Abdus Salam (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

In the excitement following the discovery of a Higgs-like boson at the Large Hadron Collider, a few observers have paused to remember one physicist who was scorned in his home country. The new discovery could mean the completion—or the beginning of the end, depending on whom you ask—of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, the prevailing explanation for the known particles and the forces that act on them. One of the theoretical architects of the Standard Model was Muhammad Abdus Salam. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize along with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow for their converging work on the electroweak theory that unifies two of the four fundamental forces.

There is one reason the name Abdus Salam is not known to every Pakistani schoolchild of the present generation: he was a member of the banned Ahmadiyya sect, specifically the Qadiani group, whose members consider themselves Muslims but are officially deemed apostates because they deny that Muhammad was the last prophet.

Salam was born to a lower-middle-class family in a small town in the Punjab region of what is now Pakistan. A gifted youth, he earned scholarships to attend Government College and later Cambridge University, where he took his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1951. Returning home with the aim of pursuing basic research in Pakistan, he soon found this to be “impossible.” “With anguish in my heart,” he later said, “I made myself an exile—and it was this anguish which led me to propose the creation of an International Centre for Theoretical Physics [ICTP].” The center was created in Trieste, Italy, in 1964. ICTP researchers were among those analyzing debris of particle collisions in the ATLAS experiment, an indispensible part of the Higgs hunt.

Salam served as a key adviser to the Pakistani government on its nuclear weapons program until 1974, when he resigned in protest of the parliament’s adoption of a constitutional provision declaring the Ahmadiyya to be non-Muslim.

Physics and Metaphysics

In addition to his research, Salam was a lifelong advocate for science in developing countries. While it could be said that he sometimes idealized the scientific past of “the Islamic world,” Salam did not shrink from diagnosing the dismal state of contemporary science. When the distinguished Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodhboy, well-known for his staunchly secularist views, asked Salam to write the preface for his book Islam and Science: Coexistence and Conflict, he expected his more devout colleague to decline. Salam stunned Hoodhboy by agreeing and beginning his preface by stating, “I completely agree with him that religious orthodoxy and the spirit of intolerance are two of the major factors responsible for killing the once flourishing enterprise of Science in Islam.”

The preface goes on with Salam joining Hoodhboy in opposing the “Islamic Science” movement: “I agree with the statement that there is only one universal Science; that its problems and modalities are international and that there is no such thing as ‘Islamic Science’ just as there is no ‘Hindu Science,’ no ‘Jewish Science,’ no ‘Confucian Science,’ nor ‘Christian Science.’”

Salam had no trouble seeing himself as united in a shared quest with “an avowed atheist,” Weinberg, who famously has said that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless: “We were both ‘geographically and ideologically remote from each other’ when we conceived the same theory . . . .” Weinberg once recalled in an interview that in Salam’s practice, Islam was also compatible with keeping a ready supply of scotch in one’s desk drawer. And yet, far from being separate from his scientific life, Salam’s religious worldview was a kind of moral-spiritual Higgs field surrounding it.

In Abdus Salam’s understanding of his tradition, the practice of science was a part of a spiritual practice: “As a scientist, the Holy Quran speaks to me in that it emphasizes reflection on the Laws of Nature” and exhorts believers “to study Nature, to reflect, to make the best use of reason in their search for the ultimate and to make acquiring of knowledge and scientific comprehension part of the community’s life.” Most interesting, he suggested that Islam contributed to his intellectual attraction to work on the unification of forces: “If there was any bias towards the unification paradigm in my thinking, it was unconsciously motivated from my background as a Muslim.”

The absolute oneness and unity of God, the principle of tawhid, is foundational to Islamic theology. For many Ahmadiyya in particular, tawhid—the verbal noun of wahhada, “to make one”—is the preeminent principle of Islam. No doubt, the principle generates no end of metaphysical imponderables. What is God’s relation to the Creation? Can God be distinct from the world while at the same time everywhere present in it? Or is God everywhere present in the world because the world is one with God? For many Sufis, the latter thought is elevated to the ultimate aim of religious life—personal union with God as the realization of tawhid. Salam, however, may have embraced a conception of tawhid less metaphysical than ethical. In a 1986 interview he characterized Islamic morality as a set of “universal” concerns: “care for the environment, lack of specialization, care for wholeness.”

