Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science [View all]

[onager]

Long but excellent and detailed article in New Atlantis, by Hillel Ofek. The article analyzes the well-known "Golden Age" of Islamic science, and what killed it. Along with a history of skepticism in Islam, and how free-thinking became (literally!) a curse instead of a blessing.

This article may be more applicable in The Other Group, but I figure most of its denizens hang out in here anyway. At least if recent alerts are any indication.

Some bits from the article:

This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction...

At a deeper level, Islam lags because it failed to offer a way to institutionalize free inquiry. That, in turn, is attributable to its failure to reconcile faith and reason. In this respect, Islamic societies have fared worse not just than the West but also than many societies of Asia. With a couple of exceptions, every country in the Middle Eastern parts of the Muslim world has been ruled by an autocrat, a radical Islamic sect, or a tribal chieftain. Islam has no tradition of separating politics and religion.

The story of Arabic science offers a window into the relationship between Islam and modernity; perhaps, too, it holds out the prospect of Islam coming to benefit from principles it badly needs in order to prosper, such as sexual equality, the rule of law, and free civil life. But the predominant posture among many Muslims today is that the good life is best approximated by returning to a pristine and pious past — and this posture has proven poisonous to coping with modernity.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science