Arabs once dominated science
By MICHAEL WOODS
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
April 13, 2004
TOLEDO, Spain - Islamic medicine and science led the world for centuries while Europe stagnated in the Dark Ages.
From 800 AD to 1500, Arabic was the language of science, as English is today. Muslims occupied Spain, and Europeans flocked to Toledo and other Spanish cities, or traveled great distances to Baghdad or Damascus, to translate Islamic science and medical books into Latin.
Islamic medicine in the year 1000 was a marvel of sophistication, featuring competency tests for doctors, drug purity regulations, hospitals staffed by nurses and interns, advanced surgeries and other practices beyond the dreams of medieval Europeans.
The United Nations Development Program, in a report published last year, described in often painful detail some of the factors that have contributed to the decline of science and the rise of extremism in Arab societies. Among them are:
- Increases in average income have been lower in the Arab world than anywhere else for 20 years, except for the poorest African countries. One in 5 Arabs lives on less than $2 a day.
- Arab unemployment is the highest in the developing world.
- Surveys show more than half of young Arabs want to leave their countries and live in the United States or other industrialized countries where opportunities are better.
- The Arab brain drain is the world's worst, with about 25 percent of new graduates in science, medicine and engineering emigrating each year.
- About 1 in 4 Arab adults can neither read nor write. This is a particular problem among Arab women, 50 percent of whom are illiterate. Many children do not attend school.
- The quality of education has declined, with many schools teaching mainly interpretations of the Koran, rather than other knowledge or skills.
- Less than 0.6 percent of Arabs use the Internet and barely 1.2 percent have access to a personal computer. There are 18 computers per 1,000 Arabs, compared to the global average of 78.3.
- During the entire 20th century, fewer than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic - equivalent to the number translated into Spanish in a single year. Religious books account for 17 percent of new publications in Arab countries, compared to a world average of 5 percent.
- Censorship stifles ideas, information and innovation. Numerous censors review book manuscripts, each with the power to edit text or demand revisions.
"The region is, for the most part, a scientific desert," according to a 2002 article in the journal Nature. "In some states, oil wealth has allowed the construction of fabulous cities, magnificent mosques and sumptuous shopping malls. But little scientific infrastructure has emerged. Collectively, the Arab nations spend only 0.15 percent of their gross domestic product on research and development, well below the world average of 1.4 percent."
Muslims account for 20 percent of the world's population, but less than one percent of its scientists. Scientists in Islamic countries now make barely 0.1 percent of the world's original research discoveries each year.
Authorities on Islamic science cite various reasons for this state of affairs, but the Koran is not among them.
"The Koran actually forms one of the cornerstones of science in Islam in a way unlike any other scripture of any other religion," said Glen M. Cooper, a professor of the history of science and Islam at Brigham Young University.
The rise of Islamic science
After Muhammad's death in 632, Muslim armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and expanded the borders of Islam east and west.
They absorbed not just land, but also scientific knowledge from India and Greek learning planted centuries earlier by the armies of Alexander the Great. Muslims translated into Arabic the treasures of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Archimedes and other great physicians, philosophers and scientists.
By 711, the Muslims had reached Spain, and they ended up dominating the region until Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella drove out the last of them in 1492.
The impact of Islam's discoveries during this period went far beyond individual innovations like algebra or the establishment of models for modern hospitals and universities. The spread of Islamic knowledge to Europe sparked, or at least helped to spark, the Renaissance and scientific revolution of the 17th century.
Yet most Americans are completely unaware of Islam's rich scientific heritage, said George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic science at Columbia University, and more than a dozen other experts interviewed for this article.
Two reasons Americans are relatively clueless on the subject are the Arabic-English language barrier and a long tradition of U.S. historians focusing on European scientific traditions, said Jeffrey Oaks of the University of Indianapolis.
Explaining the decline
Universities were an Islamic invention later adopted in Europe, but Muslim universities did not shelter and preserve scientific knowledge during wars and other upheavals. Christian warriors carved up the Islamic empire and cut off contact between great scientific centers. Here in Spain, the Catholic reconquest of Ferdinand and Isabella deprived Islamic science of the great libraries and schools in Cordoba, Seville and Toledo.
Conflicts also cut off science's lifeblood - cash for research and education. And the Ottomans, who took over much of the Islamic world in the early 1500s, used their resources to make war, not science.
In the 1700s, a puritanical form of Islam took root in Saudi Arabia, with a doctrine that rejected knowledge acquired after the first 300 years of Islam's existence.
Several scholars said one problem is the lack of awareness among Arabs and Muslims about their own scientific heritage.
In much of the Arab world, science is dependent on handouts from sultans, kings or caliphs. The United Nations Development Program called oil wealth "a mixed blessing" in a 2003 report that called on Arab countries to reclaim their scientific heritage.
UNDP pointed out that Arab rulers invest much of their oil money in the United States and other foreign countries, rather than using it to develop their own nations, and import technical know-how instead of educating ample numbers of their own citizens to be scientists and engineers.
Signs of rebirth?
The UNDP report also described what's needed to re-energize scientific inquiry in Arab and Islamic societies.
It included relatively straightforward suggestions like spending more on scientific research and ordinary education rather than religious schools. Other recommendations involve inventing new systems of government in some countries. One called for "guaranteeing the key freedoms of opinion, speech, and assembly through good governance bounded by law."
"Our civilization once supported a knowledge society that was the envy of the world," said Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, a U.N. assistant secretary general who helped prepare the report. "They will do so again if we clear away the defective social, economic and political structures we have piled upon them. We can free our minds to reason without fear; free our people's souls to breathe."
Arab scientists and governments are making some progress.
In 2000, a group of leading scientists formed the Arab Science and Technology Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The emirates are among a handful of Arab countries - which include Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan - that are investing more in science education and research.
Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al-Qassimi, the ruler of Sharjah, donated $1 million from his own pocket to start the science foundation and provided its $5 million headquarters building. The foundation hopes to raise $100 million so it can provide research grants and encourage Arab scientists in other countries to return home.
The emir of Qatar is backing the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, which is building a vast "Education City" featuring branch campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Cornell universities.
"The pendulum can swing back," wrote Ibrahim B. Syed of the University of Louisville in an article about Islamic medicine. "Islamic countries have the opportunity and resources to make Islamic science and medicine number one in their world once again."
(Michael Woods can be reached at mwoods(at)nationalpress.com.)