A Final Indignity

The tragic irony of Abdus Salam’s life was that the unity and unification he sought both in religion and science was denied him in his homeland. His vision of multiethnic cosmopolitan centers where “concourses of scholars” could congregate in common pursuit of basic research, to which he tirelessly tried to rally Islamic countries with their oil reserves overflowing with Allah’s bounty, was to be realized—not in Lahore but in Trieste, at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics that bears his name. Pervez Hoodhboy’s remembrance ends with this lament:

Salam’s epoch-making achievements as a scientist stand in stark contrast with his dismal failure to bring science back to Islam. It was not for lack of trying, but nothing ever really worked. The Islamic Science Foundation, a grand scheme for scientific advancement with an endowment of $1 billion collected from oil-rich countries, came to naught after Salam was banned from ever setting foot in Saudi Arabia. . . . Salam’s efforts did contribute towards creating at least some of the score or so organizations whose raison d’etre is to accelerate science and technology in Muslim countries. But these organizations provide nothing but cushy jobs for those who sit at their helms, and they are no more than litter on the landscape today.

Abdus Salam was buried in Pakistan after his death in 1996. In a final indignity, his headstone, which originally read “First Muslim Nobel Laureate” was changed so as to remove “Muslim,” leaving the absurd appellation “First Nobel Laureate” separated by an ugly gap.

The grave of Abdus Salam. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Sanal Edamaruku at Velankanni in Mumbai. Image by New Humanist.

Like all proofs, the recent demonstration by the Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku that a statue of the crucified Jesus at the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni in Mumbai was not miraculously producing holy water from its toes but rather venting backed-up wastewater by means of capillary action does not compel one to accept its conclusion. It compels one to accept its conclusion or to reject one of its premises. Either it is no miracle or God is an iconoclast with a wicked sense of humor.

After criminal complaints were filed against Edamaruku by The Catholic Secular Forum and Maharashtra Christian Youth Forum under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes “insults or attempts to insult the religious or the religious beliefs” of any group with the “deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings,” some international media observers framed the story as a case of blasphemy against a supernatural belief.

As with the waters of Mumbai, the real story is a bit murkier but it is also more interesting. Catholic leaders and organizations have distanced themselves from the miracle claims of the local laity. Instead they insist that the request for a police investigation of Edamaruku (currently taking shelter in Finland to avoid a pre-trial arrest) had nothing to do with his debunkery. It was rather a legal response to “objectionable” and “gratuitous” remarks about Catholic belief that he made during two discussions of the Irla case broadcast live on March 5 and 10 on the TV9 television network and for which he has refused to apologize. The rationalist found himself in the middle of a debate about the nature of idolatry.

The Skeptic on the Cross

In a written statement, the Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mumbai, Agnelo Gracias, explained that the Church “has NOT made any pronouncement” on whether the dripping cross has a supernatural cause. “There is a lengthy scientific process that has to be undergone before any official pronouncement is made. It is quite possible that the dripping water may have a natural explanation.” He then went on to address Edamaruku’s on-air assertions that “the Pope or the Church is against Science,” that “the dripping Cross has been created by priests who are out to make money,” and that the Church advocates “worship of images.”

“There is a difference between honoring a thing and making it divine, something to be worshipped,” Gracias’ statement argued. “We respect and honor the Scriptures of any religion not because the books are in themselves divine, but because they have a special significance for the adherents of that religion. We honor a cross because it is for us a reminder of the love of Jesus who died for us.”

Facing a panel of outraged critics on the March 10 broadcast, Edamaruku was repeatedly challenged to “prove” his statements, including this accusation of idolatry. Though he scarcely got a word in over the alternately Hindi and English torrent of opprobrium, which he seemed genuinely to enjoy, he did toss back this question: “When you put a candle burning in front of a statue, what does it mean? It’s not a worship?” He said he welcomed the chance to be heard and vindicated in a court of law and he has declared his intention to bring a challenge to Section 295 before the Supreme Court.

