Even tough Muslim world is not perceived as leading in science today (far from it) they had their Golden Age between 750–1350 CE when they named many of the stars (Achernar, Aldebaran, Algol, Altair, Betelgeuse, Deneb...), they invented alchemy and they inherited science from the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians, mathematics and medicine from India, literature from Persia, and philosophy and logic from Greece. Which was inspired by Mu’tazila movement that called, not just for the nurturing of this existing knowledge, but also the investigation of new areas.
But they failed miserably in the mean time to the "religious sciences": the various techniques worked out to index and interpret the Quran and the Sunnah.
In 1988 Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy described in this article few recent papers presented by self-styled Islamic scientists, several of them addressing the October 1987 International Conference on Scientific Miracles of Qur’an and Sunnah. He described some of the science programs that were in that conference like "Panel Discussion on Things Known Only to Allah"
Among these supposedly scientific papers was one from Mohammed Muttalib of the Department of Earth Sciences at Egypt's Al-Azhar University. This geologist advanced his theory that the deep roots of mountains act like pegs holding in place the earth's outer layers, which would otherwise be thrown off into space by the planet's spin.
At a similar conference the previous year in Karachi, the International Seminar on Quran and Science, Arshad Ali Beg of the Pakistan Council for Scientific and Industrial Research announced he’d derived a mathematical formula suitable for calculating the amount of hypocrisy present in any given society.
At the same conference, Salim Mehmud, the chair of SUPARCO (Pakistan’s NASA), used Relativity to explain how the Prophet had ascended to heaven for a meeting with God and been able to return within mere moments.
Hoodbhoy observed wryly that the seventy or so papers scheduled for presentation at the Islamabad conference were all vetted beforehand by a panel of scholars to ensure their theological acceptability; not one was checked by a scientist.
Or take S. Bashiruddin Mahmood who was once a senior director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission wrote a book Mechanics of the Doomsday and Life after Death about transformation of the soul to the passage of an electric current.
Same Mahmood who, some years earlier, had been keen to investigate the possibilities of communicating with djinns in order to construct djinn power plants and thereby solve Pakistan’s energy problems at a stroke.
Of course Mahmood isn’t the only modern Islamic scientist with a penchant for djinn studies. Hoodbhoy directs us to the paper "Dichotomy of Insan and Jinn & Their Destiny" by Safdar Jang Rajput. This appeared in the journal Science and Technology in the Islamic World in March 1985. According to Hoodbhoy, Rajput contends that djinns, as fiery entities, must be formed from methane or similar hydrocarbons because these burn without smoke (after all, there are no reports of anyone ever having seen a djinn giving off smoke).
Or in 2007 Turkish American physicist and skeptic, Taner Edis, in his book An Illusion of Harmony discusses the view of djinns’ role in science that’s been put forward by the Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gülen. It’s Gülen’s belief that djinns are likely responsible for such mental illnesses as schizophrenia (here we have something close to the christian view of psychological illness as demonic possession), and he states also that there are instances of not just mental illnesses but cancer being driven out by prayer (or, as christians might say, exorcism). He sees a possibility for djinns to be put to useful work.
In 2006 Ziauddin Sardar, Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Arts at the City University, London, gave a lecture to the Royal Society where he did start with some of the contributions Muslims gave in the ancient pas but then he concluded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7DdkI72GfI
“scientific” experiments have been devised to discover what is mentioned in the Qur’an but not known to science—for example, the programme to harness the energy of the jinns. . . . This reductive fundamentalism now embraces Creationism and is generating a growing movement for “Intelligent Design” in the Muslim world. . . .
These two trends, the fundamentalist and the mystical, suggest that real science has almost evaporated from Muslim consciousness. In a recent survey, Nature noted, today’s Muslim states “barely register on indices of research spending, patents and publications.” And it concludes the situation is not just bad; it is set to get worse.
But they failed miserably in the mean time to the "religious sciences": the various techniques worked out to index and interpret the Quran and the Sunnah.
In 1988 Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy described in this article few recent papers presented by self-styled Islamic scientists, several of them addressing the October 1987 International Conference on Scientific Miracles of Qur’an and Sunnah. He described some of the science programs that were in that conference like "Panel Discussion on Things Known Only to Allah"
Among these supposedly scientific papers was one from Mohammed Muttalib of the Department of Earth Sciences at Egypt's Al-Azhar University. This geologist advanced his theory that the deep roots of mountains act like pegs holding in place the earth's outer layers, which would otherwise be thrown off into space by the planet's spin.
At a similar conference the previous year in Karachi, the International Seminar on Quran and Science, Arshad Ali Beg of the Pakistan Council for Scientific and Industrial Research announced he’d derived a mathematical formula suitable for calculating the amount of hypocrisy present in any given society.
At the same conference, Salim Mehmud, the chair of SUPARCO (Pakistan’s NASA), used Relativity to explain how the Prophet had ascended to heaven for a meeting with God and been able to return within mere moments.
Hoodbhoy observed wryly that the seventy or so papers scheduled for presentation at the Islamabad conference were all vetted beforehand by a panel of scholars to ensure their theological acceptability; not one was checked by a scientist.
Or take S. Bashiruddin Mahmood who was once a senior director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission wrote a book Mechanics of the Doomsday and Life after Death about transformation of the soul to the passage of an electric current.
Same Mahmood who, some years earlier, had been keen to investigate the possibilities of communicating with djinns in order to construct djinn power plants and thereby solve Pakistan’s energy problems at a stroke.
Of course Mahmood isn’t the only modern Islamic scientist with a penchant for djinn studies. Hoodbhoy directs us to the paper "Dichotomy of Insan and Jinn & Their Destiny" by Safdar Jang Rajput. This appeared in the journal Science and Technology in the Islamic World in March 1985. According to Hoodbhoy, Rajput contends that djinns, as fiery entities, must be formed from methane or similar hydrocarbons because these burn without smoke (after all, there are no reports of anyone ever having seen a djinn giving off smoke).
Or in 2007 Turkish American physicist and skeptic, Taner Edis, in his book An Illusion of Harmony discusses the view of djinns’ role in science that’s been put forward by the Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gülen. It’s Gülen’s belief that djinns are likely responsible for such mental illnesses as schizophrenia (here we have something close to the christian view of psychological illness as demonic possession), and he states also that there are instances of not just mental illnesses but cancer being driven out by prayer (or, as christians might say, exorcism). He sees a possibility for djinns to be put to useful work.
In 2006 Ziauddin Sardar, Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Arts at the City University, London, gave a lecture to the Royal Society where he did start with some of the contributions Muslims gave in the ancient pas but then he concluded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7DdkI72GfI
“scientific” experiments have been devised to discover what is mentioned in the Qur’an but not known to science—for example, the programme to harness the energy of the jinns. . . . This reductive fundamentalism now embraces Creationism and is generating a growing movement for “Intelligent Design” in the Muslim world. . . .
These two trends, the fundamentalist and the mystical, suggest that real science has almost evaporated from Muslim consciousness. In a recent survey, Nature noted, today’s Muslim states “barely register on indices of research spending, patents and publications.” And it concludes the situation is not just bad; it is set to get worse.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
