See how far one man can slide into moonbattery between 1992 and 2007. Back before he became Algore, High Priest of Knowing What’s Good For You, the hypocrite was criticizing Bush for ignoring Iraq’s ties to terrorism.
4 October, 2007
Science and Islam
A physics professor from Pakistan laments the lack of scientific progress in the Islamic world.
Where his points are about science, they are well-taken.
Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or “butterfly-collecting” activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.
Followed by a pot shot at the West.
Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science. But what explains its meteoric rise in Islam over the past half century? In the mid-1950s all Muslim leaders were secular, and secularism in Islam was growing. What changed? Here the West must accept its share of responsibility for reversing the trend. Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq, Indonesia under Ahmed Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser are examples of secular but nationalist governments that wanted to protect their national wealth. Western imperial greed, however, subverted and overthrew them. At the same time, conservative oil-rich Arab states—such as Saudi Arabia—that exported extreme versions of Islam were US clients. The fundamentalist Hamas organization was helped by Israel in its fight against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization as part of a deliberate Israeli strategy in the 1980s. Perhaps most important, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency armed the fiercest and most ideologically charged Islamic fighters and brought them from distant Muslim countries into Afghanistan, thus helping to create an extensive globalized jihad network. Today, as secularism continues to retreat, Islamic fundamentalism fills the vacuum.
There may have been undesireable consequences to some foreign policy decisions, but that hardly explains why his campus at Islamabad “has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore.” When he holds up the EU as a shining example of how to do things right it’s tempting to dismiss him. But the article raises many good points, and the best part about it is that his article’s very existence is a sign of reform in Islam.
And that can come none too soon.
