Saw the first one very nice. Will watch rest.
Jim Al-Khalili, he seems to be quite famous in the science community. What do you know about him? I think I might buy this book by him:
Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed
From what I read about him, he writes a certain amount about the contributions of Islamic science.
- The House of Wisdom and the Legacy of Arabic Science (to be published by Penguin Press in the summer of 2010 ).
- His articles at the Guardian
Which is a bit annoying, as if there is a field of Islamic physics or something. Nobody talks about Hindu Science. I mean who cares. And he also propagates that Arabs used to be great scientists (I agree with the past-tense). Islamic Science, came from conquered territories. I'm not even sure the majority of those Muslim scholars were even arabs!
This why people should stick to their own fields, I would love to know his personal opinion on Islam, God, and religion. I think he is trying to defend Islam, and I'm not sure why? The whole argument about Islamic Science has been made before and it is has not really persuaded the non-muslims that have looked into Islam's history, or that know about the stagnation of scientific research and discoveries in the larger part of the modern muslim world.
The BBC does have a tendency to do hagiography when it comes to Islam. At the same time, some really good programmes regarding Islamism have been done by the BBC, for example, their evisceration of the Muslim Council of Britain, who are an Islamist wolf in sheeps clothing, by the Panorama news show was superb.
But I get the feeling the BBC tend to think it is their duty to project white washing of certain elements of Islam, and Islamic history, as a kind of politically correct gesture. There is room for fair, cogent and rational scepticism and debunking of many of the Dawah-like assertions about Islamic history peddled in that documentary series presented by Rageh Omaar, for example.
Topic: from nothing to life