Some are vocally frustrated with the canonical status of paranormal pseudoscience. They don’t see the value in proving that Bigfoot still doesn’t exist. Others worry about expanding the movement’s mandate beyond its areas of special expertise, or turning skepticism into one liberal or libertarian political pressure group among many. The question is how to accomplish important things without attempting things that others do better.

The Division of Labor Principle

I begin with the premise that the primary mission of organized skepticism is not simply to gather up self-identifying skeptics into a flock of like-minded individuals in which they will feel at home. Nor is it simply to witness to those outside the flock in hopes of persuading them to embrace the worldview of critical rationalism and scientific naturalism. If flocking is necessary, and witnessing is sometimes appropriate, it is because they help organized skepticism to carry out some other more foundational activity.

That activity is service. As Daniel Loxton has put it, organized skepticism provides an essential service to the public. At its best, it protects people from deception and misinformation, it empowers people to improve their health and well-being, and it contributes to public discourse on matters of public policy and the rights of citizens. The question is, how can we be of most service?

Prudence recommends an intellectual division of labor. Skeptics should not attempt to duplicate the efforts of those who are in a better position to be of service. For example, The Innocence Project is exposing faulty forensic science and eyewitness testimony in the wrongful convictions of hundreds of people in the United States who have thus far been exonerated by DNA evidence. As much as I think this is noble work, I think skeptics would be mistaken to go there, even though they would find bad thinking to discredit with evidence. Bad thinking is happening all over the place. Since in this instance there is already a specialized scientific field of forensics, experts in this field (as well as criminal law) are better placed than skeptics to be of service.

The successes of organized skepticism on its canonical topics can be attributed to a unique expertise on these topics. These are areas that attract, in Daniel’s phrase, “enthusiasts but no legitimate experts.” Here the phenomena are believed to lie beyond the reach of normal science, either because they fall in between the traditional disciplinary boundaries (e.g., astrology) or beyond the ken of empirical methods altogether (e.g., miracles). Skeptics are the experts at formulating and evidentially supporting naturalistic explanations of phenomena believed to lie beyond the reach normal science. They labor in the disputed borderlands of science.

The Beneficence Principle

Among the phenomena in the borderlands, skeptics should concentrate on those that do the most harm. This will often mean looking beyond national and cultural borders.

A study published by UNICEF in April 2010, Children Accused of Witchcraft: An Anthropological Study of Contemporary Practices in Africa, finds that “in a large majority of African countries, executions of alleged witches have reached alarming levels,” specifically,

Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria and the United Republic of Tanzania. . . . In Limpopo Province in South Africa, according to unofficial estimates, 389 people were allegedly killed between 1985 and 1995; and between 1996 and 2001 more than 600 people were killed by lynching in the same province. Thousands of elderly people, especially women, have been accused of witchcraft and then beaten and/or killed in Tanzania.

Large numbers of children are being made the victims of witchcraft allegations in the Congo Basin, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria. Particularly vulnerable are children who are different: orphans; those with albinism; those whose birth was considered abnormal—for example, premature or in a breech position; those with a physical disability or illness such as Down Syndrome, autism, or stuttering; even those who are simply exceptionally thoughtful, willful, or withdrawn.

Leo Igwe is a campaigner against witchcraft allegations in Akwa Ibom State in southeastern Nigeria. He has been harassed, jailed, and beaten for his activities in defense of children’s rights. As Leo points out, institutions like UNICEF will only go so far in investigating this scourge.

The document carefully avoided doing a critical evaluation of claims or accusations associated with witchcraft. The study did not come out with a position statement as to whether witches exist or not or whether claims associated with witchcraft are true or false. This report did not do justice to the topic and phenomenon of witchcraft accusation because it did not provide answers to questions that have been boggling the minds of Africans for ages, such as: Is witchcraft science or superstition? Is witchcraft myth or reality? Do witches actually exist or are they imaginary entities?

Nigerian activist Leo Igwe

In Leo’s experience, the common belief among the “so called African elite” is that “the veracity or validity of witchcraft claims is beyond the scope of ‘Western’ science but within the ambit of ‘African science.’” Here is an urgent human rights problem in the heart of skeptics’ traditional territory.

Could skeptic activists in North America be of service? When I asked this of Leo Igwe, he responded with a resounding yes. They can be very useful allies, he said, most immediately by offering “training and transfer of expertise,” fostering international networks, and helping to fund local campaigns “because the threats of dogma, fraudulent, paranormal and fringe science claims are global. So combating them requires a global approach.”

A successful model of skeptical impact can already be found in the southern Indian context, where campaigns on witchcraft and sorcery, or banamati, are led by rationalists. Interdisciplinary teams of doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, social scientists, hypnotists, and magicians visit affected villages. They interview the accused and their alleged “victims,” educate the community, and help to train local police on effective enforcement and prevention.

Sadly, the need for such work is abundant. Fortunately, abundant too are local rationalist activists who are seeking allies. Organized skeptics in North America would do well to draw on the tradition of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER magazine and the Center for Inquiry, which have always been global in scope. By looking beyond their borders, they can engage with new partners and discover new ways in which their unique expertise can be put to the most good.

But more than these happy changes, what struck me were the things that have remained the same: the topics of conversation. Going to the meeting with no professional obligations and after a period of some remove, I could regard the proceedings with the eye of an anthropologist. Under that gaze, the remarkable thing was just how non-obvious, even peculiar is the selection of subjects that characterize contemporary organized skepticism. I will illustrate with an unscientific sampling of presentation titles from the TAM program: Defending Evolution in the Classroom and Beyond, Skepticism on TV, Problems in Paranormal Investigation, A Skeptical Look at Aliens, Placebo Medicine, and The Magic of Science.

The titles vary across skeptics meetings, but at the core are the now-familiar topics: psychics, monsters, ghosts, UFOs, creationism, alternative and complementary medicine, popularization of science, and, somewhat less reliably, false memory syndrome, communication with the dead, faith healing, doomsdays prophesies, conspiracy theories, climate science, fringe science, and science and faith. This combination, while not exhaustive, represents a kind of canon, a statistical mode of the set of conversations and at the same time a normative model of what is worthy of talking about. If the particular combination that makes up the canon seems quite unamazing and natural to those in the community, that is precisely the point. To the outsider, however, it can appear quite odd and contingent. What is it, besides the paper of the conference programs they are printed on, that binds together ginkgo biloba and El Chupacabra, cold reading and cosmic fine tuning? Why this canon?

The Founder Effect

I believe the explanation is primarily historical and social in nature. If I were qualified to speculate, I would appeal to a Founder Effect, to mass culture, and to politics. The founding heroes of modern organized skepticism, men such as Carl Sagan, James Randi, Martin Gardner, Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, Ken Frazier, and Isaac Asimov, brought with them a unique constellation of disciplinary backgrounds, talents, personal interests, and professional and social networks. This idiosyncratic mix—to which we can add the influence of the inimitable Houdini—was already fixed in the small initial population of skeptics before it began to expand.

