On Science and Religion

Now that my brother has done the honourable thing and apologised, I feel free to move on to another, more meaningful post. Exhibit A:

An article explaining how "Muslim" scientists/mathematicians were well ahead of the game in terms of creating and, presumably, understanding complex geometric patterns.

The actual information revealed is fascinating and unoffensive; centuries ago, in a place far, far away, a bunch of guys got together and discovered how to use non-repeating patterns to make beautiful designs. In the meantime, it can only be assumed that the artisans had some appreciation for the underlying mathematical properties of the shapes they were making. After all, it was the great polymath Omar Khayyam--very influential in the area of Central Asia mentioned in the above article (read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf)--who was one of the first people to work on studying geometry through mathematical functions (there are translated versions of Khayyam's mathematics available today in at least French and modern Arabic--actually the modern Arabic version, published by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies is useless, much less clear than the medieval Arabic kept as an appendix). Ultimately, however, this in itself is not why the story received so much attention, even being listed on the BBC website. When was the last time you heard the BBC World News anchorwoman mention a story based on mathematics research?

The reason last month's story received the attention it did--outside the corridors of math departments--was the way it could be used to "bridge the cultural divide" in our post-Huntington world. Muslims are bad; they are terrorists... but wait, no, they're not bad because a few hundred years ago some of them did some cool mathematics. Personally, I have no time for the idea that Muslims are bad because I kind of used to be a one in the strict sense, and probably still am one in the vague definition of the word, depending on how fine a line you want to put on it. What I want to gripe with, however, is the idea that any science can be linked to a religion; when was the last time you heard of "Euler, the Christian mathematician" or "Einstein, the Jewish physicist" or even "Heisenberg, that Nazi scientist"?

Perhaps there are benign, even benevolent reasons for using such language: telling Western school children after 9/11 that a few Muslims were intelligent is like telling Nazis that Jews are good for the cultural life of the nation, meant to fight irrational hatred; but then what do you do with the religious jingoists, who want to use these factoids to peddle their tripe? What do you say to the bearded imam who attacks co-educational schooling, proclaiming that a "return to the roots of Islam" would heal our developmental failure-to-launch? What do you say to the Israeli who wants to wipe out the West Bank's university while the Hebrew University of Jerusalem--the recipient of much care from Einstein in its early days--can build on illegally occupied territory?

One of the great ironies of all of this is how it would have jarred with the actual personalities concerned. There is a growing trend in these parts to have "Islamic" hospitals; these, doubtlessly, have some remedial features in that they extend health care to sections of society which otherwise could not afford them (in places like Egypt and Jordan) and allow female patients in particular to feel more relieved about where they will stay while receiving treatment. What makes me chuckle is the way they're usually named after personages who were anything but Islamic at the time; Mohammed ben Abi Bakr Al Razi is one popular choice for the name of an Islamic hospital, yet the man was known for his non-conformity as a Muslim as much as for his medical work back in the day. Another might be Jabr ibn Hayyan, whose work on the use of furnaces--kitab al afran--still merits a mention in textbooks on thermogravimetry. None of these people were particularly pious, and linking their achievements with some kind of religious spirit is quite misleading and disingenuous, and serves nobody in the quest to improve the status of Muslim countries.

You might ask why make such a big deal out of it; surely, it couldn't hurt any young budding Muslim scientist, sitting on a desk in his under-funded public school in his disastrously mismanaged home country, to feel a certain pride in his forebears? Except that it's wrong. If we convince people that the reasons for the past greatness of Islamic civilisation(s) was based on doctrinal faithfulness, instead of the on the ingenuity of individuals, coupled with the economic prosperity and political stability and patronage which allowed them to function, we will have limited to a great extent our ability to plan for the future. The absurd becomes dangerous when wealthy governments in the region sponsor conferences on "the science of the Koran" instead of investing in better lab kits and more modern textbooks. Some times it seems that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep school kids here stupid.

Such diversions from reality also lead us astray from interesting questions about the nature of the differences between religion and science; how confident should Muslims be in applying the diktats of their religion if none of it can be made falsifiable? How certain can anybody be that Islam is a divine religion if it can be shown that there arithmetic inconsistencies in the way wealth is divided?
Nor do these claims of an Islamic science actually help an already confused group of people. Why on Earth should an Uzbekh care that Jabr ibn Hayyan, an Arab, was their co-religionist, when the Persians have their own army of thinkers and now, it seems, the Uzbekhs did too?

People of all religions can find, I'm sure, ways of justifying their superstitious beliefs with science of the past or the future (one fad in the 1990s was to link Hinduism to string theory). Given the disastrous situation Muslims are in at present, however, we can little afford to waste time trying to find the solutions to equations in the metaphysics of the past.