The appalling consequences of the military technology deployed in the
Gulf War 12 months ago provide a tragic symbol of the encounter between
East and West during the past five centuries: superior military technology
has allowed Western nations to impose their will across the globe, inducing
a prolonged crisis of culture among the losers. Nowhere has this crisis
been more intense than in the Islamic world, where military success had
often been regarded as an outward and visible sign of divine favour after
the Arab armies began to overwhelm their complacent neighbours in the seventh
century.

As a physicist whose career is divided between universities in Pakistan
and the US, Pervez Hoodbhoy’s personal experiences have given him a unique
insight into a number of urgent questions at the very heart of this crisis.
Although he insists that he lacks any professional competence to address
the issues he raises in the book, he maintains that force of circumstance
has compelled him to write. The appendix confirms that he has found himself
engaged in a controversy with proponents of a so-called ‘Islamic science’
which he regards as similar to Christian ‘Creationism’. His book is an attempt
to explain how a hybrid of science and religious fundamentalism could have
received the patronage of President Zia of Pakistan, and to suggest a course
for the future which might prevent his fellow Muslims consigning themselves
to a scientific ghetto.

The cover of the book displays an enthusiastic note from Edward Said,
who claims that ‘any reader, Muslim or non-Muslim, is bound to be affected
by Dr Hood-bhoy’s clear and persuasive arguments’, but the circumstances
described above will almost certainly reduce the impact the book might have
had. Although the title seems to promise a general study of Islam and science,
when Hoodbhoy discusses contemporary issues he rarely moves beyond Pakistan.
Given the varied cir-cumstances of life throughout the Islamic world, even
readers with a special interest in Pakistan are likely to find such a narrow
focus frustrating.

At the same time, his hopes of providing answers to historical questions
lead him into precisely the sort of areas he admits are outside his training.
The account of the ways in which the medieval Christian church attempted
to suppress early scientists, which Abdus Salam in his preface regards as
particularly impressive, consists of little more than a list of ten examples
drawn from A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology published almost
a century ago. Additional comments made by the author himself indicate virtually
no knowledge of the structure of medieval European society, or of the relationship
between sacred and secular learning, and include a condemnation which even
readers who are not anxious to return to the Middle Ages may regard as rather
extreme: ‘the suppression of scientific thought by the medieval Church represents
one of the blackest periods of human history’.

This description is in marked contrast with Hoodbhoy’s account of the
French Revolution as ‘a landmark victory for the intellectual and physical
liberation of the French people’. Throughout the book, one encounters simplistic
dichotomies between what the author regards as reason and superstition,
and these raise serious questions about the sort of reader he has in mind.
Hoodbhoy is evidently a ‘modernist’ of the old school, and his account of
the nature of science and the scientific method might almost have be taken
from a textbook for elementary schools 40 years ago.

While he will have been very provoked by ‘Islamic scientists’ who seem
to believe that celestial beings mentioned in the Quran can be used to solve
Pakistan’s energy problem, his frustration has led him to adopt a stance
which will seem anachronistic or reactionary to general readers who are
now familiar with books attempting to lead them through the strange worlds
of chaos theory or artificial intelligence.

Given Hoodbhoy’s own modesty, it may seem unfair to press the point,
but if the general reader will not be convinced by his arguments, who will
be? Specialists in the history of Islamic science will learn nothing from
his chapters on the subject. He does not seem to be familiar with research
which might have strengthened his own arguments, and of all the publications
by dozens of specialist historians, only a single article by A. I. Sabra
is cited, and then only in support of the obvious point that Nestorian Christians
played a major role in translating Greek texts into Arabic.

Conservative Muslims who might be attracted to the ‘Islamic science’
which so worries Hoodbhoy are also unlikely to be convinced, since he finds
it difficult to answer the basic questions at the centre of the dispute.
At times he seems to regard science as morally neutral, but at other times
as morally positive because its very neutrality means that it is part of
the process of enlightenment.

He also maintains that Western science is more than simply Western,
because it is universal, but this is precisely the claim which conservatives
have made a point of rejecting: they do not see a tradition so obviously
tied to the history of the West as a system of objective, neutral or universal
truth. Indeed, even if the claims for neutrality were justified, the lack
of moral commitment this neutrality implies would itself be seen as contrary
to Islam.

No account of the glories of early Chinese, Indian or Islamic science
is likely to remove conservative anxiety, and in the end the question would
not seem to be about the kind of science which is compatible with Islam,
but rather about the kind of Islam which is compatible with science. The
Islam in which Hoodbhoy maintains that science can flourish is almost certainly
not the kind of Islam his opponents would like to see.

