have been more focused on industrialising within the context of Western liberalism or socialism. In practice, Islamic science and elites continue to be guided by models of reality that promise more, larger, and grander – all at the expense of the cooperative, the communal and the local. Nor do we creatively appropriate foreign-origin new visions of science.

Islamic science, or non-Western science in general is about creating new universal and inclusive models. They are committed to ethical spaces and action in a world where difference is far more captivating than similarity. However, to survive – for postmodernism does not sufficiently challenge unequal power relations and center-periphery distinctions – an agreed global ethic must be posited.

Once the natural, the real, the human, and the sovereign have been made relative, what will the new guiding ethic be? Islamic science and other non-Western projects lay claim to this future, arguing that colonisation has allowed them to creatively internalize the West and thus create a critical traditionalism that can move the planet forward.

The conference began debate of these issues, and concluded by discussion of a specific science policy in Muslim nations. Clearly a transformation in science policy at the very top would be ideal, and include a commitment to science and technology, basic education, and literacy. Specifically this would mean scholarships, creating science cities (suggested by Anwar Nasim of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences) and targeting areas that Pakistan could excel in. This would not be the nuclear war program but would be solar and focus on softer energies systems wherein an Islamic science could flourish.

An Islamic science would also create a science consciousness – a mentality of inquiry, the search for knowledge (spiritual and physical) and using tradition to create a new future, not one that transfers the past to the present.

But this level of grandness is unlikely. Muslim nations remain in various vicious cycles of feudalism, anti-Indianism, and politics-as-staying-in-power rather than social responsiveness. Western science has fit perfectly into that paradigm. Still, finding ways for scientists to work together, increasing funding, initiating pilot projects, and other steps are all important. As Foucault reminded us, power is everywhere, even at small levels, and minor changes during periods of crisis can lead to massive transformations. As complexity and chaos theory asserts, we live in a world of many interactions and numerous loops, and by the appropriate pressure on some of these points a great deal is possible.

But merely calling for more of this or that will not do. Bureaucracies continue because they ossify languages that succeed, ensuring policies that fail. We might not have a solution to the angst of shrinking moral space, but certainly an alternative science and model of development cannot be any worse than the tragedy of the last few hundred years.