"The religious state of Islamic science"

Read the full interview with Taner Edis by Steve Paulson on Salon.com.

Excerpts:

"even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.....it's important to distinguish between basic science in, say, physics or biology, and more technology-oriented work. Muslims have been trying to catch up to Western countries for the past couple of centuries. Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the contribution to scientific research is much lower......It permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life......Didn't Western colonialism also contribute to the decline of science in the Islamic world? .....There is no overarching cause that single-handedly accounts for Muslim backwardness in science. Western colonialism has much to answer for.....a dilemma for many people in the Muslim world who are thinking about science and religion. On the one hand, there is a desire to catch up, especially in the technological realm which underpins the military and commercial superiority of the Western world. On the other hand, there is a desire to adopt modern science in such a way that local religious culture is not corrupted. So yes, they are very concerned not to go down the Western path......How does this play out in schools? What happens depends very much on which Muslim country we're talking about. In many Muslim countries, you don't have much creationism, but only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we've seen creationism appearing in Turkey's official science textbooks that are taught in high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world......What makes it hard to be a physicist in Turkey? First of all, factors that have nothing to do with religion. Turkey is a poor country. The amount of resources that they can devote to basic scientific investigations is very low. The physics department in Turkey where I got my undergraduate degree had some very good teachers, but the resources we had were fairly poor compared to any American university."

Taner Edis is the author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam.