Why did Muslims lag behind the West? This is an overly broad question that I, in no way, claim to have the answer to in such short article. What I have is some thoughts.. Random thoughts. First, I want to start by some observation that I feel is really underestimated by Muslims, or at least that was my case until 4-5 years ago. When we talk about the West-Muslim gap in science and civilization we are not just talking about a "shift" in roles with Muslims being ahead of the West for so many centuries (basically the Middle Ages) and then the West taking the lead starting from the renaissance. The gap is far deeper than that for the "levels" of civilization that we are currently talking about in the 21st century (including ours) are simply unprecedented in the entire human history since the evolution of Homo Sapiens about one million years ago. To put it clearly, the Industrial Revolution which started in the late 18th century (and which is taught in a totally ridiculous way in our school curriculum) has basically lifted the levels of human living conditions to extremely high levels. Such "revolution" is only comparable to the agricultural revolution that occurred 10,000 years earlier and which shifted the miserable lives of hunters and gatherers into settled food producing. Parallel with this revolution, was a sizable increase in the life expectancy of humans from 35-40 years (as was the case during the entire human history) into 60 years and later to more than 80 yeas in some countries nowadays. So what I mean is that what happened then is not merely a shift in roles.. It is a shift but with a huge increase in levels of the gap as well as in the size of the gap itself: When Muslims were ahead of the West the latter was not so poor relative to the Muslim World as the Muslims are currently poor relative to the West! When Muslims were leading, Haroun al-Rashid, at the heyday of Islamic civilization was dying at the age of 40 years and the masses were living at the subsistence level since agriculture was the only method of production.
But, why did not such revolution take place in the Muslim World? Why did not the Muslims translate their more sophisticated science into a "steam engine" for example? The same question was asked of various civilizations (for instance, the Graeco-Roman Ancient Civilization), and the answer lies in the intellectual origins! To put it simply, scientific thinking was not systematically used in these civilizations, although there were "individual" attempts to introduce such thinking.
Muslims (by the way, I mean in this article "culturally" Muslims for many of the great contributions to Islamic civilization came from non-Muslims) started adopting Greek philosophy since the 8th century AD through "Islamic 'Elm Al-Kalam". The motivation was clear: respond to non-Muslims and new converts to Islam who were armed by the weapons of the Greek philosophy and were questioning the logical and theological foundations of the Islamic teachings. Islam, up to that time an unsophisticated "Bedouin" religion, was basically unable to respond to such questions: How would a Muslim scholar respond to a non-believer? Would he direct him to a verse in a holy book he does not believe in in the first place? Al-Mu'tazela took the lead in this movement and they began philosophizing Islam, employing reason in interpreting Quran, and stood firmly in the theological debates with non-Muslims and new converts.
Al-Mu'tazela, however, initiated some debate about the nature of the Quran: Whether it was "created" by God or rather existed from eternity? This was a costly debate in the history of Islamic thought and although I agree with the logic of Al-Mu'tazela in their claim that the Quran was created (otherwise there will be multiple gods and monotheism defied), I think they took it far in their insistence on imposing their belief as part of the Islamic belief and considering any one who does not believe in that as "heretic" and "infidel". This resulted in a counter-revolution by enemies of al-Mu'tazela, the conservative team which insisted on following the "words" of the Quran without employing reason, and made the public sympathize with the latter team. In the end, al-Mu'tazela were defeated, their books were burnt, and they remained until the present day considered as heretics by the Muslim hardliners and the "blind followers".
I mentioned this story as an example of the bad reputation rationalists, scientists, and philosophers held in the Islamic world since then. As another example, Al-Ghazali, one of the most celebrated Islamic thinkers in the modern Arab world wrote a famous treatise titled "Tahafot Al-Falasifa" or "Emptiness (?) of Philosophers" which was taught in Al-Azhar for many centuries (perhaps until today?).
The consequence of the final victory of the conservatives was enormous: The door of innovation in Islamic Jurisprudence was closed and scientific thinking was discouraged. Perhaps all the scientists that we hear of (Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina for instance) were not really popular figures in the Islamic world. The popular figures were Malik and Ibn Hanbal!
Los Angeles: April 22, 2010
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