Subtle and Malicious

India’s laws against blasphemy and religious insult were introduced under British colonial rule. The Indian Penal Code was drafted in 1837 by the Indian Law Commission under the chairmanship of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay and adopted in 1860 after a period of review and intense debate. The Code would go on to influence colonial governments across the globe.

Many judges and Christian missionaries in India argued for removing or significantly modifying the so-called offenses relating to religion. As one commentator put it, “it is almost impossible to convert a sincere or ardent votary of any faith without wounding his religious feelings in the early stages of the process.” So, “if it is admitted that attempts at conversion from one faith to another ought not to be punished in British India, then the wounding of religious feelings ought not to be punished when the wound is inflicted with that legitimate object.” Even sarcasm “is often the only answer that can be given to positions too absurd to be gravely argued.”

In response to such objections, the framers of the Code placed their faith in the discretion of judges: “it is not the impression of the offended party that is to be admitted to decide whether the words uttered deserve to be considered as insulting; and whether they were uttered with the deliberate intention of insulting; these are points to be determined upon cool and calm consideration of the circumstances by the Judge.” However, the subsequent history has vindicated the critics’ warnings. In practice, many subsequent judicial decisions on cases of peaceful speech suppressed under these laws have been arbitrary, biased, and unjust.

One such case from 1962 prefigures Edamaruku’s own. In it the Karnataka High Court overturned an acquittal of Henry Rodrigues, editor and publisher of The Crusader, a magazine that attacked Roman Catholic belief from a broadly Biblical Christian perspective. “Honor to Mary or Dishonor?” asked one article. According to court records, it contained this passage:

Taken up with this infidel devotion to Mary, what a large number of people call upon a dead creature [for help]. The poor dead Mary neither hears nor sees them. If a thousand people, in a thousand cities use a thousand rosaries at the same time to say "Hail Mary, Hail Mary” to honor and worship a corpse, will a single dead creature be able to hear the prayers and honor uttered by the thousand people in the thousand cities in a thousand languages (which include the language of the dumb too)?¹

The article went on to assert that miracles attributed to Mary were designed to swindle money from parishioners.

The lower court granted that such language could be considered abusive and insulting to Catholics, but found no malicious intent. Rodrigues’ lawyers argued that Rodrigues—himself a self-identified Catholic—published this material “in a spirit to bring about reformation and out of a sincere conviction that certain practices followed by the Roman Catholics and certain superstitious beliefs entertained by them, are all wholly opposed to what is stated in the Holy Bible.”

In the matter of The Crusader, truth was supposed to be of no moment. As the court put it, “even a true statement may outrage religious feelings.” Likewise, if the matter of the dripping cross sees trial, truth will be no defense and so the outcome will not formally turn on whether Catholic idol-worshipping or science-bashing can be “proven.” What the judges will most likely think they will be doing in exercising the powers first granted to them by the colonial government is determining whether Edamaruku’s insult was made with malicious intent. But truth has a way of seeping imperceptibly back into the matter, as if by capillary action.

In State of Mysore v. Henry Rodrigues, the High Court, considering the very same evidence as had the lower court, arrived at the contrary finding of malice.

This is an allegation made, without any just or lawful excuse. Because, by no stretch of imagination can it be said that in worshipping and offering prayers to Mary, the followers of the Roman Church actually worshipped a corpse or a dead body. . . . There cannot be any doubt that the statement of the [defendant] . . . is one made without any lawful or just excuse and intended only to outrage the religious feelings of the followers of the Roman Catholic Church.

Apparently the judges could fathom no psychologically plausible motive other than malice, given the obvious unreasonableness of the defendant’s speech. But their prior belief in the unreasonableness of his speech must have come from their own understanding of what does and does not constitute idolatry. Evidently, Rodrigues held that that to attribute agency and address petitionary prayer to Mary is to invest with divinity a dead human being. By refusing to countenance this as a “just or lawful” reason for his insulting speech, the court in effect classified his religious beliefs as beyond reasonable imagination.

