Science Near Islam

I’m watching “Science And Islam” on BBC Four. I’ve already rejected the premise out of hand, but I’m watching it anyway. I’ll buy that Muslims have made and will continue to make important discoveries, but it’ll take a lot to convince me that Islam itself has anything to do with it. (This is not helped by the fact that after about five minutes the show referenced a book called “The Hindu Art Of Reckoning” as a major breakthrough in mathematics.) Favourite quote so far: “I think one must bear in mind that this [the 8th century AD] is an era in which people actually believed in God.” – Dr Amira Bennison, Cambridge University. How good is that?

Mostly it is about the Islamic world and the culture and people thereof rather than Islam itself (the Islamic people seem uniquely incapable of distinguishing these concepts), but there are a couple of encouraging comments from Mohammed in holy texts that can’t have hurt (although the program doesn’t address other parts of scripture that may have the opposite effect) and an interesting idea about the Q’uran helping out. The idea is that Arabic was rolled out as a universal language to help people understand the book in its original form, and Arabic was modified to make it clearer so that people didn’t misinterpret it. That doubtless helped science, albeit by accident, by enabling easy, unambiguous communication. (It’s interesting that Christianity didn’t feel the need to make their message unambiguous – indeed, until recently they deliberately obfuscated it by translating it into dead languages. I think they only stopped because it was too much like hard work.)

Right now the presenter, Jim Al-Khalili, is talking to a so-called “wise woman” who has a wide variety of herbal and similar remedies. I assume he’s just being polite, but It appears not to have occured to him that they might not work. To my eyes, that proves nothing at all to do with science. That could just as easily be superstition. It becomes science when you test it. It’s a blurry line when you’re talking about the early proto-science of the eighth century, but the fact that she’s still selling this stuff in the twenty-first doesn’t seem to have put him off his “Science And Islam Walking Hand In Hand” thesis. And now he is reading from a book which says epilepsy is caused by evil spirits. “Hardly scientific,” he says, “but Islam’s most tangible contribution to medicine is less in its specific remedies and more in its overarching philosophy. It is, after all, a religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans”. No, it’s just a religion. Like all religions, it contains loads of different ideas, many of which are perfectly horrid, and adherants can choose to focus on any of them that they fancy.

I know Islam has had some bad press lately, but you won’t fix that by trying to give it the credit for any and all achievements made by its followers or their subjects. Marcus du Sautoy managed to cover much of the same ground on the same channel without as far as I recall mentioning Islam. (I imagine he probably mentioned it in passing.) That should be a clue as to how important it was. Another interesting quote from Dr Bennison just now: “it was not the case [in ninth century debates] that people were expected to adhere to a particular line or adopt a particular religion. They were allowed to express their own sentiments and their own views very freely. The point was that they should do so in elegant Arabic and in good logical reasoning”. Compare and contrast that to the reaction to the cartoons of Mohammed, an arguably quite important side of Islam that the program utterly fails to mention. Where did “butcher those who insult Islam” come from? Why should I credit Islam with the former and not blame it for the latter?

This sort of thing bothers me because it kind of spoils an otherwise interesting documentary, and because if we confuse a religion with its followers then any meaningful debate is impossible. You can’t argue against an idea if that argument is seen as an attack on the people who hold that idea (or other similar ones, since the term “Islam” can cover a multitude of sins). I think that if you call a show “Science And Islam” then it should be about the relationship between science and Islam, not about the growth of science in the Islamic world (that show should clearly be called “Science of Arabia”), and as part of that I expect you to mention that the influence of Islam on science has at times been to hinder it. Granted I’ve only seen one episode, but even if that is redressed in future episodes, I shouldn’t have to watch a whole series to get balance.

The program now ends with the observation that “the first great achievment of the medieval Islamic scientists was to prove that science isn’t Islamic… Science… transcends political borders and religious affiliations”. Which is true only in the rather weak sense that science remains true no matter which parts of it you elect to ignore: science is not Islamic, and crucially, Islam is not scientific.