Furthermore, the founders were responding to a particular moment in the popular culture and mass media—primarily in the U.S.—feeding public fascination with certain fashionable flavors of flim-flam. Reflecting on the 30-year anniversary of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Paul Kurtz enumerated the objects of early efforts: Astrology, parapsychology, near-death experiences, fire walking, UFOs and alien abduction, past-life regression, and false-memory syndrome—to which I would add faith healing. These public fascinations typically had elements of pseudoscience and of the paranormal. They were claims that not only had thereto escaped rigorous empirical investigation, but that were purported to be permanently beyond its power and scope. They resided on the disputed borderlands of science.

The constituency that sprang up around the work of the founding generation constituted a cross-section of educated, middle-class North Americans and Europeans. In order not to alienate this constituency, the burgeoning organizations would gravitate around the ideological mean of their politics, avoiding extensive forays into political, moral, and religious issues that were deemed divisive.

The problem of the skeptical canon kept me up for too many late nights at the Center for Inquiry offices, where it was the subject of ongoing debate with Kurtz and my then-colleague D.J. Grothe, the ebullient former magician (and former evangelical Christian) who is now obviously flourishing as president of the JREF. The canon had two sources of instability built into from the beginning. Because it gave pride of place to those paranormal claims that had gathered a pseudoscientific fog around them, it could easily come to embrace other areas of pseudoscience or untested claims beyond the paranormal borderlands of science, such as herbal remedies and urban legends.

Furthermore, most first-generation skeptics took on two quite different projects. They would perform the public service of investigating paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, while at the same time taking on the monumental social project of promulgating the philosophical outlook that provides the rationale for this service: scientific naturalism and critical rationalism. But defending a scientific and rational analysis of something is not the same thing as defending science and reason, and an organization designed to undertake the former may not be best-equipped to undertake the latter. The U.S. Geological Survey provides the public with reliable scientific information about earthquakes, but it leaves the teaching of seismology—to say nothing of “the methods of science”—to others.

By the early 2000s, during my tenure at CFI, Kurtz was stressing a broad mission of “public understanding of science” that sought to “explicate the methods of scientific inquiry and the nature of the scientific outlook,” present “a balanced view of science in the mass media,” and “teach critical thinking.” The trick was to capture all this without falling into vacuousness (“The Pro-Thought Movement”) or paradox (“Working to Reduce Things That Don’t Exist Since 1976”). Once, a woman new to the area stopped in at the offices to get some travel directions, saying that she had seen the sign out front reading “Center for Inquiry,” and figured it must be the place to ask.

The Second-Generation Effect

During a TAM9 panel on “diversity in skepticism,” D.J. was again faced with the canon question. The panelists addressed themselves first to the institution-building challenge of attracting women, people of color, and members of GLBTQ communities. Do they feel welcome? Are skeptics talking about things that matter to them? And, as Debbie Goddard added, what are skeptics doing about what they are talking about? Such questions presented a prior institution-defining challenge: Must skeptics stick to the paranormal borderlands?

Photo courtesy of Hemant Mehta

It is critically important that the second generation grapple with the canon problem. When the first generation did much of their work, they did not do so as professional staff of skeptic organizations. At the time, there were no such things. They were tenured professors, writers, entertainers—people who had established and distinguished themselves in fields other than organized skepticism. They brought to their skeptical activism this external experience and social capital. The coming generation of organized skepticism is being led, or will soon be led, by people whose primary professional background is organized skepticism itself. The danger is that in looking only to a time-slice of the founders’ work, they will create a kind of cargo cult that carries on rituals of imitation instead of a living tradition whose continuity with the founders is based on deep principles.

On the other hand is the risk of “mission drift,” as Daniel Loxton calls it. As he reported on his blog, Greta Christina proposed to the TAM9 diversity panel that “there are testable, empirical, pseudoscientific claims embedded within the arenas of social values, political discourse, and yes, religion as well. . . . Skeptics can tackle those strictly empirical questions without a centimeter of mission drift, and without losing any of our traditional scientific focus.” This is a promising thought. But what principle of canon formation guides it, and what prevents the movement from taking on just any faulty empirical thinking? How does Skeptic.com not turn into Politifact.com or WebWD.com?

My point is not to pick on the minds at the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation), who have shown themselves more than willing to enlarge the traditional orbit—for instance, the marvelous historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht has become a regular. The point is that TAM is attracting the most vibrant of the second generation of organized skepticism in North America. That generation is now passing through its puberty. Some are beginning to strain against the customs of their parents’ household. In part 2 of this article, I will propose some criteria that could be put to the development of the next skeptical canon.

Presidents Obama and Mubarak in June 2009

It has been two years since President Obama announced in Cairo “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” As noted previously in this space, science was supposed to take part in this new beginning. The United States would “launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries, and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create jobs. We will open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops.”

Today, six months into the Arab Spring, we see a changed Egypt, North Africa, and Middle East. What, if anything, does this tell us about the nascent experiment in science diplomacy?

“A new beginning” again

The 2009 Cairo speech, “A New Beginning,” was played in the key of reconciliation. It was about overcoming tensions and conflict through partnerships in which “America and Islam” could “come together" and “find common ground.” Apart from a brief passage on young people with “the ability to re-imagine the world, to remake this world,” the rhetoric was of rapprochement more than revolution.

On May 19, 2011, after taking a bruising for the Administration's anemic reaction to the Egyptian revolution, the President presented a detailed address on Middle East policy. According to widespread reports in the press, this one received no standing ovations in Arab capitals. In contrast to 2009, the post-Spring talk was of a self-determined people throwing off “tyranny,” “fear,” and “repression” to reclaim their dignity. Then, the go-to text was the Qur’an; now, it was the Declaration of Independence.

Overlaid with the voices of Arab protest, the Administration’s “new beginning” sounded all the more conservative. “Most people have realized that what the U.S. does or does not do is no longer important because people took matters into their own hands and decided their own future,” a pollster in Qatar told the Washington Post. “So why should people care what he says? America is no longer an issue.”

One of the grating things about the Cairo speech was its conflation of the citizens of “Muslim-majority countries” with Islamic civilization. The author of the speech, a 33-year-old named Benjamin Rhodes with an MFA in creative writing from NYU, seemed to have a special interest in transcending the “clash of civilizations” and demonstrating that the better sort of Americans can tell a Salafist from a sufi. This would neatly reduce the geopolitics to a matter of cross-cultural understanding. But of course, for the proto-revolutionaries in Arab autocracies, the main complaint was not American bigotry towards Islam but American backing of the venal and illegitimate governments they were forced to live under. In Egypt, secular civil society activists were opposing a secular Pharaoh. What they hoped to hear from the United States was more solidarity with them, and less with him. Solidarity among the children of Abraham was really not the issue.