Several years earlier, S. Veerabadran Chettiar vs E. V. Ramaswami Naicker & Others, the Supreme Court weighed in on this matter. The case involved a man who shattered a clay figure of the Hindu god Ganesh in a public act of religious protest. Lower courts dismissed charges under Section 295—covering any act that “destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons”—on the grounds that the particular token of Ganesh’s image in question, while resembling those that were consecrated and worshipped by some Hindus, had not itself actually been consecrated and worshipped by anyone.² The Supreme Court, claiming that the lower courts had “given much too restricted a meaning to the words ‘any object held sacred by any class of persons’,” found that an object held sacred could include “any objective representation of a similar kind” to that which is consecrated or worshipped.

The judges may well have been cool and calm, but impartial they were not. This is the fatal flaw in the legal standard of intentional outrage of religious feelings: It gives government authorities the opportunity and the right to determine which contestable moral and religious beliefs are more worthy of protection.

Do Rationalists Have Feelings?

Lord Macaulay well understood that the contemporaneous British blasphemy law, which safeguarded Christian belief per se, would be unworkable in the multi-faith Indian context. The legal standard calibrated to “religious feelings” or “religious hatred” continues to be attractive to many precisely because it promises to substitute a quasi-secular category of harm to individual persons for a religious category of disrespect to a deity or dogma; to replace spiritual blasphemy with personal blasphemy, as I call it in The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.

However, the history of the Indian Penal Code illustrates that the quasi-secular standard of personal blasphemy does not prevent invidious discrimination on the basis of religious content. Neither does it remove a more basic structural inequality. The law of personal blasphemy comes to the defense of “religious” feelings but provides no equal protection for the sensibilities of secular persons of conscience or adherents of unrecognized minority faiths. Under the Indian Penal Code, rationalists like Sanal Edamaruku might as well have no feelings.

This inherent failure of equal treatment under the law is one powerful reason why we should welcome any challenge to this colonial-era law in secular democratic India and to similar laws wherever they are found.

Notes

1. State of Mysore v. Henry Rodrigues (1962) 2 Cr LJ 564.

2. S. Veerabadran Chettiar v. E. V. Ramaswami Naicker & Others (1958) AIR 1032, 1959 SCR 1211.

How do you treat your iPhone when it contains the iQuran?

Your house is on fire. In one room is your copy of the Quran; in another, your iPhone. You only have time to rescue one of them. Which will it be? Thanks to a recent fatwa, this dilemma can be avoided. Your copy of the Quran can reside on your iPhone. In March, Islamic scholars in Abu Dhabi ruled that Muslims in the United Arab Emirates may store and read Quranic passages on their smartphones and other mobile devices.

But the existence of virtual sacred texts presents other perplexing dilemmas about the application of traditional rules for proper reverential handling, use, and disposal. Can one take the Quran-loaded mobile device into a bathroom, an “impure” place in which the analog analog is forbidden? And is there any place more impure than the interior of one’s iPhone, where the bytes of the digital surahs can commingle with Lady Gaga’s or Nancy Arjam’s bits on video?

I began this series by contemplating Julian Huxley's stirring dream of a future in which the “universal culture” of science would unite the sundered human tribes; where collective international pursuit of the scientific enterprise—“by its nature opposed to dogmatic orthodoxies and to the claims of authority”—would hasten the reign of reason. One intrusion of reality into Huxley's dream, as I have noted in the course of this series, is a strain of “reactionary modernism” in which the trappings of modern science and technology are appropriated by conservative movements in the service of anti-modern, inegalitarian values.

The story of the smartphone fatwa presents another. Here the force of modern science is pushing people in the direction of change, not because they adopt the intellectual outlook of critical rationalism but because in practice they embrace the use of technological products in the hurly-burly of their everyday lives.

Quran 3.2.1

The Abu Dhabi government includes three bodies that appoint religious scholars or muftis to issue rulings on matters of Islamic law. The Justice Department provides fatwas on “justice and jurisprudential matters,” the Zakat Fund answers fatwa inquiries related to the religious duty of charitable giving, and the General Authority of Islamic Affairs & Endowments (GAIAE) “on all Sharia matters.” An Abu Dhabi government website invites citizens to send their requests via “text message in Arabic, English or Urdu not exceeding 200 letters” (responses are sent via SMS), to call “the Fatwa toll free number (800 2422) available in Arabic, English and Urdu from 8 AM to 8 PM” or to submit a question “to Reliable Guide Service through the Authority’s website.”

