Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World

Ziauddin Sardar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315414515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book, first published in 1977, aims to present a Muslim view of development and highlights some of the related issues that were being debated in the Muslim world. The author outlines the parameters of the Muslim world as well as the Muslim world-view, and provides an analysis of science, science policy and Muslim culture. This title will be of interest to students of economic and social policy, as well as students of Middle Eastern studies.

1 WHAT FORMS THE MUSLIM WORLD?

The world is seen by many to be divided into two groups: those who have ‘too much’ and those who have ‘too little’; one rich, one poor; one overfed and overweight, one hungry and undernourished; one affluent and consumption orientated, one poverty-stricken and survival orientated; one ‘developed’, one ‘developing’.

One world is then subdivided into two great hostile blocs: the supposed Free World (North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australasia) who in being free must therefore embody all that is just, democratic, and unrestricted, and the Communist Bloc of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which is its antithesis. Depending on one’s perspective, these blocs are either oppressive, totalitarian, and severely restrictive, or capitalistic, reactionary and imperialistic.

In addition, in recent years, the new concept of the Third World has emerged.¹ Frantz Fanon, who coined the phrase, perceived that the ‘too little’ countries in fact constituted a third power bloc. Although the two industrialized blocs might be in a position of mutual conflict, the third bloc of countries was so far removed from them in economic terms as to constitute a veritable Third World. From a purely materialistic point of view this is so, but examined more closely there is little similarity between Catholic Peru and Bolivia, Muslim Morocco and Somalia, Buddhist Thailand and Burma, Hindu India, Zionist Israel, and Communist Vietnam, except perhaps in a common economic non-development.

The American journalist William Buckley divided the world into ‘war-mongers, victims and bystanders’. Who are which at any given time is presumably variable. In any conflict between the Superpowers of the other two blocs, the countries of the Third World, it might be assumed, would wish to be among the bystanders. However, as the Malay proverb puts it, ‘When two elephants fight, it is the grass in between that gets trampled on.’ Thus, the Bandung Conference notwithstanding, the leaders of the Third World countries have tried as far as they are able not to place their countries in the position of the ‘grass in between’. This has often necessitated leaning towards one or the other of the two blocs. None has successfully played the one off against the other; even Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was the best practitioner of this game, did not succeed entirely, as his successors discovered.² This necessity coupled with the need of military equipment for national defence and emotional post-colonial links led to the development of spheres of influence, with Third World countries lining up with one elephant, or, if the post-independence rulers were of a different colour (e.g. North Vietnam), with the other.³

The Third World countries also have the problem of ‘Finlandization’ to consider. This is where a country retains a high degree of autonomy and territorial independence from a very powerful neighbour, but in order not to invite trouble the country’s foreign policy etc. is conducted with reference to that of its neighbour. Finland post-1945 is taken as the classic example of this situation; Bangladesh, Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal might be others. Such political realities place certain constraints on political decisions for science policy and development on such matters as free access to foreign resources, the development of certain types of programmes, or the training of personnel. The danger of Finlandization, therefore, is that the country may slip into a surrogate or satellite status and eventually be worse off than it was as a colony.

With the increases in crude oil prices, the traditional gap between the ‘too much’ and the ‘too little’ has been bridged by the member nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). However, bridging the gap has only created a new division between developing countries with oil, and those without.

Fanon’s picture of a poor Third World now needs modification. One could divide the world into three blocs: developed countries, developing countries, and OPEC. One could further subdivide the developing countries into Underdeveloped Countries (UDCs) and Less Developed Countries (LDCs); the difference being that while the LDCs possess some capital and indigenous technology, the UDCs do not.

From the Muslim point of view, the world can only be divided into two categories: Muslim and non-Muslim. We will call the non-Muslim world ‘Occident’ and the Muslim world as a whole will be referred to as the Ummah. Perhaps we should explain our terminology in some detail.

The Concept of Occident

The Free World or the capitalist bloc is often referred to as ‘the West’. An unfortunate ambiguity creeps into the use of its logical counterpart ‘the East’; it may be that its users intend this duality of meanings. This confusion, however, is unnecessary and should be eradicated. The use of the West to refer to the Allied forces on that side of the line dividing West and Middle Germany at the end of the Second World War naturally led to the use of the East to refer to those forces on the other side, normally the Communists. The alternative use of the West has been to indicate the culture and place of origin (mainly Western Europe) of the imperial powers of the recent years and the counterpart East to indicate the colonial peoples and their culture. The natural tendency, to identify the ‘Communist East’ with the previously colonial East was strengthened by the Bandung Conference in 1955.

However, to the Muslims there is really no difference in the cultural and territorial origins of the capitalist West and the communist East. Marx, working in the epistemology of European Jewry and in the milieu of nineteenth-century German culture and philosophy, was advocating solutions to the contemporary problems of nineteenth-century Europe. His comments on India and ‘Oriental Despotism’ verge on the inane. Engels was no different. The communist ideologues, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, were concerned with Marxist revolution in Russia and the consolidation of such revolutionary gains. The foreign policy of post-revolution Russia differed from that of pre-revolution Russia mainly in the motivation ethic. Indeed the aggressive expansionism of the ‘international class struggle’ made it more aggressive.⁴ It was communist Russia which completed what the Czars had failed to do, and conquered the ‘East’ of the independent, Muslim and the Central Asian nations and later extended the western borders of Russia’s empire to the River Elbe.

The Three Power Blocs

OPEC	Developing Countries	Industrialized
Algeria	Argentina	Australia
Saudi Arabia	Brazil	Canada
Indonesia	Cameroons	EEC
Iraq	Egypt	Spain
Iran	India	US
Nigeria	Jamaica	Japan
Venezuela	Mexico	Sweden
	Pakistan	Switzerland
	Peru
	Yugoslavia
	Zaire
	Zambia

Culturally and historically, Russia and all of the western parts of her empire belong to Christian Europe. The initial formation of European attitudes towards the Muslim ‘East’ was a product of the prolonged hostility of the Crusades, deriving from the loss of Christian-European control of the Mediterranean. Much of the earlier aggressiveness of the Portuguese and Spaniards and later of French, Italian and their northern co-religionists of the Netherlands and Britain can be traced to the Holy-War-Against-Islam mentality. This same mentality provided much of the legitimization for issues as diverse as colonial educational policies and the slave trade. Even when the role of missionaries and committed Christians decreased and the empires were dismantled, these attitudes remained. The old enemy has been largely forgotten; but the attitudes have become institutionalized. It will take a fundamental restructuring of attitudes and beliefs before the Christian–Islam conflict is resolved. This basic conflict was responsible for shaping many imperial policies and postures towards the conquered states for the majority of these states were Muslim.

This then is the basis of our concept of the Occident. We feel that although the attitudes and policies engendered by the Christian-Islam conflict have lost their original religious character, they regrettably remain. Their cultural source is Christianity and the recently discovered ‘Judaeo-Christian’ heritage. As O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. What Forms the Muslim World?
• 2. A Muslim View of Science
• 3. Science Policy and Development
• 4. Cultural and Ethnic Dimensions of Development
• 5. The Social Side of Development
• 6. Aid, Trade and the New Economic Order
• 7. A Question of Priorities: Agriculture or Industry?
• 8. Imported Know-How or Technological Self-Reliance?
• 9. R & D: Basic or Applied?
• 10. Paths of Academia
• 11. The Future
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index