Daily Times

In our daily life, we witness the culture of the people living in the Western hemisphere because of media and the Internet. The startling scientific and technological advancements of the West have left us far behind in almost all spheres of life. Compared to them, we seem to still live in the medieval ages. That compels every intelligent Pakistani Muslim to think: what really went wrong with us?

During the medieval period or the Middle Ages, however, Islamic societies witnessed a spectacular flowering of science and philosophy. Between the 8th and the 13th century was a golden age of the Islamic world when theology, science and Greek philosophy went hand in hand, a sufficient proof that Islam and science are not inherently incompatible. President Barack Obama in his June 4, 2009, speech in Cairo praised Muslims for their historical scientific and intellectual contributions to civilisation: “It was Islam that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.”

Every observer of history will accept the glory of Islam and its contribution to knowledge and science. One important factor in the rise of the scholarly culture of the Golden Age was its material wealth, provided by the rise of a powerful and prosperous empire. By the year 750, Mulsim armies had conquered Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and much of North Africa, Central Asia, Spain, and fringes of China and India. Newly opened routes connecting India and the Eastern Mediterranean spurred an explosion of wealth through trade as well as an agricultural revolution.

The vast empire was theologically and ethnically diverse, but removal of political barriers that previously divided the region meant that scholars from different religious and ethnic backgrounds could travel and interact with one another. Linguistic barriers, too, were no longer an issue as Arabic became the common idiom of all scholars across the vast realm. The spread of empire brought urbanisation, commerce and wealth that helped spur intellectual collaboration.

The Asha’rite school of thought after their victory over the Mu’tazalites created a priest class. And although Islam has no concept of a priest class, they took upon themselves to codify the Sharia laws that were man-made laws then. Hence the Islamic state came to be recognised as rigid, inflexible and immutable. A concept of ijtehad advocated by some prominent religious leaders in the 18th century failed to change the complexion of faith.

There are roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, but only two scientists from Muslim countries have won Nobel Prizes in science, one for physics in 1979, the other for chemistry in 1999. The 46 Muslim countries combined contribute just one per cent of the world’s scientific literature; 10,481 scientific papers frequently cited, while the entire Arab world publishes only four. In 2002, the Nature magazine published a report about science in the Arab world, and identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction. It sounded more like the punch line of a bad joke.

The rise to power of the Abbasid caliphate in the year 750 was, as the historian Bernard Lewis put in The Arabs in History (1950), “a revolution in the history of Islam, as important a turning point as the French and Russian revolutions in the history of the West.” Instead of tribe and ethnicity, the Abbasids made religion and language the defining characteristics of state identity. That allowed for a relatively cosmopolitan society in which all Muslims could participate in cultural and political life. Their empire lasted until 1258 when the Mongols sacked Baghdad and executed the last Abbasid caliph.

Exclusion of science and mathematics from madrassas deprived the future generations of Muslims from benefiting from the fruits of intellectual discoveries that were being made in the rest of the world

Early Abbasid caliphs openly supported a pro-science movement by attempting to undermine traditionalist religious scholars while actively sponsoring a doctrine called Mu’tazilism, which was deeply influenced by Greek rationalism. Due to the writings and philosophy of Al-Ghazali who opposed the free thought, there was a severe backlash against the Mu’tazilism, and by 885 it even became a crime to reproduce books of philosophy. By the 12th or the 13th century, the influence of Mu’tazilism was nearly stamped out.

At the heart of the Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of ‘occasionalism’, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, and therefore the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God. Their chief spokesman was Al-Ghazali who argued that in assuming necessity in nature, philosophy was incompatible with Islamic teaching, which recognises that nature is entirely subject to God’s will: “Nothing in nature,” he wrote, “can act spontaneously and apart from God.” Ijtihad was seen as no longer necessary since all the important legal questions were regarded as already answered.

The purpose of this piece is to recount some significant facts that became the cause of the decadence of Islamic society. The foremost among them is the sagacity and vision of the rulers and philosophers of the West who did not see Christianity to stand in the way of scientific progress. European scholars believed that when the Bible contradicts the natural world, the holy book should not be taken literally. Influential philosophers like St Augustine held that knowledge and reason precede Christianity; he approached the subject of scientific inquiry with cautious encouragement, exhorting Christians to use the classical sciences as a handmaiden of Christian thought.

No institution or cultural force of the early Christian period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church. The church’s acceptance and even encouragement of philosophy and science has been evident from the Middle Ages to modern times. But the Islamic civilisation, unfortunately dominated by a fanatic clergy, did not have a culture hospitable to the advancement of science and knowledge, despite the fact that there are numerous verses in the Quran exhorting Muslims to seek knowledge. An authentic hadith demands of Muslims to seek knowledge even if it required them to go to China.

Creation of Madrassas was another factor that impeded the spread of modern knowledge. Madrasas were created under the law of waqf, or pious endowments, which meant that they were legally obliged to follow the religious commitments of their founders. Islamic law did not recognise any corporate groups or entities, and so prevented any hope of recognising institutions such as universities within which scholarly norms could develop. Legally autonomous institutions were utterly absent in the Islamic world until the late 19th century.

As against Madrasas, European universities were legally autonomous; they could develop their own rules, scholarly norms and curricula. Madrassas nearly always excluded study of anything besides the subjects that aid in understanding Islam: Arabic grammar, the Quran, the hadith, and the principles of sharia. These were often referred to as the ‘Islamic sciences’.

Furthermore, rigidity of the religious curriculum in madrassas contributed to the educational method of learning by rote; even today, repetition, drill and imitation followed by chastisement for questioning or innovating are the methods of education in many parts of the Islamic world. Exclusion of science and mathematics from madrassas deprived the future generations of Muslims from benefiting from the fruits of intellectual discoveries that were being made in the rest of the world.

And lastly and quite ironically, paper was originally invented by China but was put to maximum use by the Islamic world during their golden period. In 1450, with the advent of the printing press books became readily accessible, knowledge spread throughout the world like wildfire, and the usually uneducated masses all of a sudden had cheap and easy access to books of any subject. That happened almost everywhere around the world, ushering in a new age of enlightenment and education, except in the Islamic world.

As ill luck would have it, the first batch of the printed copies of the Holy Quran was found to contain some errors, and as these copies reached the market, the response was catastrophic. The entire Muslim world rose in rage against that blasphemy. As a result, a blanket ban on all printing presses was imposed throughout the Muslim world. It remained in force till the 18th century. When Europe was passing through its Renaissance, the Muslim world plunged into darkness and could never catch up with the rest of the world.

The writer is a freelancer