According to the coverage by the Abu Dhabi-based journal The National, the smartphone fatwa—issued, like other GAIAE rulings, in response to a questioner whose identity was not revealed—quoted the Quranic surah Al-Muzzammil (“the Mantled One,” or “One Folded in Garments”), “Read you, therefore, of the Quran as much as may be easy for you” and reasoned that believers are to read the text “using whatever means possible, for that is better than not reading at all” and that they will be “rewarded greatly for doing so.” The ruling also noted that “gadgets that make searches easy” could be used for religious betterment.

As is usually the case with new technologies, the commentators were giving their belated blessing to the voyage of a ship that had long since steamed out of port. Among those not awaiting permission from some muftis in UAE was Guided Ways Technologies, Ltd., a UK-based developer of iQuran, iPray, iZakah, iEatHalal, and other Islamic applications for iPhone, iPod Touch, and all major mobile devices. Its iQuran app, which features sophisticated audio components to facilitate the hearing and learning of tajweed, the proper pronunciation and intonation of the verses, is already in version 3.2.1; according to the Guided Ways website, its products are used by over 2.5 million people worldwide. The company has stated its intention to make all of its software available free of charge at some point; its statement of “ideology” gestures towards a general individualism: “We at Guided Ways do not believe in sects/divisions within muslims, nor do we aim to promote such a thing. We don’t believe in Labels (which inherently promotes sectarianism).”

Every Bit Is Sacred

The widespread adoption of technologies such as the iQuran ensures that ordinary believers will confront countless religious conundrums in miniature, such as those expressed in this post to a discussion board at Islam in Action:

Cell phone are on the side of belt and at times like on airport etc we cannot leave cellphone outside so it goes with us in the rest room. With Sharia is it going to be [disrespectful] to Quran to have it on iphone or other smart phone when some times it goes to restroom or if I take my daughter in my lap sometimes her feet touches the cell phone even though it is un-intentional?

One respondent offers this solution:

So long as the [Quran] application is not open, there would be no problem with having the phone under the belt, etc. . . . so long as the application is not opened, it would not be wrong to do so, more so if you have no other choice. Best to have the phone fully covered when entering the restroom, merely out of respect. . . . [Out] of sheer respect for the fact that the application is present, even though not opened, do give the ‘iphone’ its due care and respect.

Not unlike Surah Al-Muzzammil, which excuses from intensive scripture reading those who are “in ill-health,” “travelling through the land,” or “fighting in God’s Cause,” this suggestion is nothing if not pragmatic. Still, it is not without theological implications—and at least two incompatible implications at that. When does a mobile device count as a Quran? Whenever it stores the right set of metaphysical and moral truths, a body of information the essence of which can be retained even in binary bytes? If so, then believers may be required to give their iPhone 4s ritual burials when the next upgrade arrives. Or is a mobile device a Quran—literally, “the Recitation”—only when it is instantiating this information in the right human-decipherable language, or perhaps only when it is generating the sacred auditory object itself? If so, then it may follow that even a paper version is sacred only when a believer is engaged in recitation with it.

Such questions go to the heart of one of the most important and longstanding controversies of Islamic theology: What is the Quran? Is it a part of history, a message directed by God to humanity at a particular moment in time that may be interpreted by human reason? Or is it timeless, eternal, a sacred object that is to be venerated and imitated through ritual recitation of “the original Arabic”—God’s phonemes, as I put it in The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights (leaving aside for the moment that revisionists have discovered multiple variants of the texts, with Ibn Warraq numbering them at thirty-two)?¹ The Mu‘tazilite school of thought, which flourished during the ninth and tenth centuries CE, fiercely defended the historicist position on the grounds that the alternative elevated the Quran to the point of idolatry and contradicted the doctrine of free will, for it entailed that the revelation existed prior to all human history.²

What must make Steve Jobs smile down on us from his brushed-stainless-steel perch is that the future of such theological questions is slipping from the hands of traditional scholars and government authorities and into the pockets of individual believers as they adapt their religious attitudes and practices to new habits of lived experience in a technologically-enhanced world. As the professor of religion and culture Rachel Wagner and others have been documenting, new communication technologies are challenging traditional models of authority in Muslim communities throughout the world, especially by enabling easy access to formerly obscure foundational documents by laypersons, most of whom are not Arabic-speaking. The very technologies that the General Authority of Islamic Affairs & Endowments endorsed may make it less likely to be consulted at all the next time.