Is science diplomacy too big to succeed?

The conservatism of the Cairo agenda points out a difficulty inherent in the notion of science diplomacy. The conversation partners of diplomats are, by and large, other diplomats. The counterparts in the deals they are empowered to cut are typically state entities. Big Science needs big partners. In the case of Egypt, that meant the Mubarak regime and its corrupt patronage networks in the military and commercial sectors.

Among the Administration’s first science envoys was Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American Nobel laureate in chemistry and a professor at CALTECH. As part of his mission in January 2010, Zewail conferred with the (now former) Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, the Supreme Council for Science and Technology, and Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi to ascertain how the United States could do more to support science and technology initiatives in the country.

A diplomatic cable produced by the U.S. embassy and published by Wikileaks describes their January 26 meeting:

After thanking Zewail for his continued focus on assisting Egypt in building its science and education infrastructure, Nazif launched into a discussion concerning a recently announced GoE [government of Egypt] plan to build a center of excellence targeting entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives. . . . Nazif stated that he envisioned this center as a joint US-Egypt project. The GoE would provide the land and construction of the center's buildings, he said, and the [US] would “allocate funds to run the center.”

Nazif acknowledged that the center’s priorities were not yet defined, but said they would likely include “projects concerning agriculture (defined as food safety), health, water security, energy, and information technology.” Additionally, the center “would serve as a focal point to provide financial and technical assistance to ‘young entrepreneurs starting their own businesses.’”

The embassy’s report concludes with this frank assessment:

During his initial envoy visit, Zewail spoke repeatedly about his desire to build stronger collaborative relationships in education, science and technology and move away from building vaguely-defined and poorly staffed research organizations. The GoE, however, is clearly seeking to capitalize on a renewed US emphasis on science and technology issues by requesting funding for a new center of excellence. It is doubtful that a new physical center would advance any of the collaborative projects—in health, science, education—the US is already partnering with Egypt.

While it is far from clear that its goals have become any more precisely defined in the post-revolutionary period, something like the center will probably be built in Egypt. Last month, the new military government approved the creation of a “Zewail Science and Technology City.”

Can a culture of science be built?

Writing in his “House of Wisdom” blog, the editor of Nature Middle East, Mohammed Yahia, observed that the most promising idea outlined in the Cairo speech has seen the least fanfare and progress: individual academic exchanges. Writing last July, Yahia noted that there had been “no increase in visiting professors to major universities in the region, nor are there more opportunities for science students and graduates to pursue further education in the U.S.”

On the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the Cairo speech, the State Department reported that the annual budget for U.S.-Egypt collaboration had been upped from $3 to $9 million and that another roughly $2.5 million had been allocated for a series of conferences in cooperation with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a coalition of self-described Islamic states, and its dodgy spawn ISESCO, the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation. Meanwhile, the State Department has said that it will “begin work on a Young Scientist Global Exchange program.”

Lecturing at the American University in Cairo this April, the science envoy and editor-in-chief of Science Bruce Alberts told his audience, “I'm a big believer in empowering young people to address their problems. The culture of science, such as honesty, tolerance and respect for logic, will be critical for Egypt's future." We can join Alberts in saying up with the culture of science. The question is whether the diplomacy of Big Science is nimble enough to build it in a region where government is so often part of the problem, or whether the culture will be better entrusted to the activities of lots of little scientists.

Last month, NASA's new administrator, Charles Bolden, flew into an asteroid field of criticism when he told Al Jazeera during a visit to Egypt that the foremost charge given him by President Obama was to uplift Muslims.

When I became the NASA administrator—before I became the NASA administrator—he charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

The Washington Examiner published a reaction by former NASA chief Michael Griffin, who attacked Bolden's statement as "a perversion of NASAs purpose." FOX News pundit Charles Krauthammer hammered, "This is a new height in fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of to feel good about their past scientific achievements'—it's the worst kind of group therapy psycho-babble, imperial condescension, and adolescent diplomacy."

Bolden Going Where No Man Has Gone Before

The mild-mannered astronaut and former Marine Corps major general had already drawn fire for his announcement that the administration would mothball NASA's Constellation program and instead rely on private industry to provide transportation to the international space station. The administration's proposed focus on a future manned flight to Mars was blasted at a May 12 Senate committee meeting by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan—the last man to walk on the moon—as "a blueprint for a mission to nowhere." Neil Armstrong testified, "I believe the president was poorly advised."

To the Al Jazeera host's follow-up question, Bolden denied that his was a diplomatic mission. Instead, he said that the president's directive had a pragmatic purpose: "there is much to be gained by drawing in the contributions that are possible from the Muslim nations. . . . No single nation is going to get to a place like Mars alone."

Griffin is not persuaded that the U.S. needs help from Muslim-majority states to get to Mars: "There is no technology they have that we need." In February, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Bolden identified Indonesia as a potential partner. Indonesia did not launch its first domestically manufactured rocket until 2008.

Amid the immediate fallout from the interview, the White House stood by Bolden, releasing a statement pushing the pragmatic argument: "The President has always said that he wants NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and engineers as we work together to push the boundaries of exploration. Meeting that mandate requires NASA to partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries. The space race began as a global competition, but, today, it is a global collaboration."

But several weeks later, the Obama Administration distanced itself from Bolden's original claims about what the president had tasked him with doing. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested that Bolden misspoke, saying "that is not his task, and that was not asked of him."

Near-Earth Objections

Ignore for the moment the question of NASA's proper mandate. (Personally, I'm coming around to the view that most of the budget should go to paying Bruce Willis to keep near-Earth objects from destroying the world.) Instead, inspect the assumptions driving the rhetoric. When Bolden speaks of "historic contributions," he is no doubt referring to medieval history, the celebrated era between the eighth and fourteenth centuries during which Arabic-Islamic thinkers were the leaders in natural philosophy, mathematics, and medicine.

Is it true that "Muslim nations" do not "feel good" about these contributions? In my experience, in discourse in the international community and scholarly literatures, one quite often encounters the opposite attitude: a dogmatic sense of self-satisfaction, as if to say, we did it first. Among religious conservatives and representatives of the authoritarian Islamic states, such satisfaction can provide cover for inaction and stagnation. For them, the Golden Age does not so much prove that Muslims can do science as it proves that they have done it already.

Taken as folk psychology, the rhetoric also assumes that feeling better about the past will make Muslims feel better about the future. However, as I've pointed out in this space before, the more gilding one applies to the Golden Age of Arabic-Islamic science, the worse its present condition will appear. It either suggests that the medieval Arabs really dropped the armillary or it feeds into the popular but misleading narrative that Islamic science would have triumphed had it not been for imperialistic incursions from without. I would expect the first to bring shame and the second resentment. An unflinching look at the history, on the other hand, could bring useful insights into some of the long-entrenched institutional and cultural forces that continue to hold back science in Islamic states.