This means that the argument is likely to be decided according to the
rules of theology rather than the history of science, and Hoodbhoy may have
had more justification than he realised when he claimed that the debate
lay outside his competence. Nevertheless, his modesty and sincerity make
his courage in addressing issues avoided by many specialists all the more
admirable. Even if his arguments might have been refined, there is much
in the book that needed to be said, and much that can be read with profit,
especially about science education in Pakistan. I hope he will return to
the subject.

It is with this in mind that Hoodbhoy provides a useful critique of
attempts by other authors to discuss Islamic science as if the realities
of modern life simply did not exist, and Muslims could wish themselves back
to the numinous realms of the medieval alchemists. This is a very serious
question for anyone attempting to revive the glories of earlier centuries,
and although Hoodbhoy may risk making the same mistake himself when he recruits
Ibn Sina or al-Razi to prove that ‘the seeds of modernism’ can be detected
among famous Muslim scientists a thousand years ago, it is an area in which
conservative Muslims, Christians, Hindus or anyone else ought to take great
care.

In addition, his arguments are often confusing: to support claims for
the ‘oneness’ of mankind, he provides a brief account of the linguist Noam
Chomsky’s theories of a ‘language acquisition device’, although even if
this could be demonstrated to exist, it is difficult to see why it would
prove that ‘human thought and behaviour are entirely universal’ and that
the development of science in Europe was therefore ‘utterly accidental’.
Furthermore, while Hoodbhoy seems to think the point is essential to his
hopes of encouraging contemporary Muslims to study science, his lengthy
accounts of why the scientific and technological revolution occurred in
Europe rather than the Islamic world suggest that he does not really believe
it anyway.

Roderick Grierson is a Syriac specialist, director of the forthcoming
Islamic science exhibition The House of Wisdom, and founder of the history
of science section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

IN THE bitter controversy which has followed the publication of Salman
Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the British public has been surprised
by the claim that while many of us might like to believe that our society
is superior to others because of its liberalism, rationalism and objectivity,
these qualities are not absolute. They are merely part of a system of belief
that is culturally determined, and should not be imposed upon members of
other cultures.

I would not presume to guess at Ziauddin Sardar’s opinions on the questions
raised by the Rushdie affair, and I hope he will forgive my beginning a
review of his new book Explorations in Islamic Science by referring to it,
but his book will have a significance for readers beyond specialists in
the history and philosophy of Islamic science or in Third World development.
It is a con tribution to a debate regarding the relationship between Western
culture and the rest of the world, and this debate has profound implications
for our society as a whole.

It is Sardar’s contention that Western science poses a grave threat
to Muslim identity, because it reflects Western rather than Islamic values.
Indeed, he believes that Western science poses a grave threat to the entire
planet, because its research and application are divorced from any sense
of ethics or social responsibility. To defend his thesis, he examines the
nature of ancient traditions, including the Greek and Chinese, the accuracy
of different interpretations of medieval Islamic science, and the impact
of recent studies in the philosophy of science on our understanding of the
nature of modern scientific research.

The impressive number of his other publications and the energy of his
style suggest that the book was composed in some haste. It is not surprising
some serious problems arise.

In a survey of this sort, it is almost essential to rely on secondary
sources, but since Sardar’s notes sometimes refer to titles that are not
included in the bibliography, it is difficult to be certain which sources
he has consulted. Nevertheless, the source listed for his account of the
history of Greek science is a Penguin paperback that first appeared 46 years
ago, was revised in 1961, and has been dropped from its list as antiquated.
His account of Chinese science seems to be based on the second volume of
Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, which is now 35 years
old.

Sardar conducts much of his argument through naive generalisations.
When he tells us that ‘the major characteristics of the Chinese people is
(sic) that everyone, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, male or female,
has profound respect for life’, it is difficult to know what to make of
such an assertion, especially when the Chinese are contrasted with the Greeks
who ‘were generally irreverent and disdainful, had a great opinion of themselves
and despised all other people’. Chinese xenophobia is as well-documented
as Greek, but is not included in Sardar’s analysis, and he seems unwittingly
to perpetuate the Orientalist myths, which imagine the East to possess a
profound understanding of life lost to the West through its obsession with
the intellect.

