http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-scienceAny thoughts?
Makes me wonder whether the gap is too big between current Islamic state and the modern world for Islam to ever reform into something milder and not dying with a bang -a sudden mass decline in believers. Perhaps there will be a threshold point when no longer there can exist the discrepancy between nurtured logical thinking (goal aspired to by society at large, particularly one with the internet info era) and such a religion as Islam.
Just shared the final section here (I haven't read the whole article, it's quite long):
A Gold Standard?
In trying to explain the Islamic world’s intellectual laggardness, it is tempting to point to the obvious factors: authoritarianism, bad education, and underfunding (Muslim states spend significantly less than developed states on research and development as a percentage of GDP). But these reasons are all broad and somewhat crude, and raise more questions than answers. 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 decline of Islam and the rise of Christianity was a development that was and remains deeply humiliating for Muslims. Since Islam tended to ascribe its political power to its theological superiority over other faiths, its fading as a worldly power raised profound questions about where a wrong turn was made. Over at least the past century, Muslim reformers have been debating how best to reacquire the lost honor. In the same period, the Muslim world tried, and failed, to reverse its decline by borrowing Western technology and sociopolitical ideas, including secularization and nationalism. But these tastes of “modernization” turned many Muslims away from modernity. This raises a question: Can and should Islam’s past achievements serve as a standard for Islam’s future? After all, it is quite common to imply, as President Obama did, that knowledge of the Golden Age of Arabic science will somehow exhort the Islamic world to improve itself and to hate the West less.
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. Islamism, the cause of violence that the world is now agonizingly familiar with, arises from doctrines characterized by a deep nostalgia for the Islamic classical period. Even today, suggesting that the Koran isn’t coeternal with God can make one an infidel.
And yet intellectual progress and cultural openness were once encouraged among many Arabic societies. So to the extent that appeals to the salutary classical attitude can be found in the Islamic tradition, the fanatical false nostalgia might be tamed. Some reformers already point out that many medieval Muslims embraced reason and other ideas that presaged modernity, and that doing so is not impious and does not mean simply giving up eternal rewards for materialistic ones. On an intellectual level, this effort could be deepened by challenging the Ash’ari orthodoxy that has dominated Sunni Islam for a thousand years — that is, by asking whether al-Ghazali and his Ash’arite followers really understood nature, theology, and philosophy better than the Mu’tazilites.
But there are reasons why exhortation to emulate Muslim ancestors may also be misguided. One is that medieval Islam does not offer a decent political standard. When compared to modern Western standards, the Golden Age of Arabic science was decidedly not a Golden Age of equality. While Islam was comparatively tolerant at the time of members of other religions, the kind of tolerance we think of today was never a virtue for early Muslims (or early Christians, for that matter). As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Jews of Islam (1984), giving equal treatment to followers and rejecters of the true faith would have been seen not only as an absurdity but also an outright “dereliction of duty.” Jews and Christians were subjected to official second-class sociopolitical status beginning in Mohammed’s time, and Abbasid-era oppressions also included religious persecution and the eradication of churches and synagogues. The Golden Age was also an era of widespread slavery of persons deemed to be of even lower class. For all the estimable achievements of the medieval Arabic world, it is quite clear that its political and social history should not be made into a celebrated standard.
There is a more fundamental reason, however, why it may not make much sense to urge the Muslim world to restore those parts of its past that valued rational and open inquiry: namely, a return to the Mu’tazilites may not be enough. Even the most rationalist schools in Islam did not categorically argue for the primacy of reason. As Ali A. Allawi argues in The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009), “None of the free-thinking schools in classical Islam — such as the Mu’tazila — could ever entertain the idea of breaking the God-Man relationship and the validity of revelation, in spite of their espousal of a rationalist philosophy.” Indeed, in 1889 the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher noted in his essay “The Attitude of Orthodox Islam Toward the ‘Ancient Sciences’” that it was not only Ash’arite but Mu’tazilite circles that “produced numerous polemical treatises against Aristotelian philosophy in general and against logic in particular.” Even before al-Ghazali’s attack on the Mu’tazilites, engaging in Greek philosophy was not exactly a safe task outside of auspicious but rather ephemeral conditions.
But more importantly, merely popularizing previous rationalist schools would not go very far in persuading Muslims to reflect on the theological-political problem of Islam. For all the great help that the rediscovery of the influential Arabic philosophers (especially al-Farabi, Averroës, and Maimonides) would provide, no science-friendly Islamic tradition goes nearly far enough, to the point that it offers a theological renovation in the vein of Luther and Calvin — a reinterpretation of Islam that challenges the faith’s comprehensive ruling principles in a way that simultaneously convinces Muslims that they are in fact returning to the fundamentals of their faith.
There is a final reason why it makes little sense to exhort Muslims to their own past: while there are many things that the Islamic world lacks, pride in heritage is not one of them. What is needed in Islam is less self-pride and more self-criticism. Today, self-criticism in Islam is valued only insofar as it is made as an appeal to be more pious and less spiritually corrupt. And yet most criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the West. This prejudice — what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab world) “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of Islam’s biggest obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox belief irrelevant, and it closes off debate about the nature and history of Islam.
In this respect, inquiry into the history of Arabic science, and the recovery and research of manuscripts of the era, may have a beneficial effect — so long as it is pursued in an analytical spirit. That would mean that Muslims would use it as a resource within their own tradition to critically engage with their philosophical, political, and founding flaws. If that occurs, it will not arise from any Western outreach efforts, but will be a consequence of Muslims’ own determination, creativity, and wisdom — in short, those very traits that Westerners rightly ascribe to the Muslims of the Golden Age.
Topic: 'Why the arabic world turned away from science..'