There is an urban legend circulated in Muslim communities around the world that while on the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong heard a strange noise. Subsequently, back on Earth, upon hearing the Islamic call to prayer, Armstrong recognized it as the sound he had heard on the moon and converted immediately.¹

The American travel writer Paul Theroux heard a variation of this tale in a conversation on a passenger train crossing Turkmenistan, where he found himself seated in a car with a soldier, a student, and an old man in traditional Turkmen dress. The old man welcomed the foreigner. The student, translating, said the old man had a question for Theroux.

"He says that some years ago, an astronaut went to the moon," the student said. "He was from America. When he got to the moon, he heard a strange noise. It was an azan"—the call to prayer usually chanted by a muezzin from a mosque. "The astronaut recorded it. When he came back to Earth, the scientists in America analyzed it, and they came to think that it was the voice of the Prophet Muhammad."

"On the moon?"

"Yes. On the moon."

The old man was still speaking, his chin beard swinging.

"Furthermore, he says that because of this, the astronaut became a Muslim and began praying five times a day."

The old man was facing me, as though defying me to mock the story.

"I haven't heard this story," I said.

"He says he believes it."

"What does he think about it?"

When this question was translated, the student said, "For him, it's good news."²

My attentive readers will no doubt note that the moon has no atmosphere, so no sound could exist there. That must explain how Armstrong could have missed the call of the muezzin on the moon.

If NASA wants a meaningful way to engage with Muslim communities, it should make its materials available in Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, and Farsi. Stories about how East preceded West are not going to help anyone get ahead.

The New Library of Alexandria

An old tale has it that when Alexander the Great’s engineer was laying out the plans for Alexandria, drawing a chalk line along the future perimeter of the great harbor city, he ran out of chalk. To complete the job, sacks of barley flour were taken from the troops’ rations and poured out in a long line. Just then, an enormous flock of birds that had been resting nearby descended and began to devour the plans. The birds were taken as a bad omen, and Alexander despaired, forecasting his project’s doom. His seer Aristander countered that they were a good omen, signifying that the city would be so prosperous as to attract flocks of people from all around to gain sustenance from it.

The year since President Barack Obama delivered his address “On a New Beginning” at Cairo University in June 2009 has seen a stream of new visitors alighting on Alexandria. This month, an international conference, “Initiatives in Education, Science and Culture: Towards Enhanced US-Muslim Countries Collaborations,” was held at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the resplendent $200 million New Library of Alexandria that was completed in 2002 near the site of the ill-fated original. The year 2011 has been dubbed the U.S.-Egypt Year of Science. One year into the Obama administration’s policy of engagement with “the Muslim world,” science and technology are at the head of the flock, and the buzzword in the air is “science diplomacy.” What does it portend?

A New Era of Science Diplomacy?

In his Cairo speech, President Obama announced the U.S. would open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and appoint “Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops.” He also announced that the U.S. would partner with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (a fifty-seven-member coalition of Islamic states) to eradicate polio and promote child and maternal health.

In November 2009, the State Department announced the first three science envoys, whom the U.S. National Academies had chosen in consultation with the White House and State Department. In January they began their missions. Nobel Prize–winning chemical physicist Ahmed Zewail visited Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Former National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni traveled to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and UNESCO in Paris. Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science and former National Academies president, visited Indonesia.

In an interview in Paris, Zerhouni sounded something like Julian Huxley in the heady days of UNESCO’s origins as he spoke of the opportunity to “break down barriers between peoples of the world in the exchange of knowledge, scientific and technological information, and to have, finally, for once in the world, the level of understanding we need to create an economic environment, social environment, a global environment where people will be able to understand each other.”¹ Bruce Alberts could have taken a page from the Skeptical Inquirer, saying that every nation needs science “to create a more rational world” and that the ordinary citizen should be educated to “think like a scientist” and consult evidence. But he also noted that science diplomacy is itself an experiment.²

Does International Scientific Cooperation Work?

In that spirit, one might ask whether there is any evidence that scientific collaboration can increase amity between nations. Japanese-U.S. relations were furthered by the Cooperative Science Program that grew out of a meeting between President Kennedy and Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda in June 1961. Similar arrangements were made as part of Nixon’s normalization of relations with China. Of course, the most high-profile international scientific collaborations took place between the space programs of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. These reached their zenith with the Apollo-Suyuz Test Docking in 1975.

By late 1978, some in Congress had grown concerned that valuable U.S. technology was being obtained by the Soviets through such projects. By 1982, with Russian tanks rolling over Afghanistan and marshal law imposed in Poland, President Reagan permitted the U.S.-Soviet space cooperation agreement to lapse. When push comes to shove, sovereign states put their own interests first.

Meanwhile, throughout the Cold War, an international collective of scientists was pursuing a different strategy to limit the arms race. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, named for the town in Nova Scotia where the first conference was convened in 1957, followed on the London release in 1955 of the Russell-Einstein manifesto on the dangers of nuclear weapons. Pugwash was led by Joseph Rotblat, a British nuclear physicist who had resigned from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds. The aspirations of the group were expressed in its “Vienna Declaration,” a statement by the third conference, held in Kitzbühel and Vienna in 1958:

We believe that, as scientists, we have an important contribution to make toward establishing trust and co-operation among nations. . . . The ability of scientists all over the world to understand one another, and to work together is an excellent instrument for bridging the gap between nations and for uniting them around common aims. . . . It can contribute to the climate of mutual trust, which is necessary for the resolution of political conflicts between nations, and which is an essential background to effective disarmament. We hope scientists everywhere will recognize their responsibility, to mankind and to their own nations, to contribute thought, time, and energy to the furthering of international co-operation.

While Pugwash scientists quite noticeably did not end the Cold War, they are often credited with influencing international agreements such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the 1972 agreement on anti-ballistic missiles. Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for his work.

What is most noteworthy for present purposes is that the Pugwash Conferences belonged to the realm of civil society, not public diplomacy. Strictly speaking, they were not international initiatives. The organizers did not work under the auspices of any government, indeed scrupulously endeavoring to avoid the appearance of national or ideological partisanship. Consequently, Pugwash conversation could take the form of the free-flowing improvisations of academic colleagues, not the forced cadences of diplomats.

On the Ground

At the opening session of the “Enhanced U.S.-Muslim Countries Collaborations” conference at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Farah Pandith, was emphatically vacuous: “We heard the President talk about his commitment to increase the way in which we are activating our mechanisms to work on these important challenges. . . . As we think about the challenges and moving towards getting a resolution on many of these very difficult subjects, we see an increase in the way in which we are building capacity on the ground.”

