AS AMERICAN troops closed in on Baghdad, Iraq鈥檚 information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, turned the denial of reality into a fine art. But even he would have been hard pushed to explain away something the conflict in his country has clearly demonstrated: the gigantic technology gap between the Arab world and the West.
The war in Iraq is being called the most one-sided in history. The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan predicted last week that many Arabs would see it as 鈥渁 moral, psychological and political defeat鈥�. Some also see it as a defeat for Muslim research and development.
鈥淲hile Iraqis were looting their own treasure, scientists in Britain were announcing the completion of the human genome sequence. Nothing better illustrates the technological disparity between the Middle East and the West today,鈥� says British writer and academic Ziauddin Sardar, an expert on the history of Islamic science.
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Most Islamic commentators agree that scientific development in the Arab world has run into the sand. Arab countries are among the lowest spenders in this field in the world: research funding in the region amounted to just 0.2 per cent of GDP in 1994, compared with 0.3 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, 1.8 per cent in Western Europe and 2.5 per cent in North America.
One good indicator of a country鈥檚 scientific output is how many scientific papers its researchers publish per head of population. For Arab nations this figure is around 2 per cent of the average for industrialised nations, according to last year鈥檚 UN Arab Human Development Report.
Often, where science is stalled so too is economic development. Science and technology are arguably the biggest drivers of economic growth, and here the Arab world is lagging. In 1999 the GDP in all the Arab countries combined, with a total population of 246 million, amounted to $531.2 billion, less than that of Spain, which has a population of only 40 million.
It was not always thus. Most historians agree that Islamic scientists 鈥� such as Al-Khwarizmi, the 9th-century founder of algebra 鈥� laid the foundations for the European Renaissance. Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, goes further: between the 9th and 13th centuries, he says, all the people doing decent science, philosophy or medicine were Muslims.
But thereafter, a religious establishment that was fearful of alternative interpretations of Islam held sway over those advocating change and growth. In Hoodbhoy鈥檚 words, rationality became choked in the 鈥渧ice-like grip of orthodoxy鈥�.
Science in Muslim countries has never properly recovered. This despite the conviction of many scholars that science and Islam are not in conflict, since the Koran explicitly encourages Muslims to seek knowledge of the world. But while Islamic experts agree on the extent of the decline of Muslim science, there is dispute over why it happened and what is keeping it that way today. Some argue it still comes down to religion, and the difficulty of modernising within a strict traditional culture. 鈥淩ational doubt is central to modernity,鈥� says Malise Ruthven, a scholar of Islamic history and visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego. Scepticism, he says, is incompatible with the Islamic idea that all knowledge comes from God.
Other experts claim it is not religion holding things back so much as politics. Sardar puts it down to 鈥渄espotic regimes that are only interested in the technology of control and quick fixes. The only research Saddam Hussein was interested in was weapons.鈥� Muslim science, he says, relies too much on buying in expertise and equipment, which undermines the need to do basic research. Arab governments have to realise that to promote scientific and technological development they need to go back to the lab and do their own research into their own problems.
Whatever its immediate causes, the crisis in technology raises a fundamental question: how has the West, which several centuries ago abandoned religion as the primary source of knowledge, moved so far in science compared with the Arab world, whose very identity depends on knowledge revealed by God? It is a question that Ruthven believes many Arabs do not want to face.
Scientific and technological development is long overdue in the Muslim world. Bernard Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and perhaps the best-known Western scholar of Islam, warns of dire consequences if it doesn鈥檛 happen. 鈥淭he people of the Middle East are increasingly aware of the deep and widening gulf between the opportunities of the free world outside their borders and the appalling privation and repression within them,鈥� he writes in his book The Crisis of Islam: Holy war and unholy terror, which was published last week (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). 鈥淭he resulting anger is naturally directed first against their rulers, and then against those whom they see as keeping those rulers in power.鈥�
The implication is clear: the political and economic 鈥� and thus scientific 鈥� development of Islamic countries is imperative not just for those who live there, but for the whole world.