Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

It is very possible that the achievements of modernity have changed the game. That said, the game was (is?) rise and fall. Rising civilizations leave a heritage to be mined, so there is an overall direction of rise... but every one of the many scientifically advancing cultures in history has declined. It would be prudent to expect the same for ours.

That said, modernity has almost certainly changed at least some of the rules. Even the term "The West" has become complicated. Our civilization is now essentially global. A scientific invention in France immediately arrives in Seoul. A joke told in Houston is heard in lagos. A book popular here is likely popular there.

The practical link between Rio De Janeiro and Tokyo is stronger now than Baghdad and Casablanca then.

In the US I am pretty sure we are already on the decline.

I think it has to do with, during the industrial revolution and post-war, huge scientific advancements and tech grew the economy, fed capitalism by means of providing new desirable goods to consumers (e.g. dishwashers, nicer cars, etc.)

I wonder if we've reached a "peak" of consumer comfort where advances in science/ tech/ medicine are no longer frequent/ impactful enough to meaningfully satisfy consumers, (why do we care about exploring Mars?) so it's easy for people to reject it and say "we don't need science."

As the Mongols expanded, each time they encountered an empire, they offered them two alternatives: a) Pay tribute to the Mongols, b) War with the Mongols and their vassal nations.

The caliphate chose the war option, unaware of the true military strength of the Mongols, who they considered primitive barbarians. The result was the complete destruction of the empire, their infrastructure including libraries, and the death of most scholars.

However, parts of Spain were under Islamic control from 711 AD to 1492 AD, and Sicily from 878 AD to 1060 AD. It was there were books from Islamic libraries were translated to Latin, giving origin to the European Reinassance.

Well, when your region of the world has been torn asunder by everything, including colonial powers, fascist reactionaries and nationalists, liberal market economies, and international communism; the only remaining cultural artifact that you can call your own is religion. If you want to unify the Middle East, you have to do so under the guise of religion, and in practice that means conservative religious extremism. Iran is sort of a microcosm of this: they deliberately adopted theocracy as any form of secular government or economy was viewed as surrender to one's oppressors.

The only problem is that there's at least three dominant forms of religion in the area to unify under: Sunni and Shiite Islam, and Zionist-compatible Judaism. This has more or less created a local cold war between Sunni theocracies (e.g. Saudi Arabia), Shiite theocracies (e.g. Iran and half of Iraq), and Israel. These hostilities are often fought with insurgencies, which means lots of violence in the border areas between the three religions. This is not a great place to live.

Immigration law is quite complicated and fraught. Every country has a mostly but not entirely irrational fear of demographic shifts (see Texas and Israel), and so they heavily restrict who can enter their country. However, the demands of capitalism mean that most countries have to provide a practical immigration path for college-educated individuals such as scientists. Immigration for the working class is generally disallowed or heavily restricted as a form of labor market protectionism, which means there is vast disparities in who is and isn't allowed to leave a country.

This creates an interesting problem: it is very difficult for these countries to convince educated scientists to remain in their country. Scientists generally don't get along with theocrats all that well to begin with. However, we've also chosen the immigration policy that is most likely to select for (relatively) liberal emigrants and filter out more conservative ones. So there's a vicious cycle: it's easier for scientists to leave the Middle East, which makes the region more conservative, which makes more scientists want to leave.

There are lots of theories, of course, but one I find interesting is that East Asia, in addition to never being colonized to the same extent as most places, emerged with national boundaries largely intact. The Middle East was under foreign control for, well, basically forever (Romans -> Ottomans -> mandates) and ended up with some pretty weird national boundaries. This encouraged a lot of strife.

There's also the oil theory; countries with huge natural resources seem to often struggle to develop normally.

I find this statement problematic. The West is leading the current period of scientific revolution, as the Muslims, the ancient Chinese and Indians did during their periods of scientific achievement.

When Japan was conquered by USA in 1940s, the USA treated it with much more respect than the Europeans did vs the Ottoman Empire from WW1.

As a result, Japan was able to regrow into a world power. While the countries that formerly constituted the Ottomans are under a constant civil war (and major military groups, like ISIS, dream of re-establishing a religious empire of old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Caliphate)

Its not very hard to imagine a "cut up Japan", a hypothetical disarmed Japan where the USA would split between Britain / France / Russia / other members of the allies.

In fact, we can look to the (eastern part) of the Soviet Union to see how well splitting up countries went during WW2. The East / West Germany thing almost surely stunted Germany's growth back into its world standing.

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With that being said: the Ottomans were certainly in a decline by the late 1800s, before WWI broke out. But I can't imagine that WWI did those countries any favors.