Science diplomacy in Muslim-majority countries is a big, audacious idea worthy of candidate Obama. The government-run Overseas Private Investment Corporation claims to have already raised close to $2 billion in investment for technology development projects. Such investment is badly needed in societies where science is stagnant. Even still, in the year since Cairo, the percentage of the Egyptian public with a favorable opinion of Obama has slipped from 41 to 31 percent.³ It is too soon to tell whether America’s new science diplomacy will put in place significant advances or leave behind just so many feathered words.

It seems that the stone-the-adulterers commandment has long been the subject of theological controversy because although mandated by traditional religious law, or shari’a, it does not appear in the Quran. Instead, the Quran mentions the much less severe punishments of flogging or perhaps confinement. Some fornicators actually get into such things, maybe even in combination. Presumably a death sentence would have been important enough to merit inclusion in the revelation. Why didn’t Allah mention it before? According to another hadith, He did. Muhammad had written down the revealed verse on a piece of paper and placed it under his bed for safekeeping. One day while Muhammad had taken ill and the household was preoccupied with nursing him, a goat wandered in and ate it.

Islamic scholars took from this story not the lesson that I find obvious—that the goat was a second Messenger of Allah, who wanted to show Muhammad exactly what he could do with his bonkers idea of stoning adulterers. Instead, they used it to argue that were it not for the goat, the Quran would have (therefore should have?) included the missing verse and that this resolves the apparent doctrinal inconsistency—a hermeneutics of animal husbandry.

I’m sorry. This comic tale doesn’t really have a punch line. But it does reveal something about the nature of knowledge and epistemic authority in Islam, and this may go a long way toward explaining why Arab-Islamic societies never produced a scientific revolution while European societies did.

The Religion of He-Said, He-Said

A major preoccupation of Islamic scholars is verifying the “genuineness” of various hadith. Their preferred method is to trace the transmission from one source of these stories to the next, as in  

Abu al-Ayman narrated to us, saying: “Shu’yab narrated, saying: ‘Abu al-Zynad told us that Abd al-Rahman ibn Hurmuz al-A’raj . . . narrated to him that he heard from Abu Hurayrah who heard the Prophet saying...’¹

A text is considered trustworthy when one can establish an unbroken chain of personal testimonies leading back to a person who had direct contact with the Prophet. Islam is a religion of he-said, she-said—minus most of what she said, of course. (In the case of the goat-ate-my-surah story, however, the original source was said to be a woman, or rather a girl: Aisha, Muhammad’s child wife.)

The chain-link epistemology of hadith was mirrored by the structure of legal scholarship. Instruction took place through individualized apprenticeships rather than institutionalized degree programs. Intellectual and professional attainment came in the form of a certificate passing on the authorization to teach a particular subject, which would be issued by a particular teacher to a pupil who had mastered the subject to that teacher’s satisfaction.

Historian of science Toby Huff argues that this diffuse organization of knowledge hindered the development of science, which relies on peer criticism by appeal to objective standards held in common across a discipline.

It is due to this personalistic and particularistic factor that one finds literally hundreds of schools of law over the centuries, each founded by a faqih who, through the power of his intellect and the magic of his personality, established his own school of law capable of issuing its own rulings (fatwas), unconstrained by a body of precedent and universal legal principles. Thus, law, jurisprudence, as the paradigmatic body of knowledge in Islamic civilization, established a model of inquiry antithetical to that required of modern science, that is, a system based on personal authority rather than collective or impersonal collegial standards.²

The study of the natural philosophy and proto-science of the Greco-Roman world, which had been collected and translated by Arabic-language thinkers, took place under an additional burden. It was not permitted in the colleges, or madrasas, which were primarily devoted to the study of Islamic law. Instead, this heterdox knowledge had to be cultivated by individual scholars acting in a private capacity.

In Europe, by contrast, the legal innovations in the eleventh and twelfth centuries made possible the creation of legally autonomous corporate entities—including universities and, later, scientific associations—in which groups of thinkers could coalesce around shared projects and shared standards in relative freedom from Church and state power.

The Trouble with Half-Totalitarianism

The above history should serve as a corrective to some of our own received stories. One story says the West has Arabic-Islamic societies to thank for “passing the torch” of classical civilization. What the popular wisdom elides is that this learning typically survived not because of but in spite of the nature of Islam. Another story says that intellectual development under Islam was stunted because Islam is a totalitarian system. This is also half true. Islam was half totalitarian, so to speak. It was doctrinally totalitarian, in that matters of truth and justice were completely determined by religious tradition, hence the suppression of subversive thought in the madrasa system. Yet socially, Islamic learning was highly individualistic by comparison with elaborately institutionalized European learning.

Even the best Arabic-Islamic thinkers suffered for want of organized skepticism—the powerful effects of iterated peer-review feedback. Personal testimony is unreliable. Memory fails. Our pet ideas can get eaten by life’s goats. The more watchful eyes there are, the better the chances that someone will catch the next one that slips into the tent looking for dinner.

Notes

[1] This comes from the hadith collection Sahih Al-Bukhari, book 11, no. 876.

[2] Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, 2nd ed., (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 228.

In March 1277, Bishop Tempier promulgated a now-famous condemnation of 219 errors in theology and natural philosophy that he believed were being entertained and discussed by scholars of the university's faculty of arts. Among this syllabus of errors appeared the following propositions:

That there is no more excellent state than to study philosophy.

That the only wise men in the world are the philosophers.

That one should not hold anything unless it is self-evident or can be manifested by self-evident principles.

That man should not be content with authority to have certitude about any question.

That there is no rationally disputable question that the philosopher ought not to dispute and determine, because reasons are derived from things. It belongs to philosophy under one or another of its parts to consider all things.

That our intellect by its own natural power can attain to a knowledge of the first cause.

That we can know God by His essence in this mortal life.

The Condemnation of 1277 was intended to control discussion of theological matters being carried out by members of the faculty. The Bishop’s chief concern seems to have been that too many were choosing Aristotle over God. Above all, the Condemnation asserted God’s power to bring about anything he chooses, short of a logical contradiction. This absolute power appeared to be subverted by those who, under the sway of the philosopher, sought to explain the world as a system of natural causes and principles.ⁱ Under Tempier’s decree, they would now do so on pain of excommunication.

The point of revisiting these events is not to raise three cheers for the forbidden beliefs (although I must confess that as a philosopher, I find the first two extremely self-evident). The point is to uncover some unexpected answers to why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in Arabic-Islamic societies, where its preconditions had existed for centuries.

