Islam, science and Muslims

Islam & Science, June, 2003 by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

I disagree completely with Muhammad Ali Pasha and others who said just go to Europe and learn how to make guns and come back and have a better army and forget everything else. We cannot do that; everything goes together--from the making of guns to computers and cell phones, to making of steel, to making of airplanes. Technology itself imposes upon man a type of worldview. It changes man into a machine in many ways. And Islamic civilization must try in every way possible not to have that happen to it. And when I say that governments have no choice now, I do not mean that we will never have a choice. But at the present moment, we have to employ a delaying tactic. That is, rather than jumping headlong into emulating Western science and technology, we must do it where it is absolutely essential, where there is no other choice--meanwhile buying for ourselves time to create our own science and, insha'Allah, one day our own technology.

Iqbal: At one level, this whole question of the revival of Islamic scientific tradition, I feel, is intimately connected to the revival of Islamic tradition of learning itself.

Nasr: That is right.

Iqbal: You were fortunate to have had the opportunity to grow up in an ambience permeated by the presence of masters of traditional philosophy and Sufism, something you have eloquently described in your Intellectual Biography, (1) but what opportunities are left for Muslims to grow up in such a rich intellectual and spiritual atmosphere? I am particularly thinking about the Muslims living in the West: How do we provide that ambience to our young men and women in the West? We have not been able to create any institutions in the West, where our young generation can have a chance to imbibe the tradition.

Nasr: Let me first turn to the Muslim world. What we need to do is rather than imitate the Western educational institutions--which we have been doing for the past two hundred years since the time of Syed Ahmed Khan, and others--to strengthen our own traditional Islamic educational institutions. These institutions (madaris) unfortunately have become more and more narrow in their vision in many Muslim countries during the last few centuries, for example, the exclusion of the teaching of philosophy and logic, not to talk about mathematics and astronomy from their curricula. By saying that we need to reestablish and re-strengthen the madaris, I do not mean to say that it should be done in any sense of violent exclusiveness, political or otherwise. I mean the revival of the real and the authentic madrasah system. Second, we need to strengthen, within the Muslim World, the traditional method of transmission of knowledge and the combining of knowledge with ethics and spiritual qualities and virtues, which must be transmitted along with knowledge. And this is something that has to be done throughout the Muslim World--from the madaris of Malaysia to those of Morocco. In certain areas, for example, like Iran, there are very hopeful signs: many new madaris have been established recently, for instance those in Qum. Of course the quality is not very high in many cases because of the very large number of students, but there are some institutions where the quality is also high. Moreover, there is a large number of very fine young scholars, who also have experienced the transmission of the intellectual and spiritual aspects of Islam, and not only the legal. And we need to strengthen that total traditional educational experience within the Muslim World. It has not died down, by any means, but we just need to strengthen it.