Fundamentalist Extremist Islamic Pakistan: A Huge Suicide-Bomb :
and it’s own worst enemy
A response to prof. Hoodbhoy, Islamabad
and it’s own worst enemy
A response to prof. Hoodbhoy, Islamabad
Introduction
Islamic scholars often pass sleepless nights grumbling over their the decline of science and consequent under-development of the Muslim countries. What caused the earlier so-called great scientific culture in Muslim countries collapse, they often ponder. Many scientists in the Islamic countries like Prof. Hoodbhoy in Pakistan seem to burn a lot of midnight oil on this question. They often come to this, that the internal causes led to the decline of Muslim's scientific greatness long before the onslaught of the Christian mercantile imperialism under the Holy Roman British Empire. To contribute once again, they feel, Muslims must become introspective and ask themselves as to what went wrong.
With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why are the Muslim countries disengaged from reality, from science and from the process of creating new knowledge
Have Muslims always been so… ? A magnificent Golden scientific and cultural Age under some great Muslim kings in the 9th–13th centuries in Baghdad and the Islamic Spain brought about major advances in mathematics, science, architecture and medicine. The Arabic language, enriched with vast knowledge from the Islamic colonies, held sway in an age that created Algebra, Elucidated principles of optics, established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But the rise of Islamic mullahs and fundamentalism lead to the end of that period. Science in the Islamic world eventually collapsed under the dead weight of medieval Islamic theology and theocracy. However, at present it remains a fact that no major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims amidst growing sense of injustice and victimhood.
Such negative feelings must be checked before the gulf between enlightened Europe and the ignorant and backward Islam widens further. A bloody clash of Western Christian, religions between Catholics and Protestants, had destroyed Europe in 16th Century, and there is a real danger that the present religious war between Christianity and Islam as well as rise of the medieval-minded Islam in Europe might once again destroy Europe along with the evils Islamic and Christian cultures… !
Islam's earlier encounter with science surprised it and so had happy and unhappy consequences. There was no science in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic Bedouin Arab culture which was full of medieval superstition, ignorance and barbarity. The initial period of Islam, around 610 AD when Arab Bedouins overwhelmed Syrian Christian colony of Byzantine. But Science remained essentially a profession of Greek and Syrian slaves, while Umayyad Arabs aristocracy, in between the barbaric imperial wars of Arab Islamic colonization, usually busied themselves with slave markets, distribution of loot and plunder and in building big palaces where they lived with hundreds of women sex-slaves, these unfortunate women from the conquered and colonized nations whose men were either killed or sold as slaves in the Islamic slave-markets., and whose lands were snatched by the these barbaric Arab Islamic sword-wielding tribes
As Arabs Islam established itself politically and militarily in conquered areas, its territory started expanding belong the nearer frontiers. In the mid-eighth century, Bedouin Arab Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by some liberal and enlightened kings and aristocrats, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Baghdad saw a confect between the traditionalists and the rationalists. Politics was progressively being dominated by the rationalist and secular Mutability's, who sought the supremacy of reason over faith. In opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites, the traditionalists who would sacrifice solid reason for the incredible and feeble faith, became strong by the strength of the Bedouin swords. A generally tolerant and pluralistic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus predestination—became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the rationalist Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.
A long period of Islamic darkness followed, punctuated by occasional secular and liberal brilliant spots. In the 16th century, the Turkish Ottomans Theocratic Khilafat established an extensive empire with the help of military technology and religious brainwashing. But there was little enthusiasm for science and new knowledge. In the 19th century, the European Enlightenment inspired a wave of modernist secular Muslim reformers: Mohammed Abdul of Egypt, his follower Rashid Rida from Syria, and their counterpart on the Indian subcontinent, such as the liberal Muslim Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, exhorted their fellow Muslims to accept ideas of the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Their theological position can be roughly paraphrased as, "The Qur'an tells us how to go to heaven which may not be places but just illusions ; and not how the heavens : the sun, moon, stars and galaxies go." That echoed Galileo earlier in Christianity-ridden medieval Europe.
The 20th century witnessed the change of the instruments of the Holy Roman British Empire, the Europeans Christians were replaced by the local Christian which was in parallel with the emergence of several neo-colonial Muslim, Hindu and Christian states which were nominally independent, though officially British dominions. All these new states initially came under the Europe-influenced and educated secular national leaderships. A spurt toward modernization and the acquisition of technology followed. Many expected that a Third world scientific renaissance would ensue. Clearly, it did not.
What ails science in the neo-colonial Muslim states?