The Medieval Invention of Society

In the popular imagination—particularly among friends of Reason and Enlightenment—the story of the rise of science is the story of the monolith of Church power being shattered by individual heroes like Bruno and Galileo. In this narrative, the scientists are champions of personal freedom as much as the soixant huitards of Nanterre. Astronomy under Islam, meanwhile, remains medieval because Islam’s power remains totalitarian. While this telling of the story contains much truth that is by now familiar, it also obscures some truth that is counterintuitive and far less appreciated.

The thirteenth-century intellectual struggle at the University of Paris illuminates how Christianity had already helped to prepare the way (in many ways inadvertently) for free, naturalistic inquiry. This had less to do with Christian doctrine as such than with certain innovations in Church law developed in the preceding two centuries.

When we hear the story of 1277 today, we must not take for granted its most important fact: there was something to which the condemnation was addressed. The university was not an extension of Church hierarchy but rather an independent institution with its own identity, purpose, and structure.ⁱⁱ The punishments that the Bishop could bring to bear as disincentives to discourage heresy were not civil but religious. He could threaten errant scholastics with removing their rights to membership in the Body of Christ; he could not determine by ecclesiastical fiat the curriculum of the university or the membership of its faculty. But what is for us unremarkable was once unthinkable.

Paradoxically, the relative independence of the University of Paris, and countless institutions like it, was a result of an earlier assertion of Church authority now known as the papal revolution. Beginning in the middle of the eleventh century, the hierarchy struggled to free itself from interference by secular officials, from the local to the imperial level, who claimed jurisdiction over religious affairs. The key battle was over secular rulers’ claim to responsibility for the appointment or investiture of clergy like bishops and abbots, the so-called “investiture controversy.” It began in 1076 with Pope Gregory VII excommunicating a defiant Emperor Henry IV, who shot back that the pope had become a “false monk.” It ended with the Concordat of Worms of 1122, which liberated the Church from imperial control.

Masters of the Universitas

To explicate and legitimize the emerging political settlements, Christian monks wove together church law and European common law with the resources of the Roman legal tradition—by way of recently discovered manuscripts—to invent the novel system of canon law. In this system, the church would function as a distinct and legally autonomous collective entity with the right to own property, to assemble, to enact and judge its own statutes, and to engage in representative governance, both internal to itself and externally in the broader civil and political order—in a word, it would become a corporation. As Harold J. Berman contends in Law and Revolution, the papal revolution opened the door for the creation of similar entities in the secular world, making possible a new model of society as an aggregate of multiple collective agents, each with its own legal jurisdiction.ⁱⁱⁱ

By at least 1215, the scholars at the University of Paris had established themselves as one such corporate body. Indeed, university comes from the Latin term for corporation, universitas. It was in virtue of the university’s independent institutional powers that fifty years later the faculty of arts could vote to enact a statute that made required reading of the natural works of Aristotle, the very books the good Bishop wished he could close but couldn’t.

The popular narrative is correct that the evolution of science depended on the emancipation of thought from Christian power. Yet this very emancipation depended on a structural transformation of European life set in motion by Christian power itself, as has been argued convincingly by the historian of science Toby E. Huff.^iv And it is not individual freedom but corporate freedom that deserves the role of chief protagonist. As I will explore in my next column, the comparative failure of science under Islam is not explained by a lack of individualism but rather an excess of it, a failure to develop institutions that could serve as the home of independent inquiry.

Notes

ⁱEdward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 55.

ⁱⁱToby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 194.

ⁱⁱⁱHarold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

^ivHuff, The Rise of Early Modern Science.

Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.

What Golden Age?

This Golden Age is rightly held up as one of the glories of Arabic-Islamic civilization. However, it only makes more pointed the question of how Arabic-language science (defined broadly as natural philosophy) came to be so rapidly and totally surpassed by European science. As the historian of science Toby Huff points out with regard to astronomy in particular:

Arab astronomers from the eleventh to the fourteenth century established a broad-based research tradition aimed at reforming the Ptolemaic (geocentric) planetary model. These astronomers—in both Eastern and Western Islam—wanted a theoretical planetary model that conformed to what really is. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the combined efforts of the Marâgha School of astronomers, capped by the work of Ibn al-Shatir, finally arrived at a planetary model mathematically equivalent to the Copernican model of a century and a half later. But having arrived there, Ibn al-Shatir and his successors failed to make the leap to the heliocentric view—the leap that distinguished the Copernican achievement—and thereby failed to achieve the philosophical and metaphysical transformation that we call the scientific revolution . . . .¹

Despite all of these advantages—research funding, the resources of Greek philosophy and science, and great minds such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Razi, al-Baghdadi, al-Biruni, al-Haytham, and Ibn Rushd—Arab societies did not give rise to modern science.

The eclipse of Arabic science is often explained by pointing to external geopolitical factors, such as the re-conquest of Spain by Christian forces from 1085 onward or the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. However, in other intellectual capitals, such as Damascus and Cairo, developments proceeded largely undisturbed for centuries. Arab astronomy and medicine were reaching their zenith at the end of the thirteenth century—well after the purported disruption by external forces (and long before colonialist interference by European powers). The great observatory that was home to the Marâgha School was founded near Tabriz, Iran, in the year following the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. Although it ceased to function barely forty-five years later, its end appears to have been hastened not by foreign hostilities but by some impulses from within.²

Another take on the decline of Arabic science is that it never declined because it never really existed. In this view, science and mathematics were carried out by a small number of extraordinary individuals whose activities and outlooks were never fully assimilated to the mainstream—that is, Islamic—culture. As these individuals disappeared or their patronage dried up, their work dissipated. Since there was no established tradition, we have no need for an explanation of its decline by appeal to general causes, endogenous or otherwise.

Arguing against this view, the so-called “marginality thesis,” A. I. Sabra has pointed out that many of those who taught secular philosophy and medicine were also Islamic legal scholars; that leaders in higher mathematics were often muwaqqits, official time keepers employed by mosques; and that scientific literature could be found in the libraries of the religiously affiliated madrasas.³ This evidence suggests that Greek learning had been “Islamized” or “naturalized” by integration with the intellectual, social, and institutional structures of Islam and Arab culture.

Whig History of Science

The most eyebrow-raising response to the question of what caused the decline of Arabic science is to deny that there really is such a question. Some have maintained that the question only arises if we assume that the historical trajectory of Europe is normative for other societies, such that divergence from that trajectory demands an explanation. To catch the drift of this criticism, have another listen to Huff’s language. He tells us that Arabic scientists “failed to make the leap . . . that distinguished the Copernican achievement” and “failed to achieve the . . . transformation that we call the scientific revolution.”

In his book, The Making of Islamic Science, Muzaffar Iqbal labels this kind of discourse Whig history, in which “judgments passed on the scientific developments of a previous civilization are invariably based on the developments in modern science. This creates historiographic problems and entails the danger of unconsciously slipping from the historical fact into a Whiggish view of history, as if the final purpose of the cultivation of science in the other civilization was merely to create modern science.”⁴ Iqbal seems to suggest that the question of decline will itself decline as more informed and culturally sophisticated historians prevail.

