In Islam, and with rare exceptions, scientific knowledge has always remained fragmentary and devoid of any desire to make it evolve and succeed. Arab and Muslim countries do not produce knowledge, it is a clear cause. How did we get here?
Par Dr Mounir Hanablia *
One of the references quoted in this book had rightly pointed out that in 1660 St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra were both under construction. But while England produced Newton, India withdrew into itself entangled in its wars, its dynastic struggles and its harems.
One could just as well have added that the military science of Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1730 equaled that of the famous English duke Marlborough, whom no general of Louis XIV (known as the Sun King) had been able to overcome. However in 1764 at the battle of Plassey, the (colonial) troops of Clive, surrounded by those twenty times more numerous of the Nawab of Bengal, had made short work of it; they had taken the precaution of covering their supplies of powder and ammunition with waterproof tarpaulins, and this had enabled them, unlike their adversaries, to have weapons in working order at the end of the storm which had suddenly broken out. That day. It must be said that since Crécy in 1346, when the Genoese crossbowmen of the King of France found themselves unable to bind the ropes of their rain-soaked weapons, the English knew what to expect.
Four centuries behind
Nevertheless, it is not only the conjunctures of the battles to explain the vagaries of history. We can always argue that the Shia dar el-ulum bouyids dispensing secular knowledge were replaced by the Sunni Seljuk medersas of exclusively Charaic teaching, the closure of the Istanbul astronomical observatory on the order of the ulemas, the delay (four centuries) taken to introduce printing presses to the Muslim world when the Arabs had been the first to use paper from China for writing as early as the 10th century. But had everything really played out earlier when the elitist Mu’tazilite rationalists had suffered a decisive defeat against the mob-supported religious clerics led by Al-Ghazali who had placed the revealed text of the Koran above all discussion, any questioning?
Things continued in this way until the 19th century when Jamal Eddine Al-Afghani, Mohamed Abdou, later Mohamed Iqbal, faced with the colonial occupation of Muslim countries, tried to demonstrate the compatibility of Islam with modern science. But with globalization and the appearance of social networks, the deception that all scientific discoveries are actually included in the Koranic text has flourished, obviously to the benefit of Islamists.
Is the Koran therefore an epistemological obstacle of primary importance? If we refer to the text, it is no more so than any other book, and quite the contrary. On the other hand, with respect to the political organization he inspired, that of regimes in which the priest-king reigns over occupied populations by relying on a warrior aristocracy, and on the legitimacy conferred by religious clerics by virtue of a immutable law of the interpretation of the sacred, the answer can only be affirmative.
The separation between powers
In Europe there had been thehabeas corpus and parliament in England, the investiture dispute between Church and Empire, which had prepared the way for the separation between State and Church and between the powers, the right of property, and free enterprise. .
It was free enterprise that ensured the Dutch and then the English the domination of the seas through trading companies, and only certain political guarantees leading to citizenship and the concept of nationhood allowed traders to invest without fear of be dispossessed by the state. And it was always free enterprise that had made possible the technical improvements in navigation and armament necessary for European trade and colonization.
There was nothing like it in Islam where, with rare exceptions, scientific knowledge has always remained fragmentary and devoid of any desire to make it evolve and succeed. The most significant case of this is Spain and Portugal, these two countries which never ceased to use the knowledge bequeathed by the Arabs whom they had just defeated to become leading maritime powers, something which the latter for seven centuries have never fulfilled, probably because they have not felt the need.
established truths
In conclusion, claiming that the quest for knowledge came to a halt with Avicenna and Al-Biruni under the influence of the doctors of the law is only true in one sense; it is even already a little idealizing things in a quest for an ideological essence. If Muslims were interested in Greek, Iranian, and Hindu philosophy, the political powers in place had set the limits not to be crossed. If they were not interested in improving navigation techniques, it was because they used land routes, and cabotage along the coasts of Asia or Africa did not require ships. of high seas, much larger, faster and stronger, the very ones that the Europeans, having forests in abundance, had no choice but to build.
Moreover, the wealth accumulated through trade and conquest did not encourage the questioning of habits or established truths, whether political, social or religious. This prosperity had the same paradoxical effect as the gold of the Americas on Spain, which by buying according to its needs, made the economies of its neighbors work, while neglecting its own, before finding itself ruined.
In the end, more than the epistemological obstacles related or not to religion, it is the geopolitical situation of Islam that has made its decline inevitable. The tragedy is that the open debate to explain the causes and remedy them is still not closed.
* Free practice doctor.
”Islam and science. Put an end to compromises”, essay by Faouzia Farida Charfi, ed. Odile Jacob, Paris 2021, 240 pages.
2023-04-30 08:16:28
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