In India Astrology is now being treated as a Science and the Modi government is considering allowing alternate medicine (Ayurveda / Homeopathy / Unani) "doctors" to prescribe allopathic medicines.

This when India's first Prime Minister sought to promote "scientific temper" in independent India:

> "[What is needed] is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind—all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems." —Jawaharlal Nehru (1946) The Discovery of India

And the constitution of India itself emphasises:

> [It shall be the duty of every citizen of India] To develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.

Political leaders are the key, and the answer to why science and culture flourish and die in any civilization. The west will experience this too.

The author is also including in Contemporary Islam, SEA countries like Malaysia.

He also discusses Pakistan and ancient Indian civilizations as separate entities, which have geographical overlap, because Pakistan (and Bangladesh) is far behind India in terms of research productivity.

In my opinion, blaming religion for any decline of science is completely accepted even if there's no direct correlation between both, which is very bad because it's creates a false believe that religious people aren't educated.

If you get rid of the dictator you end up like Iraq and Libya after Saddam and Gaddafi were removed. Its better to deal with the devil you know.

Yeh, that sums up the the article pretty well

Could the centuries of direct colonial rule by the Ottomans and Europeans played a role? The Ottomans were by no measure gentle but the Europeans were nothing short of barbaric. Take Palestine. To solidify their hold the British simply rounded up and executed fighting age men the moment rebellion started brewing.

The stakes are high and the Europeans knew this. The Arabs sat on oil. Lots of it. Colonialism is doomed to fail because the uncivilized eventually rise up (imagine that). Enter Sykes-Picot and neo-colonialism. Give them the illusion of being free, back brutal dictators over the people, and divide and conquer along sectarian lines.

Finally enter Israel. To really support for Israel Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote that Israel would “form part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”. And they played their part. They are the wildcard ready to bomb any middle eastern country should they rise up and crawl towards independence. See all the nuclear power plants they bombed while they were still being built.

Having a true democracy would be a bless for sure, but don't think that will magically produce scientists, or revolutionary new points of view. You need to seed, nurture, care for and harvest decades later. And this is one of the causes of decline of science. Everybody is now planned, arranged and forced to fit in chunks of 4 years, so the people now in power can take all the credit.

As bad as dictators are, a stable dictatorship could ironically lead to a much more comfortable environment for scientists than a democracy. The first thing that many politicians do after stepping in power is to fire the scientists identified with the previous government (or discredit their work, or remove their funds...).

"A preliminary caution must be taken about both parts of the term “Arabic science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed here were not all Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend that only began to change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution about “Arabic science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it today.[...]"

Not sure about the average person, but I do get a sense that scholarship is valued.

And THAT is the problem in any non-western country. The extent of brain drain by more flourishing economies are the prime reasons why certain countries are plagued by lack of education, lack of opportunity, spread of corruption, and spread of gang-like entities.

It's important to remember that most people don't really worry about this kind of ideological questions, like whether studying in university is incompatible with Quran. Hell, most people don't even know what's in Quran. So at least in contemporary world, I think lack of Muslim progress is better explained by poverty and not through those ideological analyses.

That's a language which is still missing in Google's translator.

I was nodding all the way until "bottlenecks in"... and then the Expanse slang. Tsk tsk :)

It can't be that simple. How do you fit there, for example, russian space exploration?

"Mohammed was not only a prophet but also a chief magistrate, a political leader who conquered and governed a religious community he founded. Because Islam was born outside of the Roman Empire, it was never subordinate to politics."

"Islam needs a state to enforce its laws, and the state needs a basis in Islam to be legitimate."

I am not a scientist, but yes. It’s not that hard to directly access most scientific tools. Verification takes effort, but random verification should reasonably give you confidence and can be a fun project on it’s own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbdbVhzcM4

PS: One of the most famous experiments off all time is replicated whenever you can something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

To say they are "absolutely equivalent" is a massive stretch.

You're in the wrong forum.

Your analogy is, frankly, awful and way off the mark.

Edit, to add an example: a patient listening to a doctor who has set many broken bones about how the doctor is going to set that particular patient’s bones is nothing like a religious adherent listening to a priest who has never spoken to god about what god says and expects of the adherent... that’s just absurd.

It's not about science. Society is impossible without trust.

^ except that scientists do check each other's work and occasionally find mistakes. Scientific progress is real and has provided concrete and undeniable improvements to people's lives, and this should give credibility to science as a whole. But I see your point, outsiders cannot understand nor verify science without the proper training and equipment.

Science education very much rests on teaching and learning scientific methods and showing students how to prove the things they are learning.

