Islam, science, and free and open inquiry

Pervez Hoodbhoy courageously details how “intolerance and militancy sweep across the Muslim world” while “personal and academic freedoms diminish” and “secularism continues to retreat.” His sobering and well-documented account of Islamic science in which “the penalties for disbelief are severe” has dispelled many illusions.

But we should avoid new myths. Pseudoscience, parapsychology, and belief in UFOs offer no serious threat to Western science. Moreover, calls for experimental restraint in handling living matter are neither frivolous superstition nor antiscientific. Even creationists generally campaign only for a place in classroom discussion—a teaching opportunity at best and a mild inconvenience at worst, compared to the physical threats and crushed inquiry that Hoodbhoy has witnessed. Nor does scientific advancement demand abandonment of religion; Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and James Clerk Maxwell demonstrate not only that Western science flourished well before the 18th-century rise of atheism but that later scientists continued to practice religion. (Many still do.) Michael Faraday used scientific experiments to discredit séances—a move admired by John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Science indeed triumphs through establishing belief on logic and reason rather than on fear. From Socrates to Jesus to Galileo to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the West reveres thinkers who suffer violence, rather than inflict it, for the sake of truth. Irrationalism in the West flourishes most among relativists who take power, rather than truth, to be the aim of science. A preference for irrational force over knowledge is in fact the common enemy of science in the Muslim world and the West. Hoodbhoy’s bold manifesto heroically faces that enemy.