Mick Hartley

Matthew Syed on the disastrous legacy of Islamic fundamentalism:

One of the presiding iniquities of much western scholarship is the myth that all ills in the world can be traced to European colonialism, an untruth that serves as a sop to the developing world, the comforting delusion that the blame can be placed on outsiders and never on developments from within. The truth, of course, is that the degeneration of Islamic civilisation long predated colonialism and, in a certain sense, permitted it. I am talking about religion or, perhaps more accurately, that variant we call fundamentalism.

I guess I am not alone in wondering how different the Middle East might have been had it not been for the seismic influence of Al-Ghazali, that revered scholar of Sunni thought, who in the 12th century argued that science is not a liberator but a threat to the word of God and a danger to the clerics, who had every incentive to thwart the thirst for knowledge to maintain their power and privileges. “Innovator” was not regarded as a term of praise but, as the scholar Toby Huff has put it, “a term for a heretic and non-believer, subject to death”.

There have been plenty of other Islamic scholars, like Al-Ghazali, maintaining that Islam was perfect from its foundation, and must never be altered or amended or reformed: that it’s the final word of God which previous religions like Judaism and Christianity struggled to elucidate, but has now been revealed in its final perfection through the words of Mohammed.

Islam also means submission. So no, not much room for a reformation there.

The historian Bernard Lewis notes in What Went Wrong? that as the influence of fundamentalist Islam percolated through the region during the later Middle Ages, “the relationship between Christendom and Islam in the sciences was reversed. Those who had been disciples now became teachers.” Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a 19th-century intellectual, wrote that Arab civilisation, which had once “thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished”.

To describe this as a catastrophe is an understatement. While universities such as those at Bologna, Pisa and Oxford were slowly freeing themselves from the grip of the church — notwithstanding the arrest of Galileo in the 17th century — Islamic power structures were imprisoning the human mind within the cage of revealed truth. As a Taliban leader put it recently: “Western education is a sin”, ramming his point home by explaining his view of rain. “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.”

While they condemn Afghan women to oblivion, and Boko Haram in Nigeria, who also consider Western education to be a sin (it’s their name), go around slaughtering Christians.

It may be politically incorrect these days, but it is important to note that the 57 Muslim majority nations have just one university in the top 200 of the world; that there are two billion followers of Islam but only four winners of a Nobel science prize. A report in Nature magazine in 2002 found only three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excelled: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction.

Meanwhile, it may be worth pointing out, Jews are hugely over-represented as Nobel science prize winners, while Israel has four universities in the world top 200, and world-class hospitals where Arabs work together with Jews.