If the Covid-19 situation taught me anything, it would be that it's apparently very, very easy to convince the vast majority of the population they need behave, think and feel in some way, based on 'facts' and figures that are unproven, incomplete, out-of-context, or based on 'science' that is not or only barely amenable to empirical verification. We (the world) are doing so many things at once now to try to handle the pandemic, but my impression of all of it, is that we really have no idea what we are doing, what works and what doesn't, why things seem to be out of control, and (controversially) how bad it actually is in the grand scheme of things.

IMO science is most definitely not comparable to religion, but I will concede that -for most people- its role in their lives is very similar.

> My point is that no one is personally verifying science. On an individual level we cannot be sure that these are not stories and hearsay.

You should hang out with more scientists. It turns out they count as "someone"!

> Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion. A comforting, explanatory story is provided and we believe we 'know' what is happening. Scientists are our priests and we take their pronouncements as gospel, without questioning them.

This is a grossly false equivalency. The thing with any scientific claim is that you could independently verify it; in practice, verifying modern scientific claims tends to cost tons of time and money, but nothing in principle prevents you.

Sure, _in theory_, I would be glad to know enough, to have enough time and to have enough money to verify every scientific theory since the dawn of times. In practice, it's been totally not scalable for a single person for about 500 years. _Careful trust_, with verification systems in place, is then the second best choice we can make.

The difference with religion lies in the fact that you do _not_ have to blindly accept everything. If you doubt a specific scientific theory, then by all means, put it to the test! But no, you won't be able to do that for science as a whole, not because "we're whining children who like conformting stories" but simply because of the blunt fact that our time here is limited.

The difference is that you don't need faith. With enough motivation, you can probably get to see the virus on an election microscope. It is difficult. Just operating an election microscope is an art, and getting the necessary security clearances to work with deadly pathogens can be tricky. Almost no one does it, but sometimes, a crazy enough guy spends way too much time challenging a well established theory. Most of the times, the results are the same as what mainstream science says, but there are a few exceptions. This random poking keeps science in check.

The current pandemic is good at exposing the "non-faith" aspects of science. Covid is not airborne, ah, maybe it is, hydroxychloroquine works, no it doesn't, case fatality rate is 5%, no, 0.5%, no, 1%, it attacks the lungs, the nose, you keep immunity for a long time, no you don't, yes you do, etc... It is constantly changing, and this is science at work. A priest will not change his mind, he will not receive a new revision of the Bible every week. That rarely shown aspect is a bit unsettling to those with a faith-based view of science, but totally normal for those who are practicing.

Modern academia has its problems. We often talk about the "reproducibility crisis", but the simple fact it is widely recognized as a problem sets it apart from religion.

And BTW, while I am an atheist myself, I am not against religion. Religion offers stability and answers that science is unable to provide, and both can coexist.

Then you study DNA at school, you experiment a bit with drosophila, you read about Mendel and evolution, and it makes sense, doesn't it? It isn't faith, it well calculated trust.

> Science is absolutely equivalent to religion

And that's why we see people smitten by lightning every day.

We call it Social Constructionism. It's the basis of all knowledge in society. Whether a concept exists or whether it's believed to be true does not necessarily have anything connected to an objective reality, all you need is making it believable (different groups of people and different societies have different standards on what qualifies as believable). Demonstrating it by direct observation using the scientific method can achieve this goal, creating a mythology or writing a textbook can do it as well. At the end of the day, you must start from an existing concept and assume it is true. Theoretically, You can start from simple and self-evident concepts and derive everything from first principles. However, in a modern society, the existing body of knowledge is too large for any individual to independently verify and too useful to refuse. Even the verification of the simplest fact can be non-obvious and expensive. Thus, we assume they're true without verification. And often, what we have accepted are not even technically accurate.

Now, I'm not interested in discussing any particular issues in the thread, but I'd like to use this chance to talk about my pet theory on the psychology of conspiracy theories... An interesting thought exercise: Consider the shape of the Earth. Now, design a physics experiment to provide empirical evidence for a spherical Earth, preferably also it's rotation. Requirements: This should be practical within the ability of a single individual, and should be as easy as possible. Only minimum pre-existing concepts should be used. The result should be as obvious and unambiguous as possible without too much interpretation. It should be able to defend itself from any challenge on its technical inaccuracy or alternative models... I think it's actually a non-obvious problem. It's amazing how much domain-specific knowledge it requires. Flat Earth conspiracy theorists have cherry-picked numerous arguments to support their positions, just to name a few...

