Muslims, Science and Technology-I

After months of preparations we assembled in the auditorium of Pakistan’s National Library for the inaugural session of the “International Conference on Science in Islamic Polity in the 21^st Century”. It was March 1995. The Conference was organized by the Organization of Islamic Conference Standing Committee on Science and Technology (COMSTECH), established by the heads of states of the Muslim world in 1983 in the sacred city of Makkatul Mukarramah for fostering closer cooperation among member states in the fields of science and technology.

COMSTECH worked under the chairmanship of President of Pakistan who was going to address the opening session. There was, however, one problem: there were no more than one hundred persons in the hall built to accommodate one thousand and the staff of the President’s office considered it a personal insult to the President that he should come to such a forsaken place to deliver a speech. The organizers had issued over nine hundred invitations to university professors, scientists and scholars in various science and technology organizations. Every major newspaper had a center-fold special supplement on COMSTECH and the conference, announcements had been made on national radio and Television, but none of these measures could infuse enough interest in the science and technology sector of the country to produce a respectable audience. The problem was, however, resolved by an old hand at the presidency, and soon most of the seats were filled by clerks, errand boys, stenographers, typists and grade seventeen officers of various governmental departments.

Then the President arrived amidst tight security. Guests stood up, the national anthem was played, five men took their seats on the stage, a reciter was invited to recite verses from the Qur’an and thus began the inaugural session of the Conference. When his turn came, Professor Syed Hussein Nasr delivered his keynote address which was full of deep insights into one of the greatest challenges faced by the Islamic civilization—the challenge of modern science and technology.

Nasr challenged the generally held opinion that the Muslim Ummah has been overshadowed by the West because it has fallen behind in science and technology. He maintained that an unrestrained and uncritical application of modern science and technology would amount to suicide as for as the Islamic civilization is concerned. He pointed out that each civilization gives rise to its own specific ways of life and it is these specific cultural, social, economic and spiritual needs that produce particular technologies.

He reiterated his well documented belief that Islamic civilization cannot blindly imitate the West in science and technology without destroying itself.  Laced with wisdom from Rumi and other sages, Nasr’s speech filled the large auditorium with a spiritual presence which brought to the living hearts a burning desire to connect the mundane with the spiritual through an act of balance in which the higher and the everlasting truths of life point a way out of the dilemma faced by the Islamic civilization at this point in history.

Soon after Nasr’s expressive address, Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari, then the President of Pakistan, came to the podium and, setting aside his written speech, said: That was a very eloquent speech, Professor Nasr, but I am afraid we are faced with a very practical situation and we need very practical solutions. Our young students are being denied entrance to the Western universities, we simply do not have enough men and women who are trained in advanced subjects such as nuclear science, and unless we acquire modern science and technology, we will perish.”

Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari then continued his speech for the next one hour, sometimes reading what had been provided to him by the COMSTECH secretariat, sometimes setting aside the written text. His entire speech revolved around the premise that the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was the ultimate revolution in human history, a revolution which Muslims had missed. An offshoot of his premise was that Muslims have not invested enough in science and technology.

Both points were actually part of a 1983 speech written for General Ziaul Haq, the then Chairmain of COMSTECH; over the years, nothing had changed in the text. The arguments were initially invented by the late M. A. Kazi, General Zia’s science advisor and later the first Coordinator General of COMSTECH. Dr. Kazi was helped by a number of other people in formulating the speech for that grand occasion which had marked the beginning of COMSTECH.

The text was buttered with a thin veneer of numbers: Today almost 94% of scientists and technologists work for the developed nations, giving them an average of 2600 scientists per million of population, as compared to less than 100 in the Muslim world. Every year, almost one hundred thousand scientific books and over two million articles are published by the scientifically advanced countries while the share of Muslim countries is just a little over a thousand publications. Of the total global investment in research and development, nearly 97% is made by the advanced countries, and only 1% by the Muslim countries. Whereas the developed countries spend as much as three percent of their GNP on scientific research, no Muslim country has committed itself to spend even half a percent of the GNP on research and development.

These arguments are then used to make certain appeals to no one in particular: please invest more in science and technology; send more students to advanced countries, donate to COMSTECH or some other similar body. Then, the functions comes to a close. Tea is served and the crowd relishes free treats and returns to the dreariness of their offices or homes.

During the last quarter century, this and similar speeches have become the standard formula for all questions related to science, technology and Muslims. This formula is used in Pakistan, at various forums of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) as well as in the rest of the Muslim world. Apparently there is nothing wrong in the facts used in such speeches and apart from the meaningless appeals at the end, the over-used text may very well be an authentic case. Yet, there is something rotten in it. The entire exercise is futile because of certain fundamentally flawed assumptions.

To begin with, it treats the Muslim world as an entity with a certain collective GNP which can be taken as a positive figure in a statistical sense; everyone knows that this assumption is wrong, because there is no such political, administrative or economic entity in existence today. What we have is some 57 nation states with their own GNPs which are not even reliable most of the time. But this is merely the most apparent flaw. There are other, much deeper, deficiencies in this approach which constructs all questions related to Muslims, science and technology in isolation of all other developmental issues.

These deeper flaws in such approaches have existed for more than two centuries and continue to produce facile answers to a very serious issue. The origin of this flawed approach goes back to the eighteenth century when the Muslim world first encountered Western armies equipped with superior arms. These initial encounters between a technologically superior West and the ill-equipped armies of the Ottoman, Moghul and Safavi empires not only left a deep impression on the Muslim psyche, they also transformed the entire spectrum of the relationship between Muslims and the West; the questions related to science and technology were merely one aspect of this transformation.

(To be Continued).