This position has a whiff of plausibility, and not just because it nods to the contingency of history. Apart from a belief in Providence or Giambattista Vico’s “principles of universal history,” would it have been true to say in early renaissance Florence that a scientific revolution was going to happen there? Furthermore, isn’t asking why there was no Arab Galileo like asking why there was no Chinese Puccini or Persian Dante? China produced Peking opera and Persia produced Rumi. It would be a bizarre form of tunnel vision to see these singular achievements merely as abortive attempts at the achievements of other culture.

In the case of science, however, there are actual continuities between the Middle Eastern and European traditions that Peking opera and Italian opera do not share. It is precisely these continuities—such as the survival of Ibn Sina’s Canon—that are cited admiringly by those who wish to highlight the legacy of Arabic science. More fundamentally, the historiographical critique conflates motivation and justification. Undoubtedly some historians who accept the “decline” question are in part motivated by a belief that scientific modernity is on balance not all that regrettable, or by an interest in addressing the contemporary plight of science in Muslim-majority countries. These motives and interests give the question salience. However, they do not by themselves impugn the objectivity, truth, or justification of any particular claim that a historian makes. If Iqbal finds scientific modernity regrettable, then when he reads in Huff that Arab scientists “failed to make” the leap and “failed to achieve” the transformation to Copernicanism, he can substitute “were saved from making” and “managed to avoid.”⁵ The flip in salience will not change the truth-value of Huff’s analysis one whit.

Iqbal floats the idea that the alternative to Whiggish comparative history of science is to “examine the nature of science in Islamic civilization from within its own framework and see where it could have gone.” However, on its face, this is perfectly consistent with the comparative approach he rejects, for the way of Europe is one way that Islamic science could have gone. Of course, a good history will attempt to gain an appreciation of a social practice from within, from the perspective of the practitioners. In this case, it will inquire—as Sabra, Huff, and others do—into the proximate causes that shaped the role of the muwaqqit, for example. In principle, enough accounts of this kind will add up to a historical explanation of why Arabic science did not follow the trajectory of European science—or, if you prefer, why European science did not follow the trajectory of Arabic science.

The next installment of “Circumnavigations” will edge closer to this “why.”

Notes

1. Toby E. Huff, The rise of early modern science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87.
2. —. 171-172.
3. —. 84.
4. The making of Islamic science, Muzzafar Iqbal (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009), 151.
5. Iqbal, trained as a biochemist, is the founder-president of the Center for Islam and Science, based in Canada. He has also worked with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (on which, see my previous column). He told PBS in 2003 that he was “disenchanted” with practical science and that his biggest desire was to see “a revival of the Islamic tradition of learning.” See “Closer to Truth: Ask the Experts: Muzaffar Iqbal, Ph.D.”; accessed 12 January 2010.

Critics have also questioned the legitimacy of the academic credentials of Daneshjou, a professor at Iran University of Science and Technology (his online vita currently states that he did doctoral studies at the Imperial Collage of London).² As it happens, Kaneshjou was running the Interior Ministry’s election headquarters in June, and his new appointment came courtesy of the man who claimed victory, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maybe it does all add up.

Perhaps this behavior is to be expected from a member of Iran’s mullahcractic regime, which has perfected the tradition of taqiyya, or religiously-sanctioned dissimulation. What is more shocking is that Iran is among the more scientifically productive nations in the Islamic world—for present purposes, defined as the fifty-seven members of the intergovernmental Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

A Revolution Deferred

Here are some astonishing figures from Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan:

A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7…. Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world’s science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The [U.S. National Science Foundation] records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.³

Another survey found that of the approximately 1,800 universities in OIC countries,

only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were excluded).

Even Turkey, the most scientifically productive of OIC states, produced only 88,000 research papers between 1996 and 2005, less than the typical output of a single Ivy League university in the same period.⁴

Recent years have seen bold hikes in scientific research funding by governments such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar, but nothing yet seems to have made a dent in the fundamental reality: Science in the Muslim world is moribund.

Abstaining from Science

In 1979, the OIC established a new body to promote science: the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Headquartered in an ostentatious complex in Rabat, Morocco, and maintaining regional offices in Paris, Tehran, Chad, the Union of the Comoros, and the Emirate of Sharjah, ISESCO would, according to its charter, “support the efforts of Member States in developing programmes of education and technical and practical training; and encourage researchers and inventors from the Member States.” Last year, ISESCO claimed it would partner with UN bodies such as UNESCO and UNICEF to undertake close to two hundred projects costing around $6 million.

Yet according to Hoodbhoy, the achievements of this and sister initiatives (such as the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation) to date have amounted to little more than “sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.”

In 2006, ISESCO 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.”⁵

What follows contains not a shred of science but instead a series of checklists and tips for imparting Sharia rulings on matters of health, hygiene, and sexual ethics. The ISESCO authors mention the Islamic basis for upholding “equality in human dignity” and “good treatment of the girl and kindness towards her” and opposing female circumcision and “indiscrimination between the sexes” (sic?). They also instruct teachers that Islam forbids, among other things, fornication, homosexuality, intercourse during menstruation, and khulwa (an unrelated man and woman being alone together). At the same time, they assert that Islamic law justifies polygamous marriage and, above all, abstinence.

The student should adhere to the lofty Islamic morals and ideals that call for modesty, lowering one’s gaze, avoiding mixing and being alone with a person with whom one can be intimate, abstinence, resisting shameful deeds, avoiding any provocative act or item of dress that may encourage sexual harassment and lapsing into harlotry . . . [and] observe abstinence before marriage.

And this from a publication that was “compiled in cooperation with United Nations Population Fund”!⁶

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.

Elsewhere, ISESCO dispenses with pretexts at pedagogy altogether and joins in familiar Islamist propaganda against Jews. In Protection of Islamic and Christian Holy Sites in Palestine, the proceedings of a conference held in Amman in November 2004, Adnane Ibrahim Hassan Al Subah writes, “Jews are the enemies of Allah, the enemies of faith and of the worship of Allah”⁷—not a paragon of experimentally testable hypotheses. In a sickening touch, copies of this ISESCO publication were distributed at an OIC-sponsored “Inter-institutional Forum on Universal Shared Values: Challenges and New Paradigms,” attended by various UN dignitaries and held in the chambers of the UN Human Rights Council in December 2008 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN gadfly David Littman sent an open letter of complaint the following month; he has yet to receive a response from the Islamic Scientific, Educational, and Cultural Organization.

While ISESCO has the right to promote Islamic values, some of the practices it endorses are arguably contrary to international human rights standards found in treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Child, to which most OIC states are signatories. Certainly the UN has no business partnering with them in its efforts to support responsible family planning. This is all the more disappointing because ISESCO’s Sharia-based approach described above is only the most conservative way to promulgate reproductive health science within the framework of Islamic values. There are alternatives, such as a program pioneered by the UN Population Fund that trains Afghan clerics on issues of women’s health and rights.