* Bedford Level Experiment. A number of sticks were placed in an 6-mile uninterrupted straight line. Optical observations were made. Experiment failed to detect any curvature, or that the data showed the curvature was not outward, but inward. Many modern versions by Flat Earthers can be found in YouTube videos, often on lakes or sea - objects and buildings well beyond the horizon can be seen by telescopic lens. Laser beams have been detected 15 kilometers apart, etc. Why? Atmospheric refraction. After atmospheric effects have been corrected, the data will definitely show that the Earth is indeed a sphere. But from now, to interpret the data, you suddenly need a model of atmospheric optics, which is far from obvious and requires many additional concepts. Then, consider the cost and difficulty of this naive experiment - For an individual, it's already high enough and unpractical for a city dweller. Thus, all optical experiments are doomed? Radio based observations are even trickier than optical observations.

* Foucault Pendulum. It's the most famous physics experiment to show the Earth's rotation, but the instability of the original, unpowered pendulum is notorious, even minor imperfection in mechanical construction or startup can create unwanted mode of oscillation, such as an elliptic oscillation which can totally mask the Earth's rotation. For powered pendulum, a careful and complicated mechanical analysis is needed to show that the pendulum has no preferred direction of swing,. Thus, Flat Earth advocates reject Foucault Pendulum as a valid experiment - any expected result is refuted as a coincidence or the result of the experimenter's biases.

* Gyroscope. An accurate and sensitive gyroscope, such as a Laser Ring Gyroscope, can sense the Earth's rotation. But gyroscope observations are rejected by Flat Earthers in general - the raw data output is noisy with random drifts and noise, aquisation of useful data heavily relies on algorithms and data processing. They argue that the algorithms can be biased to show a rotational Earth. Of course, it's not the case, but then you need to justify the entire subject of statistics and digital signal processing, good luck with that.

* Astronomic and Geodesic Measurements. Examples include observing the fixed stars and showing their variation in altitudes, or showing the sum of a triangle on Earth is greater than 180-degree, etc. Many of these experiments require an individual to travel great distances, many geodesic measurements also require accurate navigation, which can be disputed.

Of course, obvious experiments that produces strong evidences do exist, good candidates can be lunar ellipses, sun rise and sun set, timezones. But it's just a rhetorical question, I used the absurd example of Flat Earth to illustrate the point of non-obviousness of personal verification - indeed, many people who believe the Earth is a sphere have proposed these experiments to Flat Earthers, while making the mistake of not realizing their limitations, which in turns strengthens the beliefs of many Flat Earthers that "people are too brainwashed to see the truth". If we move away from Flat Earth and step into more advanced subjects, obviousness completely disappears, and only domain-specific knowledge remains, which are heavily dependent upon preexisting results.

In my opinion, it's how numerous conspiracy theories are created. The conspiracy theorists will simply tell you: why do you assume they're true? It's entirely possible that everything you know is false. And all the gaps in your accepted knowledge can be exploited by them to make this point. And ultimately, you may come to the conclusion that the entire body scientific knowledge is a hoax. Then, one may ask, how can people build anything in engineering? The conspiracy theorist will tell you, the truths are carefully and systematic distorted in a way that appears to be self-consistent, enough for some applications, but it's distorted enough to kill truth. And since any pre-existing results couldn't be trusted and one is unable to derive or verify anything from first principles due to limited time and resources, science is hence rejected.

Conclusion: The theoretical and epistemological foundation of many conspiracy theories are the equivalent of Reflection on Trusting Trust - they claim the vast majority of knowledge is manipulated for malicious purposes, in the same way that the hypothetical attack by Ken Thompson claims one's compiler could be backdoored and no program in one's computer can be trusted.

And, at high school level, basic science is tested and experiments are repeated.

So at the very least, some people learn proper scientific thinking, while others just learn to repeat "facts".

In contrast, everything that religion is, is just memorization of some old ideas, and treating personal anecdotes and made up stories like they are statistically significant data.

Each science article is extensively reviewed. First when you need to force yourself to read previous articles in the same field. Second by your boss and other members in the team. Third time by a peers system, and is not easy at all to pass. Sometimes must be corrected two or three times more. Often is rejected and sent to other journal, that will require the same process. Journals can ask for your laboratory notes and raw data and repeat the calculus by themselves. Is not unusual.

After an article is published anybody can point to something found incorrect on it.

So the truth is that science, the real science, is extensively reviewed. There are groups specially prone to fraud, and many articles are garbage, but are most the exception than the norm.

And in the Maghreb, French has become established as the language of literature and magazines, so those peoples are doubly aloof from MSA.

