Islam Facilitated
the Golden Age of
Scientific Discovery
The Myth:
Muslims
often claim that Islam fostered a rich heritage of scientific
discovery, “paving the way” for modern advances in technology and medicine.
On this subject, they usually cite the period between the 7th and
13th
centuries, when Europe was experiencing its “Dark Ages” and the Muslim world was
acquiring new populations and culture through violent conquest.
The Truth:
Although
there is no arguing that the Muslim world was relatively more advanced during this
Middle Age period
than the Christian world, the reasons for this have absolutely
nothing to do with the Islamic religion - other than its mandate for
military expansion. In fact, the religion tends to discourage knowledge
outside of itself (Quran
5:101-102), which is why the most prolific Muslim scholars are mostly students of religion rather than science.
[Note that the country of Spain alone translates more learning material and
literature into Spanish each year than the entire Arab world has translated into
Arabic since the 9th century. As the Saudi Grand Mufti bluntly put it in
2010, "The Quran with its stories and knowledge are sufficient for us... we
don't need the Torah, or Gospels, or any other book"].
The many
fundamentalists and other devotees who dress as Muhammad did and adopt 7th
century lifestyles to some degree underscore the importance of
tradition in Islam. The religion is highly conservative and resistant to
change, which is viewed with suspicion. As scholar Bernard Lewis points
out: in Islam, an innovation is presumed to be bad unless it can be proven to be
good.
Beyond
this, there are
four basic reasons why Islam has little true claim to scientific achievement:
First, the
Muslim world benefited greatly from the Greek sciences, which were
translated
for them by dhimmi Christians and Jews. To their credit, Muslims did a better job
of preserving Greek text than did the Europeans of the time, and this became the
foundation for their own knowledge. (Although one large reason is that access by Christians to this part of their world was cut off by Muslim slave ships and coastal raids that dominated the Mediterranean during
this period).
Second,
many of the scientific advances credited to Islam were actually “borrowed” from
other cultures conquered by the Muslims. The algebraic concept of “zero”,
for example, is erroneously attributed to Islam when it was, in fact, a Hindu
discovery that was merely introduced to the West by Muslims.
In truth,
conquered populations contributed greatly to the history of “Muslim" science
until gradually being decimated by conversion to Islam (under the pressures of dhimmitude).
As Mark Steyn puts it, "When admirers talk up Islam and the great
innovations and rich culture of its heyday, they forget that even at its height
Muslims were never more than a minority in the Muslim world, and they were in
large part living off the energy of others."
The Muslim concentration within a population is proportional to the decline of scientific achievement. It is no
accident that the Muslim world has had little to show for itself in the last 800
years or so, since running out of new civilizations to cannibalize.
Third, the
accomplished scientists and cultural icons who were Muslim were often considered heretics in their
day, sometimes with good reason. One of the greatest achievers to come out
of the Muslim world was the Persian scientist and philosopher, al-Razi.
His impressive works are often held up as 'proof' of Muslim
accomplishment. But what apologists often leave out is that al-Razi
was denounced as a blasphemer for following his own religious beliefs –
which were in obvious contradiction to traditional Islam.
Fourth,
even the contributions that are attributed to Islam (often inaccurately) are not
terribly dramatic. There is the 'invention' of certain words, such as
alchemy and elixir (and assassin, by the way) but not much else that survives in modern technology
which is
of practical significance. It is also highly improbable that
such discoveries would not have been made by the West following the
cultural awakening triggered by the Reformation.
As an
example, consider that Muslims claim credit for coffee - in the
sense that they popularized knowledge that already existed with Africans who were caught up
in the Arab slave trade. However, consider that the red dye used in many food products, from cranberry juice to
candy, comes from the abdomen of a particular female beetle found in South
America. It is extremely unlikely that Western science would not have stumbled
across coffee by now.
In fact,
the litany of “Muslim” achievement often takes the form of rhapsody, in which
the true origins of these discoveries are omitted - along with their comparative
insignificance to Western achievement. One usually doesn't hear about the
dark side either. Those who brag about the
great observatory of Taqi al-Din in [freshly conquered] Istanbul, for example,
often neglect to mention that it was quickly destroyed by the caliphate.
At the end
of the day, the record of scientific, medical and technological
accomplishment is not something over which Muslim apologists want to get into
a contest with the Christian and Jewish world. Today’s Islamic innovators are
better known for turning Western technology, such as cell phones and airplanes,
into instruments of mass murder.
To sum up,
although the Islamic religion is not entirely hostile to science, neither should
it be confused as a facilitator. The great achievements that are said to
have come out of the Islamic world were made either by non-Muslims who happened
to be under Islamic rule, or by heretics who usually had little interest in
Islam. Scientific discovery tapers off dramatically as Islam asserts
dominance, until it eventually peters out altogether.
[Note #1: The Organization of Islamic States (OIC) is composed of the 57 Muslim countries with 1.6 billion people. It contains 550 universities. The United States, with less than one fifth the population, has 10 times as many. In 2005, Harvard University alone produced more scientific papers than 17 Arab countries combined]
[Note #2: Few people are as outwardly zealous about the superiority of Islam over the West than the mullahs of Iran. Yet, when these same clerics need top-notch medical treatment, they shamelessly travel to Europe (such as Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi in 2018). Even in their own country, there is not a single source of modern convenience that was not borrowed from Western innovation.]
[Note #3:
As an example of how religion triumphs over science in the Islamic world, in 2024 a professor of zoology in Pakistan, was forced by clerics to renounce (on camera) Darwin's theory of Evolution. This followed a bomb attack which left him in a wheelchair. He also had to affirm the Islamic view that women are not as intelligent as men.]
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