RENDER UNTO SCIENCE. There was RENDER UNTO SCIENCE. There was an article
in yesterday's print Wall Street Journal
(no free link - 1/23/02, p.1, author Daniel Golden) that piqued my curiosity:
"Western Scholars Play Key Role in Touting 'Science' of the Quran". (I'll
note in passing that some of those western scholars are probably feeling
very embarrassed about this right now.) It details how the works and words
of Western scientists - geologists, embryologists, marine scientists - are
being pressed into service to support the view "that the Quran...is historically
and scientifically correct in every detail". This "fast-growing branch of
Islamic fundamentalism" is called Bucailleism, after Maurice Bucaille, who
wrote The Bible, the Qur'an, and Science
, a book advancing the above thesis. Bucailleism moves in a direction opposite
to Christian "creation science" - while the latter looks for evidence in
nature to support the literal truth of Bible passages, Bucailleists go in
for sura mining to demonstrate that scientific discoveries and the
modern understanding of the universe are all presaged in the Koran. Black
holes, for example, are said to be described by the sura which states
"Heaven is opened and becomes as gates", and common emprirical observations
about heredity are exalted into foreshadowings of modern genetics. Apparently
Bucailleism is very popular and widely taught in secondary schools. Having
followed the labors and fortunes of Christian "creation scientists" over
the years, I was intrigued. A web search returns many entries for "Bucaille";
to narrow my enquiry I googled "Bucaille AND Darwin". What struck me in
the returned articles I perused was the similarity of style between these
and "creation-science" writing - the same selective quotations, the same
scientific misunderstanding, the same torturing of innocent facts into unnatural
relationships with one another, to force them to fit pre-existng categories,
the same fondness for straw-men, the same fulsome praise for the highly distinguished
scientific credentials of the esteemed author. A couple of examples of the
confusion: In a page on "Islamic Evolution", we get:

In contrast, the Quran describes the formation of the universe as a big bang, beginning with the creation of the heavens and the earths. The plurality of these terms is stressed in order to indicate that there are numerous galaxies. Next, the formation of water, the development of the land, and the creation of plants and animals took place (7:54, 41:9-12, 21:30, 44:7, 78:37). This account coincides with current scientific data. For example, according to the Quran, humans were created in the fourth period on earth, and geologists have concluded that humans appeared in the quaternary, or fourth, era.

This must mean that 19th-century geologist Jules Desnoyers decided to change the strata-designation formerly known as "Alluvium" to "Quaternary" on the basis of divine revelation. The author of another site not only implies that the Koran uniquely asserts that man was made from clay, but that this is an exposition of evolutionary theory. He also neatly divvies up all of paleoanthropology into proof of "four transformations of man" to suit his Koranic exegesis: Australopithecus, Pithecanthropines, Neanderthals ("Paleanthropians"), and Homo sapiens. (Their relation to, and how they replaced, one another is left pretty vague. Wise move.) Well, you can find plenty of stuff like that. I'm not at all surprised at its parallels with Christian fundamentalism. But in the end it's not very amusing - there is someting deeply pathetic about people with brains trying to do science with holy books. But the saddest thing in this particular exercise in fundamentalism is the denial of the universalism of human scientific endeavors. The WSJ article cites U of Penn historian S. Nomanul Haq:

He attributes the rise of Bucailleism to a "deep, deep inferiority complex" among Muslims humiliated by colonialism and bidding to recapture faded glories of Islamic science.

Well, I'd say a desire to raise science to glorious new heights is all for the good. But scientific excellence is not the preserve of any one human group. The article cited above, while properly exhorting youth to excel in science, ends on this misguided exclusionary note:

It is regretable that the task that was asigned to the Muslims that is being done by non Muslims, why Muslims are not on the fore-front, while they have the guidance of Quran in their hand. Earlier Muslims made scientific discoveries, as a matter of fact they are the pioneers of today’s Science. Karen Armstrong, the author of “Holy War”, says, “This fact has never been acknowledged in the west that all the scientific and technological development that we have today, we owe it to the Arabs and Muslims”.

First , a quibble about straw-men: no historically literate Westerner is unaware of, or refuses to acknowledge, the contributions of Arab and Muslim civilization to science. Second quibble - I don't have the book he mentions, but that quote sounds a wee bit doctored. Not even Karen Armstrong would argue that the West has made no original contributions to science and technology. It's pathetic that somebody ostensibly referencing the Islamic Golden Age should feel the need to veer into Black Athena territory. But what's really disturbing is how this fundamentalism completely misses the lesson of the history of science, which is that science is a human project, that flourishes and fails across time, geography, and peoples - and that scientific advances are not made from the study of spiritual literature , or by wasting one's time in obscurantist arguments worthy of interpreters of Nostradamus. The great names of the Islamic Golden Age, like the great names of the Scientific Revolution - whatever their personal religious beliefs, or hopes of reconciling their beliefs with their reason - advanced science by putting down their holy books and opening the book of nature.
Posted by Moira Breen at January 24, 2002 09:04 AM