Sept. 10, 2004

The Bombers and the Bombed--I

No one needs years of research to understand the devastating power of a B-52 bomber. It soars high in the skies, far high for anyone and anything to come close to it and drops its lethal weapons with deadly accuracy. Killing fields Iraq continue to witness its power.

How did the United States achieve this power? Why can’t anyone else and especially the Muslim world have a comparable technological development, not only the field of military technology but also in other areas? To understand this and similar dilemmas of the Muslim world, one must begin at the beginning: the fact that American technological advances rest upon the great transformation of Europe beginning with its Renaissance. A transformation that affected its economic, political, scientific and industrial institutions and that began in the late sixteenth century. By 1800, not only “all peoples had to adjust their governments to a modern European international political order, but also their economies,” as Marshall Hodgson formulated the issue in his classic work, “The Venture of Islam”.

But what was it that produced such a large-scale transformation in Europe during those centuries and why did not the Muslim world produce a matching response? This is, of course, the crux of the matter. This is where the imbalance originated. This is where the Muslim world sowed the seeds of our present bitter harvest.

Of course, those who deliver their sermons in the air conditioned auditoriums of some state building in Islamabad or Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur and those who write those rhetorical speeches which eventually become dusty files in OIC offices have no desire to investigate this and related questions; for them, these are merely theoretical questions. But this is precisely the domain which holds answers to the great dilemma that Muslims face today. This is where the bombers and the bombed differ; the rest is history, because Europe’s transformation and the accompanying power then acted like a bulldozer and literally razed all other cultures, political and economic systems to ground, producing a great deluge that swallowed, or at least tried to swallow, all other ways of life.

This great deluge produced a double time lag in the Muslim world for the perception of the coming calamity and in adjustments to the new realities of international power structures emerging through the transformation of Europe. In geographical regions which were not in direct contact with Europe, even the information about hundreds of new discoveries, techniques and ideas that were sprouting all over Europe was scarce, whereas in Muslim lands which had better access to the European scene, a self-assumed posture of superiority and a fatal devaluation of the new scientific, economic and political developments occurring in Europe prevented any quick response to the coming challenges.

And when the danger was perceived, it was never perceived in its totality, thereby creating the classic case of too little, too late. Even when corrective steps were taken, they were always inadequate because the full range of challenges was never perceived in its totality. This double time lag—with its first element being a delayed realization of the impending threat, and the second, an insufficient response to the threat—was a significant factor in Europe’s ability to establish its hegemony over the entire world and in its success in the colonization of the Muslim world. This is, however, only one aspect of the origin of dilemmas related to science and technology in the Muslim world.

The second aspect of this same dilemma is the emergence of a “catching up” syndrome. In other words, the double time lag produced a recipe for cure which was conceived in terms of a race in which all that the Muslim world needed to do was to catch up with Europe in science and technology, and all would be well. This formula, which became the rallying cry of Muslim reformers of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, is still churning speeches of the kind mentioned in the previous installment.

Most of those who hold power in the Muslim world suffer from a deeply entrenched inferiority complex produced by their alignment with the West; this alignment produces a perspective that views ailments of the Muslim world through the lenses cast in Western moulds and prescribes solutions which have the same taint. They even perceive history and historical change from the perspective of the West; producing a defeatist attitude and a materialistic view of progress in which science and technology are given centre-stage. Thus, for almost two centuries now, Muslims have been given this impression by their rulers that all that is needed for them to adjust to the changed times is to acquire more and more science and technology.

This senseless solution to a very complex civilisational problem ignores all basic questions related to the conditions which actually produce science and technology in the first place. A product of defeated minds, this clamour fails to investigate deeper civilizational processes that produced the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent technological developments in Europe; it merely sees the fruit, not the tree.

Two centuries of rhetoric is enough. It is time for Muslims to understand the real dilemmas produced by the scientific and technological advances in the West and rethink strategies and solutions. There is no reason to remain hostage to facile answers produced in drawing rooms by people who know nothing about processes which produce historical changes in a polity. Those who have been proclaiming that as soon as COMSTECH or any such body is given so many billions, they would produce wonders, are merely interested in the billions they want. Likewise, those who claim that as soon as such and such percentage of GNP is invested in science and technology, all ills of the Muslim world will be solved are either deceiving the Ummah or are simply not qualified to prescribe solutions to one of the greatest challenges faced by the Muslim world.

At any rate, let us understand with full clarity that issues related to science and technology will simply not go away by investing a certain percentage of GNP in science and technology; had this been the case, the most advanced instruments sitting in Saudi Arabia would have been producing science and technology more profusely than the dates of its trees. 

What, then, is the solution to various challenges posed to Muslims by modern science and technology? Without pretending to know the ultimate answer to this complex question, one can begin by drawing attention to the age-old maxim that before solutions can be prescribed, problem has to be understood in its totality. The first thing to understand is rather basic: modern science and technology have not grown in the West in isolation of other developments. Science as well as its offshoot (technology) are human endeavors that exist within a social, economic, political and cultural context. They are very much like parts of a huge body which function as a single unit. Unless we examine the whole body, we cannot understand its parts. We must, therefore, begin by understanding some aspects of the inter-relatedness of science and technology with the rest of the body.  This will, at least, take us out of the realm of facile solutions prescribed by Muslim reformers of the previous century and mindlessly followed by the contemporary holders of power and resources.

(To be concluded)