Indeed, even in Egypt, the media has a long way to go, particularly to improve its coverage of science and the environment. “Egyptian coverage of issues like climate change and biodiversity is very poor,” says Hazem Zohny, a local journalist for Al-Masry Al-Youm. “In the Arab press, they just produce press releases and statements. The English press is better, but we can say there are only a handful of trained science journalists in the country. The rest just dabble.
“The problem is few journalists actually understand scientific issues. We get ‘science journalists’ who don’t actually believe in evolution. Their religious beliefs don’t allow it. What’s the solution? We need to completely change the education system. The idea of critical thinking doesn’t exist in the public schools. We also need more independent media.”
Indeed, while the decline of Islamic science resulted mainly from a broader economic decline and the closing off of trade, it also resulted from the failure of certain technological and educational reforms. Following Johanes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450, for instance, it took forty-three years for the Ottoman Empire to allow the construction of one in Constantinople, due to the opposition of guilds which decried it as “the Devil’s Invention.”
Few in the Middle East would say the same thing today, but if science is to grow again the desert, it must be watered with more than just money. It will also require a truly free and open-minded society.
"From the seventh to fifteenth centuries—while Europe was wallowing in the dark ages—science, astronomy, and mathematics flourished in the Islamic world, spreading from Andalusia in the west to Bukhara and Samarkand in the east, encompassing scientists from many different faiths'
padikiller responds: This really isn't a true statement.
The Arabs did play with and preserve some the Greek mathematics (the tiny residue that they and the Christians didn't burn), but the Arabs didn't add anything substantial to the field of mathematics. Ever. The Indians deserve most of the credit for advancing mathematics, including developing algebra and the number zero. The Arabs deserve credit for preserving and transferring Greek and Indian knowledge, but they don't deserve a lot of credit for expanding or enhancing this knowledge.
In other branches of science, the Arabs were hardly advanced - for example, in astronomy, they never advanced a heliocentric theory.
In chemistry, they were never anything more than alchemists.
In medicine, nothing in a thousand years but a couple of treatises dealing with traditional medicine.
In physics, nothing substantial at all.
The "science" of ancient Islam is terribly overstated; a stark example of historical revisionism.
#1 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Thu 14 Jul 2011 at 08:21 AM
This is a wonderful story.Thanks James for the update.But I heard that the Hindu book Geeta was the guru of the science. Even at that time, the book mentioned that the god use to fly on special machine and many believe that the flying concept on human mind came due to that holy book. Arab deserve preserving but in reality the store house of the science was holy book Geeta, Vedh and other books on hinduism. Its what I heard ,it may be wrong.
Second, the arab world should wake up, I suffocate here when I hear about the women in Arab world, how they are treated. In this world, one has to cover her face whole life and even many countries have not provided the voting rights or poltical rights to women. With the development of science, the Arab world should come on reality and explore much more not only scientifically but socially as well.Cheers
#2 Posted by Ramesh, CJR on Fri 15 Jul 2011 at 02:30 PM
Nice story and writing. Impressive and informative. Thanks James to give us a story like Growing Science in the Desert.
By the way, I was trying to file a story regarding ''Salinity issues in Bangladesh'' but couldn't make it happen. Now I'm inviting you to come here in Bangladesh and follow the story.
#3 Posted by Pantho Rahaman, CJR on Sat 16 Jul 2011 at 03:31 AM