Notes

1. Ibn Warraq, ed., Which Koran? Variants, manuscripts, linguistics (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2009).

2. Richard Martin, Mark Woodward, and Dwi Atmaja, Defenders of reason in Islam: Mu’tazilism from medieval school to modern symbol (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).

In the several years I've been working around the United Nations, he's been a treasured source of free entertainment for me, the inadvertent star of an Andy Kaufmann–routine version of himself. The only way to listen to his deadpan, ploddingly loopy soliloquies without withering in vicarious embarrassment or despair at human folly is to assume that they are part of an act of long-form satire that will eventually end in relieved applause.

As ever, representative Marghoob Saleem Butt was doing Pakistan proud.

I caught his act in New York in early February during a meeting of the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, a group of nineteen UN member states that considers the applications of NGOs wishing to affiliate themselves with the Economic and Social Council. Pakistan and the other so-called Islamic states in its international coalition, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation), were still worked up over a major symbolic defeat they suffered in June 2011 when the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

OIC v. LGBTQ

Introduced by South Africa—to the great consternation of the other members of the African group—the non-binding resolution expresses the Council's “grave concern at acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.” Astonishingly, this was the first time in its history that the UN’s human rights body had addressed violence and discrimination against sexual minorities.

The pride of Pakistan. (Image by Fry1989, Wikimedia Commons)

Before the vote in June, Pakistan spoke on behalf of the OIC to chastise the Council for discussing “controversial notions” of sexual orientation and gender identity, questioning “the attempt to introduce to the United Nations some notions that have no legal foundation in any international human rights instrument.” Contrary to this protest there is a twenty-year-old legal precedent holding that the protection against discrimination on the basis of “sex” contained in Articles 2 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights extends to sexual and gender minorities.¹

In a 14 February 2012 letter to the president of the Human Rights Council, Pakistan's Ambassador Zamir Akram repeated the complaint, saying, “We are even more disturbed at the attempt to focus on certain persons on the grounds of their abnormal sexual behavior.” Then, most OIC members boycotted a 7 March UN panel on “Discrimination and Violence based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” which had been called for by the June 2011 resolution. Meanwhile, at the Committee on NGOs, Pakistan was working hard to prevent any LGBTQ–rights group from gaining formal affiliation with the UN. At this particular session, the lightning rod was the Vienna-based Homosexuelle Initiative Wien, a group focused on equal rights for gays and lesbians in Austria. In tandem with the representative of Morocco, Butt trained his crypto-absurdist wit on the organization’s use of a medical scientific conception of homosexuality in describing their work.

They say there is some kind of scientific, you know, dictionary on which you can consult the definition of sexual orientation. I can quote a number of other scientific research [sic] in which this—there are different, I would say definitions of, let’s say, sexual orientation. I was just going through one which comes as the definition provided by American Psychiatric Association diagnostic. And they are giving twenty-two possible, I would say, forms of sexual orientation. I would really like to know, does this organization really attest to all of those twenty-two types of sexual orientation? Some of them are really even disgusting to read. Anyway, that’s beside the point. . . .

To say of this mental discharge even that it was beside the point would already be too unkind to the point. But the talk I heard coming out of the delegate from Pakistan was, I learned, representative of a new rhetoric being deployed across the board by the OIC at the UN. Interestingly for those who patrol the borderlands of science, the argument turns on a willful misreading of an already problematic and politicized publication, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM.

Textual deviance

The DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), may be the closest thing to a trusted practical guide for clinicians, hospitals, insurers, and regulators as they plumb the human soul. A flippant skeptic might say that it answers to a deep need to know which of all of the weird things that people do are eligible for reimbursement by a medical insurance company. As it happens, the plenary sessions of psychiatric conventions are already quaking with debates over the preparation of the next revision, DSM-V, scheduled for release in May 2013.