Muslim leaders today, realizing that military power and economic growth flow from technology, frequently call for speedy scientific development and a knowledge-based but medieval-faith society. Although that call is rhetorical, in some Muslim countries—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria among others—official patronage and funding for science and technology education have grown sharply in recent years. Enlightened individual rulers, including Sultan ibn Muhammad Al-Qasimi of Sharjah, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar, President Gen Ayub Khanand President Gen.Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and others have put aside some of their vast personal wealth or state money for such causes. However, no Muslim leader has publicly called for releasing the
Science from the grip of medieval Islamic religion.
Are the increasing resource allocations for technology, enough to energize science, or are more fundamental changes required in scientific attitude and enlightened behaviors? Scholars of the 19th century, such as the pioneering sociologist Max Weber, rightly claimed that medieval-style-religion of Islam lacks an "idea system" critical for sustaining a scientific culture based on innovation, new experiences, quantification, and empirical verification. Fatalism and an orientation toward the medieval past, they said, makes progress difficult and even undesirable.
In the current epoch of growing antagonism between the Islamic fundamentalism and the European rationalist worlds, most Muslims reject such charges with angry indignation and self righteousness. They feel those accusations are yet another excuse for the Christian West to justify its ongoing cultural and military assaults on Muslim populations. Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and science may account for the slowness of progress. They believe that their Qur'an-the supposed word of the Arabian deity Allah-cannot be at fault: however, Muslims do believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions ; although thousands of scholars and Islamic universities have failed to find any such divine inspiration for scientific mental and material development.
In defending the compatibility of science and Islam, Muslims argue that Muslim kingdoms had sustained a vibrant intellectual culture throughout the Dark Ages of the Western Christianity in European Continent and thus, by extension, we are still capable of a modern scientific culture. However, they forget to analyse if the blessing were the result of the institution of kingship or the medieval and ignorant-of-Science Islam… !The Pakistani-exiled physics Nobel Prize winner, Abduls Salam, would stress to audiences that one-eighth of the Qur'an is a call for Muslims to seek Allah's signs in the universe and hence that science is a spiritual as well as a temporal duty for Muslims….although Quran’s calling it mere theological and not at all for science….Of course, this makes it clear that PhD or even Noble Prize in Physics doesn’t automatically means a rational and scientific mind ;even a Noble Prize winner Physicist could have a medieval, superstitious and irrational religious thinking, and a PhD physicist may be totally blank about dynamics of sociology, philosophy and political science… ! Perhaps the most widely used argument about Islam and Science that one hears is that the Prophet Muhammad had exhorted his followers to "seek knowledge even if it is in China," which implies that a Muslim is duty-bound to search for secular knowledge ; although it is not clear whether the Prophet himself knew what was science, if at all… !
The state of science in the contemporary Islamic world :
Measuring Muslim scientific progress
- Why the slow development?
« The metrics of scientific progress are neither precise nor unique. Science permeates our lives in myriad ways, means different things to different people, and has changed its content and scope drastically over the course of history. One might measure the scientific progress in terms of:
• The quantity of scientific output,
• The role played by science and technology in the national economies and industries
• The extent and quality of higher education; and
• The degree to which science is present or absent in popular culture, and in their scientific attitudes and behaviours.
Scientific output
A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of quality scientists and scientific research projects Muslim countries for education in physics e.g. has been too low to mention.
Islamic countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone
The situation may be even grimmer than this
The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.
Islamic countries show a great diversity of cultures and levels of backwardness and modernization and a correspondingly large spread in scientific backwardness and productivity. Among the larger countries—in both population and political importance—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan are the most scientifically developed.
National scientific enterprises
Conventional wisdom suggests that bigger science budgets indicate, or will induce, greater scientific activity. On average, the 57 states under Islam spend an estimated 0.3% of their gross national product on research and development, which is far below the global average of 2.4%. But the trend toward higher spending is unambiguous, although it is more to do with their national defense tactics than a love for science. Rulers in the UAE and Qatar are building several new universities with manpower imported from the Asia and Europe for both construction and staffing.
Saudi Arabia announced that it spent 26% of its development budget on scientific technology and religious education in 2006, and sent 5000 students to US universities on full scholarships. Thanks to General Pervez Musharraf and his able minister Dr. Ata ur Rehman, Pakistan set a world record by increasing funding for higher education and science by an immense 800% just over the past five years.
But bigger budgets for technological education do not ensure a scientific attitude, and particularly in the presence of Islamic Mullah fascism, such expenses by themselves are not a panacea.
But increasing funding without adequately addressing such crucial concerns can lead to a null correlation between scientific funding and performance.
The role played by science in creating high technology is an important science indicator but it s fields practically limited to technological advance, in Missiles and Tanks etc., and not in promoting a scientific milieu.
