Science
The
future of science in the Islamic world
By Sohail Inayatullah
At
a recent OIC/Comstech (Standing Committee on Science and Technology)
meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan on Science in the Islamic Polity in the
next century, speakers delivered tirades against the West - while standing
on a podium with the words "Best Western" (referring to Best
Western Motels) boldly present.
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.
