Theocratic science
Austin Dacey points out an interesting document.
In 2006, ISESCO [the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] published a Guide for the Incorporation of Reproductive Health and Gender Concepts into Islamic Education Curricula, obviously a critically important subject area where some scientific facts are in order. The Guide, which can be found on ISESCO’s Web site, is addressed to curriculum developers, textbook writers, and those responsible for training instructors in formal Islamic education for students aged six to nineteen. Its introduction stresses the need “to supply, at the proper time, adolescents with appropriate health information on the biological aspects within the framework of Islamic rulings and values” and emphasizes “the fact that Sharia, whether in its original or interpretative sources, is the only source for establishing, interpreting, clarifying, and incorporating reproductive health issues, including adolescent health, in the programs of formal education.”
There’s a lot that could be said about that, but one thing in particular is quite important. Defenders of Islamism and Islam and Sharia often like to rebuke critics of same by saying that Islam and Sharia cannot be essentialized because they are not just one thing – they are rather, in some versions of this rebuke, the practices and/or beliefs of all Muslims – which in effect means they are everything and nothing, because there is no way to know what that would be, or what it would not be either.
At any rate, the rebuke and the claim are wrong, as shown by documents like this. ISESCO is an official body of some sort, and ISESCO decidedly assumes there is such a thing as Sharia, ‘whether in its original or interpretative sources.’ It assumes there is such a thing as Sharia, and then having assumed that, it assumes that everything has to be in compliance with it, and then having assumed that, it goes ahead and lays down the law about how to do that. So it’s really somewhat futile for outsiders to claim that Sharia isn’t so bad really because it isn’t any one thing, let a hundred flowers bloom, so…well so there’s just no problem, that’s all. In the real world, official bodies maintain that Sharia is one thing, ‘whether in its original or interpretative sources,’ and that all other things have to do what it says. There is a problem.
In this Guide, as in numerous other documents, ISESCO is only doing its job. Rather than seeking Muslim integration with the global research and academic communities, its stated mission is to advance science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.” In this case, ISESCO does not even do students the service of setting forth the relevant empirical evidence for the purpose of beating it senseless with religious precepts.
An organization for Islamic Science is an organization for a contradiction in terms.
Amazing, isn’t it?! And the paltry number of scientific research papers produced by the member states of the OIC is really stunning. Even Turkey, the most advanced Muslim majority country, produces less in the way of research than a single (that’s just one!) Ivy League university!
It puts the lie to the old lie about Islamic civilisation. Was there ever an Islamic civilisation, or was it merely the fact that Islam so quickly absorbed so many neighbouring peoples and cultures which enriched it for awhile? So it may not have been Islam at all, but Islam’s conquests that provided the civilisational element, which influenced some of the most curious amongst the followers of Islam, who were soon suppressed by the narrowness of Islam itself, and had no descendents, so that what we have is the disaster that today flaunts itself as the perfect society? If Islam is so rich and multifarious, why is it not able to make greater contributions to world culture and knowledge than it seems, by this report from Professor Hoodbhoy (quoted by Dacey), to be making? And then there is the laughably idiotic ISESCO guide about including health and gender concepts into Islamic education curricula, actually available on the ISESCO website, and distributed at a UNHRC meeting on the 60th anniversary of the UDHR.
Or read the stilted prose of the Islamic Declaration of Cultural Diversity for a real laugh! Here’s a little sample speaking of the invaluable initiative of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran:
And we are not supposed to make fun of this either!
Well last I heard, B&W was banned in Iran, so I think we can get away with it!
It’s hardly surprising that they’re so bad at science when they take a greater interest in making their theories consistent with the Koran than making them true.
Surely the fact that the ISESCO even exists is a tacit admission that Islam is not consistent with modern science.
Eric MacDonald,
From what I know of it, the cultural and intellectual achievements of early Islamic civilisation owed more to Persian culture than they did to Islam.
Yes Jakob, the Persians, and the Indians, and the Hellenic Greek speaking population of the Levant, and… I know that my post was more or less just a rant – it made me feel a lot better! – but it is a bit tiresome being told about the wonder that was Islam, and then compare it with the tawdry attempts to build Sharia and Qu’ran and all that stuff into some great civilisational achievement, when all it really shows – when you look at what is being done in the countries of the OIC, for example – is the narrow-minded bullying of a religion which has scarcely changed from the days when it supported a gang of cut-throats from the Arabian peninsula who selected the worst parts of the religions that they encountered to support a regime of brigandage and pillage.
And that’s another rant, of course, but it really is a bit much. Our own religious traditions had finally been forced to accept at least a reasonable degree of rational accommodation, and along comes a religion without a shred of critical awareness which insists on being treated as an equal in a cultural conversation which has already experienced centuries of progress in critical and empirical thinking and exploration of the world, history, morality, political institutions, etc. etc. It’s simply bizarre.
OB:do you know where else this website is banned then? Dawkins’ website is banned in aspiring EU member Turkey.
I wonder if the dismal science performance has any direct relation to the fact that so much school time is taken up learning nonsense.
A report in Nature in 2002 signaled only three areas in which there was much scientific expertise in the Arab world (not the Muslim world). You can probably guess what they are, but for the record: desalination, camel-breeding and falconry.
The original report is behind a paywall. However a later article in Nature refers to it here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7115/full/444028a.html
Stephen, no – I know about Iran only because I used to have an informant there. (She’s now in Canada – where mullahs don’t decide what she can read.)