Zia ul haq and Islamic science.
Certain scientific areas in which research has paid off in the Islamic world are the followings :
Agricultural research—which is relatively simple science—provides one case in point. Pakistan has good results, for example, with new varieties of cotton, wheat, rice, and tea. Defense technology is another area in which many developing countries have invested, as they aim to both lessen their dependence on international arms suppliers and promote domestic capabilities. Pakistan manufactures and exports nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles. There is now a burgeoning, increasingly export-oriented Pakistani arms industry that turns out a large range of weapons from grenades to tanks, night-vision devices to laser-guided weapons, and small submarines to training aircraft. Export earnings exceed $150 million yearly. Although much of the production is a triumph of reverse engineering rather than original research and development, there is clearly sufficient understanding of the requisite scientific principles and a capacity to exercise technical and managerial judgment as well. Iran has followed Pakistan's example, and in Nuke Technology Pakistan has been training scientists from many Islamic countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Yemen, Indonesia, Algeria etc.
Higher education
Academic and cultural freedoms in society and on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and other universities of Pakistan, the religious and social constraints are similar to those existing in Pakistani society, socially mediocre and religiously medieval.
Films, drama, and music are frowned on, and are sometimes accompanied even by physical attacks by Islamic student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate Islamic norms. The QAU Islamabad campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the democratic Pakistani parliament.
As religious intolerance and Islamic militancy sweep across the Muslim world, personal and academic freedoms as well as Basic Human Rights and the Civil Liberties diminish with the rising pressure to conform to unscientific attitudes of the barbaric Islamic Shariah followers. In Pakistani universities, the veil is now ubiquitous, and the last few unveiled women students are under intense pressure to cover up. The head of the government-funded Lal mosque-cum-seminary in the heart of Islamabad, the nation's capital, issued the following chilling warning to QA university's female students and faculty on his FM radio channel on 12 April 2007:
· The government should abolish co-education.
· Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. . . .
· Sportswomen are spreading nudity. I warn the sportswomen of Islamabad to stop participating in sport. . . .
· Our religious students have not openly issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islamic fascism among women.
· The imposition of the veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that over time most students—particularly veiled females—have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions
Believe me. This looks benign to us Pakistanis. There are far more horrible punishments herein and in the hereafter for such women.
Science and religion still at odds
Science is under pressure globally, and from every religion. As science becomes an increasingly dominant part of human culture, its achievements inspire both awe and fear. Creationism and intelligent design, curbs on genetic research, pseudoscience, parapsychology, belief in UFOs, and so on are some of its manifestations in the Christian West. Religious conservatives in the Christian-dominated USA have rallied against the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Extreme Hindu groups such as the Vishnu Hindu Parishad, which has called for ethnic cleansing of Christians and Muslims, have promoted various "temple miracles," including one in which an elephant-like God miraculously came alive and started drinking milk. Some extremist Jewish groups also derive additional political strength from antiscience movements. For example, certain American cattle tycoons have for years been working with Israeli counterparts to try to breed a pure red heifer in Israel, which, by their interpretation of chapter 19 of the Book of Numbers, will signal the coming of the building of the Third Temple, 7 an event that would ignite the Middle East.
In the Islamic world, opposition to science in the public arena takes additional forms. Antiscience materials have an immense presence on the internet, with thousands of elaborately designed Islamic websites, some with view counters running into the hundreds of thousands. A typical and frequently visited one has the following banner: "Recently discovered astounding scientific facts, accurately described in the Muslim Holy Book and by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) 15 centuries ago." Here one will find that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and genes was anticipated 1500 years ago. What happens to those who disbelieve the religious pseudo-science…they can be accused of apostasy and blasphemy and sent to gallows….some has already been… !
Science, in the view of fundamentalists, is principally seen as valuable for establishing yet more proofs of God, proving the truth of Islam and the Qur'an, and showing that modern science would have been impossible but for Muslim discoveries. Medievalism alone seems to matter. In that all-too-prevalent view, science is not about critical thought and awareness, creative uncertainties, or ceaseless explorations. Missing are websites or discussion groups dealing with the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, superstrings, stem cells, and other contemporary science issues.
Similarly, in the mass media of Muslim countries, discussions on "Islam and science" are common and welcomed only to the extent that belief in the Islam is reaffirmed rather than challenged. When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90 000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior. Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets, which had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake.
As several class discussions showed, an overwhelming majority of my university's science students are forced to accept various divine-wrath explanations or at least to show such attitudes in public.