For some perspective on the politics of the DSM, consider the fact that its 1917 predecessor had twenty-two psychiatric diagnoses in total. The current edition, DSM-IV-TR (text revision), put out in 2000, has 350. The most notorious change came in 1974 when the APA determined by majority vote among its members that homosexuality is not a mental “disorder” and revised subsequent editions accordingly. The vote was 5,854 to 3,810, inviting one to conclude that non-hetero people are roughly 35 percent screwed up, like everyone else.²

The prevailing version of the DSM does not contain diagnostics for bisexuality, homosexuality, and heterosexuality as such. It does contain numerous conditions labeled Paraphilias, which are “characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”³ Among these are the familiar forms of sexual deviance (“paraphilia” is preferred by some as a purportedly less value-laden term than “sexual deviation”) along with some forms that were, there’s no shame in reporting, unfamiliar to this author. The list includes Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, Sadism, Masochism, Fetishism, Autogynephilia (the sexual arousal of a man by his own perception of himself as a woman or dressed as a woman), Frotteurism (arousing fantasies, urges, or behaviors involving touching and rubbing against a nonconsenting person—something that former doyen of cognitive behavioral therapy Albert Ellis used to enjoy regularly on the New York City subways), and Telephone Scatalogia (sexual arousal associated with making or receiving obscene phone calls).

The same list includes Zoophilia and Pedophilia. Pakistan was misreading the DSM as classifying every paraphilia a “sexual orientation” in order to draw the conclusion that a new international human right to non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity would give protection to rapists of children and animals. This was in the service of the OIC’s spurious insistence on the need for a consensus legal definition of “sexual orientation” before the UN can make any further advances in the protection of the human rights of sexual minorities.

In bed with conservative Christians?

There is some evidence to suggest that this devious argument originated with North American evangelical groups such as Concerned Women for America and the Traditional Values Coalition and that it has been circulated in UN circles by Thomas W. Jacobson, a United Nations representative for Focus on the Family—one of thousands of religious organizations that have received affiliation, while Homosexuelle Initiative Wien and other LGBTQ–rights applicants languish in bureaucratic purgatory thanks to OIC–led obstructionism.

When the Israeli representative on the Committee on NGOs intervened to point out that this Austrian organization would never be able to define sexual orientation to the satisfaction of the governments of Pakistan and Morocco, he turned the tables in a way that had to be admired.

I’m not really certain what the distinguished representative of Morocco means when he says that they try to justify homosexual behavior. What really is there to justify? And why is the reference specifically to behavior? How can a man or a woman justify who they are? I’m sorry I think these questions will remain open and I believe that we shouldn't present questions that have no answer to NGOs, questions that may be discriminatory. In this case, it seems they are.

That got Pakistan hot.

Let me start by saying that while I have full respect for the views expressed by my distinguished colleagues from United States, Belgium, and Israel, irrespective of the fact that how [sic] I may differ with them, I would never be calling them discriminatory because these are the views that they are entitled to and as sovereign states they have the right to express them in any forum, especially in the UN forum.

Throwing up his hands at Israel’s sensible observation that governments such as Pakistan’s that criminalize homosexuality must themselves be in possession of a working definition, Butt brought the curtain down:

I think this type of discussion should end. Let me just say that yes we know what we mean in our countries what is sexual orientation. But we are not granting the consultative status to these NGOs in our countries. We are granting consultative status to these NGOs in the United Nations. That is why we need a definition from the United Nations. So I think this discussion should stop here. We know that this is for the sake of political argument and if that be the case I thought that it’s appropriate that I should also put on record what we believe on the subject.

With that, he bolted to the back of the hall to make some calls, leaving his colleagues to respond to his performance. I got the distinct feeling that the discussion would not stop here.

Notes

1. Toonen v. Australia, Communication No. 488/1992, U.N. Doc CCPR/C/50/D/488/1992 (1994). ↩

2. John Cloud, “What Counts as Crazy?” Time magazine (March 19, 2012), 44. ↩

3. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth edition, Text revision (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 535. ↩

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.