And while we Muslims undoubtedly carry the biggest blame for our demise- lets' not forget the west has real interest in keeping the status quo- a free thinking, rational government is fundamentally at odds with the fundamentalist dictators west has been supporting (e.g. in Saudi arabia) for past few centuries.

It seems there's a lot of hubris in Science, just like Imperialism, Art, etc. - and you need a lot of 'excess wealth' to delve into things that are not 'subsistence'.

The Renaissance probably would not have happened without the concentration of wealth in Venice and nearby areas. I mean who on Earth is going to pay for those weird/crazy instruments to be made and for creators full time to come up with this insane 'symphonic' concoctions. We take it for granted now but what happened was a miracle, and that's just in music.

> A preliminary caution must be noted about both parts of the term “Arabic science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed here were not all Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend that only began to change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution about “Arabic science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it today. Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge primarily in order to understand philosophical questions concerned with meaning, being, the good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a revolution in thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through the mastery of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions as (to borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity. Whatever modern science owes to Arabic science, the intellectual activity of the medieval Islamic world was not of the same kind as the European scientific revolution, which came after a radical break from ancient natural philosophy. Indeed, even though we use the term “science” for convenience, it is important to remember that this word was not coined until the nineteenth century; the closest word in Arabic — ilm — means “knowledge,” and not necessarily that of the natural world.

> Still, there are two reasons why it makes sense to refer to scientific activity of the Golden Age as Arabic. The first is that most of the philosophical and scientific work at the time was eventually translated into Arabic, which became the language of most scholars in the region, regardless of ethnicity or religious background. And second, the alternatives — “Middle Eastern science” or “Islamic science” — are even less accurate. This is in part because very little is known about the personal backgrounds of these thinkers. But it is also because of another caution we must keep in mind about this subject, which ought to be footnoted to every broad assertion made about the Golden Age: surprisingly little is known for certain even about the social and historical context of this era. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, a now-retired professor of the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard, described his field to the New York Times in 2001 as one that “hasn’t even begun yet.”

I do really doubt it.

The failure of those best minds to produce results is an artifact of non-reason based education (in my country there was a huge emphasis on rote learning) and a lack of institutional support.

My friends in the West from other Muslim countries have corroborated this. It's always the bottom tier of students or the particularly devout that end up in the clergy.

"Salam was an Ahmadi Muslim, who saw his religion as a fundamental part of his scientific work. ... In 1974, the Pakistan parliament made the Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan that declared Ahmadi to be non-Muslim. In protest, Salam left Pakistan for London." [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam#Religion

"The epitaph on his tomb initially read "First Muslim Nobel Laureate". The Pakistani government removed "Muslim" and left only his name on the headstone. They are the only nation to officially declare that Ahmadis are non-Muslim."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam

The usual Western triumphalist brain farts in discussing the Islamic world are present:

* exaggerating the extent of separation of Church and State in Christianity.

* exaggerating the marginalization of non-Muslim minorities in medieval Muslim societies and framing it as unique while completely ignoring the treatment of non-Christian minorities in Christian societies in the same period (hint: not that great)

* implying that Muslim success are a fluke and it's failures reflect the true nature of Islam

You know in 1980 some blowhard could have surveyed the world's Catholic countries and noted how many of them were under authoritarian regimes. Said blowhard could have then wrote a long essay detailing the authoritarian history and nature of the Catholic Church, linking it to present political conditions. He could then contrast it with the nature of Protestantism and success of Protestant nations, explain away France as an outlier to due to lingering Huguenot influence.

"From Latin America to Spain & Portugal to the Philippines the unquestioning obedience to an unaccountable organization in spiritual matters has primed the Catholic world for predisposition to dictatorship" he would solemnly declare. "Contrast this with the marketplace of ideas that exists in the Protestant sphere and the idea of the worshiper having a direct relationship to God rather than an intermediating hierarchy".

You get my point.

From Wikipedia: "In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals."

How much science would get done in the US if everyone in the 50 largest cities is killed or enslaved and the cities are razed?

During the siege of Baghdad, the Mongols destroyed the Grand Library of Baghdad which contained countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy.[1]

To think these invaders are glorified today makes me sick. In my opinion, not only did only cause the decline of the Arabic world, but they also severely impacted the technological development of the world as a whole. Some of the works in the library were believed to be ancient manuscripts from Greek sources.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...

I highly doubt Mongols have anything to do with that.

Can down voters please explain why you disagree? (Unless hn is just overrun with deluded brainwashed lunatics.)

Notable examples of regions afflicted by the same problem are the entire Soviet bloc. And China. And yet these are typically at the vanguard of scientific and technological development.

The Soviets beat the Americans to space under exactly that class of autocratic ruling elite.