Why the slow development?Although the relatively slow pace of scientific development in Muslim countries cannot be disputed as definitely due to Islam
1. Women in Muslim countries
2. Role of state and Govt
In fact, the numbers of women in Pakistani universities are lesser to those in many Western countries, restrictions on the freedom of women leave them with far fewer choices, both in their personal lives and for professional advancement after graduation or after, relative to their male counterparts.
The near-absence of concept of Basic Human Rights and civil Liberties, under the Third-world-style-colonial-Western-Democracy or Islamic military regimes, Muslim countries share among themselves the especially important reason for slow scientific development. It is certainly true that Islamic authoritarian and Mullah-infested-regimes generally deny freedom of inquiry or dissent, cripple professional societies, intimidate universities, and limit contacts with the outside world. Many Muslim governments today, even if democratic-in-name or otherwise, definitely approximates the terror of Catholic Christian Hitler, Mussolini or the Orthodox Christian Joseph Stalin—regimes in which science survived and could even advanced in creating worse means of genocide and terror.
Another myth is that the Muslim world rejects new technology, it does not, however it does reject scientific attitudes. In earlier times, the orthodoxy and the traditionalists had resisted new inventions such as the printing press, loudspeaker, and penicillin, but now the traditional Mullahs fully abuses such technologies for he benefit of their medieval Islam. The ubiquitous Internet, and the cell phone, that ultimate space-age device, epitomizes the surprisingly quick absorption of black-box technology into Islamic culture. For example, while driving in Islamabad, it would occasion no surprise if you were to receive an urgent SMS informing you of prayer time or requesting immediate prayers for helping Pakistan's cricket team win a match. Popular new Islamic cell-phone models now provide the exact based direction for Muslims to face while praying, certified translations of the Qur'an, and step-by-step instructions for performing the pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Qur'ans are already popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting bend-downs during prayers) have made their debut.
Language: Arabic, Persian, Urdu—is an important contributory reason. About 80% of the world's scientific literature appears first in English, and few traditional languages in the developing world have adequately adapted to new linguistic demands. With the exceptions of Iran and Turkey, translation rates are small.
3. It's the thought that counts
But the still deeper reasons are attitudinal, not material. At the base lies the yet unresolved tension between traditional Islamic and modern secular modes of thought and social behavior.
That assertion needs explanation. Grand disputes, such as between Galileo and the Christian Pope Urban VIII, and between Church and Bruno are holding back the clock. Hundreds of scientists have been beheaded by Islam, many great men like Avaroes (Ibn e Rushd) had been thrown out of mosque and Islamic society, hundreds have been banished under the dead weight of Mullahism-an equivalent of Popism of Christianity, women have been suppressed, Freethought and rationalism persecuted and now this ignorant Mullahism has attained the status of real Islam : « Allah is secondary, Mullah is primary, Mullah’s Fatwa is primary, Allah’s word is secondary », according to the modern sordid Sarah-the modern fabrication and artificial synthesis now called Islam…. !
Bread-and-butter science and technology requires learning complicated but mundane rules and procedures that are likely to place strain on any medieval-minded individual's belief system. A bridge engineer, robotics expert, or microbiologist can certainly be a perfectly successful professional but these are likely to create doubts about medieval Islamic thought. Truly fundamental and ideology-laden issues confront not just the tiny minority of scientists who grapple with the new sciences but the modern media has spread such questions everywhere. Therefore, one could conclude that developing science is not just a matter of setting up enough schools, universities, libraries, and laboratories, or purchasing the latest scientific tools and equipment… !
Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of any Allah, God, prophet or any other such intellectual, spiritual or religious authority. And there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed medieval religious thought. Only the exceptionally protected individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from ubiquitous Islamic Mullah and Mosque, where questions can be asked only with difficulty, where the penalties for disbelief are capital, where the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers had already been known to religions and must only be discovered.
Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses could be made and checked.
Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science. But what explains its meteoric rise in Islam over the past half century? In the mid-1950s all Muslim leaders were secular, and secularism within Islam was growing. What changed? Here the Christian West as well as Saudi Islamic East must accept its share of responsibility for reversing the trend. And here politics meets religion and science : Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq, Indonesia under Ahmed Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser are examples of secular but nationalist governments that wanted to spread science and secularism as well as wished to protect their national wealth. Western Christian imperial greed, however, subverted and overthrew them. At the same time, conservative oil-rich Arab states—such as Saudi Arabia, UAE—that exported fundamentalist and extremist versions of Islam were US clients. The fundamentalist Hamas organization was helped by Israel in its fight against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization as part of a deliberate Israeli strategy in the 1980s. Perhaps most important, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency armed the fiercest and most ideologically charged Islamic fighters and brought them from distant Muslim countries into Afghanistan, thus helping to create an extensive globalized jihad network. Today, as secularism continues to retreat, Islamic fundamentalism fills the vacuum. It looks as if spreading religiosity, religious ideologies and religious wars etc. have become the latest tactics of Western Christian imperial political control through spiritual mind control on the name of religion : any religion, any sect, and not just Roman Christianity…Holy roman British Empire, the modern version of the ancient Holy Roman Empire and the medieval Holy Roman German Empire has outgrown narrow-mindedness of names, it wishes to control by whatever tactics…it is the modern face of the ruthless ugly imperialism…. ! !
