Agenda of misrepresentation

BREAKING THE MONOLITH — Essays, Articles and Columns on Islam, India, Terror and Other Things That Annoy Me: Ziauddin Sardar; imprintOne, Gurgaon, distributed by Foundation Books, 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 895.

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

Ziauddin Sardar’s collection of essays and articles covering the last decade or so speaks to any and all of us. That takes a wider sense of the human than much contemporary political or academic discourse seems to achieve, but Sardar, a noted authority on the history of science in Islamic cultures, is also unexceptionably precise. For example, having heard Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, he notes bin Laden’s captivatingly eloquent and evidenced critique of the double standards in U.S. foreign policy — but reminds us that when bin Laden talked of what was to be done, he showed himself as a man of violence and little else, a purveyor of a narrow, rigid version of Islam infused with “obnoxious” tribal customs and practices.

Contribution of Islam

Among Sardar’s most absorbing essays are accounts of the continuity of scientific inquiry in the Islamic world and its impact on the so-called Western or the post-Copernican science. The canonical institution of learning, the university, is an Islamic gift to the West, as are the mathematical techniques of the 13th century A.D. astronomer al-Tusi, without which Copernicus could not have designed his model of the solar system. Sardar also details briefly the achievements of al-Haitham in optics, and other great cosmologists who happened to be Muslims.

The strongest theme here is the contribution of Islam to the West’s very constitution. Muslim scholars translated the Greek corpus of philosophy — the defining inheritance of the western civilisation — into Latin, expanded it, and passed it on to “its rightful owners, the West” — where at the time very few of the literate knew any Greek. Muslim scholars also continued mighty inquiries into philosophy and the sciences well into the 17th century A.D, centuries beyond the dates Bernal and many others have stipulated as marking the termination of science in the Muslim world.

The contemporary condition of inquiry in predominantly Muslim states therefore needs explanation. Colonialism is the main cause; Dutch colonials banned Indonesians from higher learning, and in the Maghreb France banned Islamic medicine, on pain of death. Differences between schools of Islamic inquiry will not suffice as an explanation; Asharite scientists like al Beruni and Mutazalite ones like ibn Sina were equally committed to rational inquiry and the application of appropriate methods to different subjects, including experimental techniques where necessary. That those scholars worked in an age when the separation of cosmology and religion was almost certainly unintelligible is not peculiar to them; Newton spent much of his time on Biblical chronology, and Kepler’s calculations of planetary motion were part of his astrological investigations.

Colonial project

Sardar is uncompromising; the undermining of Islamic civilisations was part of the colonial project, and involved the imposition of systems of law and administration designed to close down inquiry. In consequence, knowledge was reduced to religious knowledge, and the idea of a public interest all but disappeared in Islamic societies from the early modern colonial period onwards.
There is a tragic and very dangerous twist to that tale. The obliteration of Islamic achievements from most Western histories of ideas is paralleled today in the apparently comprehensive exclusion of European Muslims from the ordinary pursuits, occupations, and entitlements of Western European life. The liberal humanism which Sardar outlines as one of Islam’s greatest gifts to the West is now, de facto, apparently reserved mainly for white Europeans. The idea of Adab, the etiquette of being human, is thus exclusively appropriated by white Europeans at their own peril — as Sardar shows.

Yet the world’s many Islamic cultures are changing. British imams persistently instruct their congregations to lead lives consistent with and respectful of the laws and culture of their homeland; the Al-Azhar University in Cairo has introduced the contemporary sciences into its curricula; Al-Jazeera TV causes much discomfort among Middle Eastern despots and dictators; and clerics throughout the region are starting to demand equal rights for men and women.

It is here that Sardar, with the facility of a seasoned journalist and the depth of a scholar, is at his most accessible. He is always alert to what life is like for ordinary people, and always a pleasure to read. An academic he may be, but he is also a true philosopher.