The broader question remains: what explains the malaise of Muslim science and what can be done about it?

References

1. “Exclusive: Paper Co-Authored by Iran’s Science Minister Duplicates Earlier Paper – September 22, 2009,” The Great Beyond. Available at blogs.nature.com, accessed 28 November 2009.
2. Borzou Daragahi, “IRAN: Proposed Education Minister Accused of Making Up His Degrees,” Los Angeles Times (August 29, 2009). Available at latimesblogs.latimes.com accessed 28 November 2009.
3. Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Science and the Islamic World: The Quest for Rapprochment,” Physics Today (August 2007). Available at ptonline.aip.org accessed 25 November 2009. Hoodbhoy is also the author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1991). See also the special issue of "Islam and Science," Nature 444, 19 (2006).
4. Ehsan Masood, “New Wave for Islamic Science,” BBC News (February 16, 2009).
5. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/ISESCO%20Guide%20for%20the%20Incorporation/Menu.php; accessed 25 November 2009.
6. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/ISESCO%20Guide%20for%20the%20Incorporation/P1.php.
7. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/Protection%20of%20islamic%20and%20chrestian%20holy%20sites%20in%20Palestine/p18.php; accessed 25 November 2009.

The great Xunzi responded that if Mozi’s policy were to be implemented, society “would be pressed to such extremity by his measures that all clothing would be coarse and gross and all food would be bad and detestable, with only hardship and grief when music and joy have been condemned.”¹ But Xunzi did not defend music by asserting its intrinsic value or extolling its aesthetic properties. Instead, he accepted Mozi’s utilitarian premises, insisting that music is valuable just because it is necessary to preserve civic order.

When music is centered and balanced, the people are harmonious and not [consumed by] dissipation. When music is sober and dignified, the people are uniform and not chaotic. When people are harmonious and unified, the army is stiff and the cities secure. . . . When music is ornate and seduces [people] to malice, then the people are dissipated, indolent, crude, and base. Dissipation and indolence lead to chaos, crudity and baseness to contention. When there is chaos and contention, the army is soft and the cities are pillaged.

Referring to the sage-rulers of antiquity, Xunzi concluded:

Thus the Former Kings were cautious about what they stirred [the people] with. They used ritual to make their wills [conform] to the Way, music to harmonize their sounds, government to unify their actions, and punishments to prevent licentiousness. Rituals, music, punishments, and government are ultimately, a means to make the people’s minds similar and bring about the ordered Way. ²

Music is a means for moral instruction, ritualized rehearsal of social roles, and ultimately discipline and control—hegemony in harmony. No less than sound, it seems that science in China has been political from its beginning.

China’s Scientific Revolution

The story of modern science in China begins with the introduction of mathematical astronomy by Jesuit missionaries during the late Ming period in the 1580s. In 1592, the Ministry of Rites discovered that the Astrocalendrical Bureau had miscalculated the date of the lunar eclipse by a full day. This was going to foul up the timing of all the auspicious and inauspicious events. Fortunately for them, the Jesuits were adept at dealing with calendar crises, having not long before resolved a European controversy over the date of Easter.

In the 1630s the government was persuaded to undertake a major calendar reform, and as Benjamin Elman explains in A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, this “opened the door for leaders of the mind and Qing dynasties to accept Jesuits as calendrical experts, just as earlier rulers had accepted Indian, Persian, and Muslim specialists.”³ So long as they continued to supply expert assistance in astronomical and geographical matters, the missionaries were tolerated by the emperor and eventually incorporated into the bureaucracy. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Jesuits introduced a variety of European technologies. But they failed to keep apace with the latest scientific advances back home. Consequently, the Earth-centered cosmological system of Tycho Brahe was still being taught in China in the nineteenth century.⁴

With the help of the Protestant missions, modern science was born in China: “From 1850 to 1870, a core group of missionaries and Chinese co-workers in Guangzhou, Ningbo, Beijing, and Shanghai translated many works on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, as well as botany, geography, geology, mechanics, and navigation.” Scientific training was centered on the military arsenals, shipyards, and factories of the coastal cities where armaments and ships were being constructed. After 1895 and China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, elites increasingly agitated for political reform and modernization. As Elman observes,

Chinese radicals linked political, social, and economic revolution to their perception that a scientific revolution was also required. Those who were educated abroad at Western universities such as Cornell or sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation for medical study in the United States after 1914, as well as those trained locally at higher-level missionary schools in China, often regarded modern science as a revolutionary application of scientific methods and objective learning to solve all modern problems.⁵

Here began a political rhetoric fusing scientific advance, technological application, and Chinese national aspiration, the same rhetoric that later resounded in the May Fourth Movement after 1919, up through Maoist “mass science” to Hu Jintao’s Scientific Development Concept.

Humming Along

Today the country’s enormous investment in science is overwhelmingly pragmatic, driven by short-term technological applications. In 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Science magazine that only 5 percent of the nation’s total spending on science goes toward basic research (by comparison, basic research accounts for 17.5 percent of the U.S. government’s science funding).⁶ The ubiquity of the Chinese term keji—literally, science and technology—illustrates the importance of applied knowledge.

It would be mistake to think of China’s scientific revolution as a fast-motion replay of Europe’s. Science did not come to China as it had come to Europe, and most Chinese elites did not come to science for the reasons that their European counterparts had. Early modern European science depended heavily on private commercial interests and autonomous professional associations (like the Royal Society). Its propagandists pressed for knowledge to improve the human condition but also to read the mind of God or the book of Nature as an end in itself. An anti-authoritarian ideology arose in response to confrontations with the Church. Chinese science, by contrast, evolved in symbiosis with state power, and its propagandists championed it as a means to national development.

In this way, from its origins the Chinese scientific establishment was organized and mobilized to achieve the practical ends of those in power. But perhaps the best explanation for the dearth of political dissent among professional scientists is more pedestrian than philosophical. Since Tiananmen, the shocking brutality of the crack- down and the constriction of civil society have surely taught many would-be disharmonious scientists that silence is the only sensible option. More importantly, they have so much to lose. Today’s technoscience professionals are members of a comfortable middle class with enviable positions to look out for and reliable research funding to look forward to.

China’s vast economic engines churn ahead, and its scientists hum along.

Notes

1. John Knoblock, ed., Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 128.
2. Paul Rakita Goldin, Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 79–80.
3. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18.
4. —. A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18.
5. —. “New Directions in the History of Modern Science in China Global Science and Comparative History,” Isis, 98(3): 522.
6. See “Science: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Sees Science as a Key to Development,” (accessed 17 October 2009).