How science can return to the Islamic world
In the 1980s an imagined "Islamic science" was posed as an alternative to "Western Christian Science." The notion was widely propagated and received support from governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Muslim ideologues in the US, such as Ismail Faruqi and Syed Hussein Nasr, announced that a new science was about to be built on lofty moral principles such as Tawheed (unity of God), Ibadah (worship), Khilafah (Islamic orthodox form of Govt=Islamic Pope+Caesar) , and rejection of Zulm (tyranny against Islam), and that Revelation (Koran)rather than reason would be the ultimate guide to valid knowledge. Others took as literal statements of scientific fact verses from the Qur'an that related to descriptions of the physical world. Those attempts led to many elaborate and expensive but absurd and ridiculous Islamic science conferences around the world. Some scholars calculated the temperature of imaginary Hell, others the chemical composition of the fictional heavenly djinnis and proposed of generating electricity of them these imaginary-beings. None produced a new machine or instrument, conducted an experiment, or even formulated a single testable hypothesis.
A more pragmatic approach, which seeks promotion of regular science rather than Islamic science, is pursued by many institutional Islamic bodies, but being controls by the traditional Muslims, they lacked the dynamism.
History never has any final word, and Muslims could be worse. One need only remember how the Anglican Christian elite perceived the Jews as they entered the US at the opening of the 20th century. Academics such as Henry Herbert Goddard, the well-known eugenicist, described Jews in 1913 as "a hopelessly backward people, largely incapable of adjusting to the new demands of advanced capitalist societies." –a reminiscence of Hitler’s Catholic and Reformed Christian Church ideologists who had similar « revelations »His research found that 83% of Jews were "morons"—a term he popularized to describe the feeble-minded—and he went on to suggest that they should be used for tasks requiring an "immense amount of drudgery."
Progress requires behavioral changes. If Muslim societies are to develop scientific mind and adopt to the technology-culture, they must understand that the latter are not easily reconcilable with religious and superstitious demands made on a fully observant Muslim's time, energy, and mental concentration: toward success in the imaginary life-in-hereafter rather than the real-life-herein
Science can prosper among the miserable humans, who happen to be born as creature as Muslims, once again, but only with a willingness to accept certain basic philosophical and attitudinal changes—a new and rational Weltanschauung that shrugs off the dead hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in religious authority, accepts the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms. The struggle to usher in science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, responsible political system and pluralism.
Orthodox and traditional Muslims see no compatibility between the above requirements and true Islam as they understand it.
In the quest for modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Muslims; Progressive forces have recently been weakened, but not extinguished, as a consequence of the confrontation between Muslim East and the Christian West.
Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state-called the religious fascism. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress.
1. P. Hoodbhoy, Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement
2. P. Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science—Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, Zed Books, London (1991).
Return to secularsites
From a diverse and tolerant culture of fertile lands which characterized dance and music on festive occasions like holi and basant we transitioned to a culture of vast deserts where blood flows to commemorate celebration. While performingsadqa or on the occasion of eid-ul-azha the victim is always a fellow creature. While associating with values of a different culture, romance and beauty of life was to be replaced by a stiff and sober attitude governed by pride superiority and self righteousness laced with intolerance with an exclusivist outlook towards the out-group. Pleasure and fun in this life was to be sacrificed for a luxurious life in the hereafter as the “real” life was supposed to begin after death. The society gradually became repressive and presently a large part thereof considers “pleasure seeking” a sin. During the New Year night when the entire world is having fun, the large majority in our society rejects the onset of the New Year. Our new year, as they say, begins with the first of Muharram with wailing and crying, an activity which then continues for the rest of the year. Basant used to be a festive occasion, which today is no more permissible under various pretexts. Pleasure- seeking is being restricted to mehfil-e-naat, participation in eid-e-milad or attending the tableeghi ijtamah. A few days back the goons of Jamaat-e-Islami threatened to attack a humorous poetry recitation session to be held on world population day i.e. July 11th. It was cancelled as the Punjab government backed out.