Sardar’s account of the history of Islamic science is hampered by what
appears to be an attempt to separate the history of Greek philosophy in
the Islamic world from the history of Greek science in the Islamic world,
so that the former can be presented as alien, and therefore rejected, and
the latter presented as intrinsically Islamic, and therefore retained as
a suitable model for Islamic science in the future. As a result, his account
bears almost no relation to what we know of the translation schools in which
both Greek philosophy and science were appropriated by the Arabs, and leads
to contradictory descriptions of the same activity. So we read that the
‘celebrated House of Wisdom’ was established from motives which regarded
science as an act of piety, but Sardar later says that rulers like the caliph
of al-Mamun who established the House of Wisdom, funded ‘the translation
of a vast corpus of Greek thought’ to provide ‘legit-imacy for their authoritarianism
and perpetuation of their dynasties – positions which could not be justified
within Islam’.

At times, errors of fact completely undermine Sardar’s argument. For
example, he supports his claim for superior ethical standards among Islamic
scientists by citing, among others, the translator and physician Hunain
ibn Ishaq, who was conscious that the results of his research ‘could only
be put to an Islamically acceptable use’. He refused to make poisons, claiming
that his religion and his profession prevented him from such an act. But
Hunain was not Muslim; he was Christian.

The point is of additional interest, given Sardar’s remarks elsewhere
on the importance of confidence in one’s own culture, for the activities
of this Christ ian translator and his Muslim patrons should be reasons for
pride among Muslims even today. When Sardar remarks that Greek philosophy
‘tried to co-opt Islam’, the statement is absurd not only because it depicts
activity by impersonal forces rather than by patrons and translators, but
also because it assumes that it is in the nature of things for Muslims to
have been victims of Western cultural aggression. I would suggest, on the
contrary, that what is often called the transmission of Greek philosophy
and science to the Arabs was in fact an appropriation of Greek learning
by Muslims for their own purposes. It produced a dramatic increase in cultural
and scientific activity almost unrivalled in history, and Muslim pride ought
to be all the greater because the tolerance of other beliefs, which enabled
the participation of Jews and Christians, stood in such contrast to European
attitudes at the time.

To defend contemporary Islam from the threat of Western science, Sardar
argues that, since truth is relative and merely a reflection of political
power, one is entitled to choose what one assumes to be true on the basis
of beliefs held in other contexts. In this he relies on recent West ern
philosophers of science, including the maverick Paul Feyerabend. He thereby
adopts an approach he rejects when he encounters it elsewhere: he addresses
questions of Islamic culture with techniques devel oped for the West. Feyerabend
describes himself as ‘a flippant Dadaist’ and his critique emerges from
the structures of modern Western culture. As the historian of Arabic poetry
M. M. Badawi has remarked, while it might be a useful corrective to advocate
the irrational in a society like France, it would be quite different to
suggest it in the Islamic world.

As for the failure of modern science to answer specifically Islamic
needs, there is nothing specifically Islamic about the examples Sardar provides,
such as malaria or diarrhoea. For Muslims in Britain neither of these diseases
constitutes an immediate threat, and for Christians in Latin America they
do. To suggest that modern science is incapable of addressing the needs
of Muslim society because the inhabitants of more southerly regions are
threatened by the consequences of climate and lack of hygiene regardless
of their religious affiliation is decidedly perverse.

Since Sardar is attempting to develop an Islamic science free from Western
influence, he turns for guidance to the great Islamic achievements of the
past, but only after he has sifted the history of Islamic science for what
is ‘really Islamic’. Such a policy would virtually destroy the history of
Islamic science as a historical discipline. In any case, Sardar shares the
general confusion about confessional identity and cultural identity, referring
with approval to the great physician al-Razi whose rejection of prophecy
and revealed religion would seem to disqualify him as a Muslim in the former
sense. Sardar’s proposal would also be quite impractical in the foreseeable
future. Unlike sources for the history of Chinese science, thousands of
Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts have not yet been catalogued, let
alone edited and published. Furthermore, since the history of Islamic science
is the history of a medieval science, the question of her meneutics becomes
very difficult. When Donald Hill, who is the leading historian of Islamic
mechanical engineering, reviewed Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Islamic Science,
he was not being sarcastic in asking whether the author’s conviction that
medieval Islamic science was superior to modern science would mean that
he was also convinced that the geocentric theory of planetary motion was
superior to the heliocentric.

I could provide a longer list of problems, and although Sardar’s arguments
are not convincing, the questions he is attempting to address are difficult.
I am sure that the present book will not be his final statement on the subject.
I look forward very much to his next book. His enthusiasm to follow the
precepts of the hadith and ‘seek knowledge even unto China’ indicates that
he will make every attempt to find answers worthy of the great scientists,
engineers and physicians of medieval Islam to whom the modern world owes
so great a debt.

Roderick Grierson is director of a forthcoming exhibition on the history
of Islamic science.