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Islamic
world faces intellectual stagnation
Riaz Hassan
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Just to remind you;-
5:79 - Nor did they (usually) forbid one another the
iniquities which they committed: evil indeed were the deeds which they did.
20:79 -
Pharaoh led his people astray instead of leading them
aright.
Published on November 4, 2006
Is the Islamic world intellectually stagnating? One way to answer this is to ask
how many world-class universities there are in Muslim countries.
The 2006 rankings of the world's top 200 universities by the Times Higher
Education Supplement (THES), announced last week, show the poor state of
academic institutions in Muslim countries.
The US , with 5 per cent of the world's population, has 54, or 27 per cent, of
the top 200 universities. Forty-six Muslim countries on the other hand, with 16
per cent of the world's population, have only one or two per cent of the
universities on the THES list. The two universities are Malaysia 's Universiti
Kabangsaan and University of Malaya , which rank 185th and 192nd with overall
scores of 29.2 and 28.6 respectively from a possible 100. On the important
measure of faculty citation, an indicator of intellectual creativity and impact,
they scored lowest.
The THES rankings were based on the assessment of more than 1,000 higher
education institutions using five key indicators. These included asking 3,700
research-active academics globally to name the top 30 research universities in
their field of expertise as well as counting the citations per published paper
by researchers at each institution. The other indicators were the number of
foreign students enrolled, staff-student ratios and top companies' assessment of
the quality of an institution' s graduates. For Islamic countries,
notwithstanding some isolated centres of excellence, these rankings confirmed
the findings of other studies.
Some years ago, using data from the Science Citation Index produced by the
Institute for Scientific Information, academics Mohammad Anwar and Abu Baker
from the International Islamic University of Malaysia, revealed the total
contribution of 46 predominantly Muslim countries to the world of science
literature between 1990 and 1994 was a meager 1.17 per cent of the total world
output, as compared to 1.66 per cent for India and 1.48 percent for Spain. This
study also showed that the 20 Arab countries contributed only 0.55 per cent to
the scientific output, whereas Israel alone contributed 0.89 percent in the same
period.
Another indicator of the intellectual insularity of the Arab world was reported
in the 2002 report of the United Nations Development Fund on the Arab world.
According to this report there is little writing or translation from other
languages: 1,000 years since the caliph Mamoun the Arabs translated as many
books as Spain translates in a single year. The consequences of intellectual
stagnation are already reflected in the economic performance of the Muslim
countries. A Brooking Institution study reported in The Economist (September 13,
2003) showed that over the past quarter-century, GDP per person in most Muslim
countries has fallen or remained the same.
A prominent Muslim scientist and Nobel laureate, the late Abdus Salam, observed
20 years ago that: "of all civilizations on this planet, science is weakest in
the lands of Islam. The dangers of this weakness cannot be over-emphasized since
the honorable survival of a society depends directly on its science and
technology in the condition of the present age". In the third industrial
revolution with its "knowledge economy", in which creation of wealth will depend
primarily on "brain industries", the scientific, technological and intellectual
stagnation is going to have far reaching socio-economic repercussions.
Several factors can account for these conditions, the most important being the
meager resources allocated by Muslim countries to research and development. On
average, Muslim countries spend 0.45 per cent of their GDP on research and
development. The comparable figure for OECD countries is 2.3 per cent. These
conditions are also a legacy of the colonialism experienced by most Muslim
countries for an extended period in the past two centuries, during which they
endured some of the worst excesses of racial and economic exploitation that
stalled their development. But most of the causes of their present predicament
can also be attributed to the prevailing cultural and political practices. Other
countries like Korea , Singapore , Taiwan and India have taken notable strides
in the fields of science and technology and are now among the major emerging
economies.
The non-availability of funds can hardly justify the absence of good
universities in resource-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait , which are
reportedly earning daily US$500 million each from their oil exports alone. An
encouraging development that appears to be taking place is that as academic and
administrative conditions in the public-sector universities have declined, the
private sector has responded by establishing well-resourced universities. This
is illustrated by the establishment of Aga Khan Medical University and Lahore
University of Management Sciences in Pakistan and Belkent University in Turkey .
The other conditions not conducive to the development of vibrant universities
include the weak, undeveloped conditions of civil society in Muslim countries.
Civil society refers to the presence of diverse non-governmental organizations
and institutions strong enough to counterbalance the power of the central
institutions of the state, which have a tendency to want to establish a monopoly
over power and truth in society.
Muslim countries are increasingly under intense pressure from religious
fundamentalists to impose epistemologies compatible with their versions of
Islamic doctrines that are generally hostile to critical, rational thought. This
is stifling the development of conditions conducive to the development and
growth of vibrant institutions of higher learning.
In my recent studies of Islamic consciousness in a number of Middle Eastern
Muslim countries, I was struck by an all-pervasive sense of humiliation arising
from the inability of the Arab countries to match the military and technological
superiority of Israel . This sense was further reinforced by the economic power
and absolute technological superiority of the West vis-à-vis Muslim countries.
This sense of humiliation is a major underlying cause of Islamic militancy and
terrorism.
A robust civil society is a prerequisite for the development of a society based
not on the tyranny of strongly held convictions and beliefs but on doubt and
compromise. Science and technology prosper only under conditions that privilege
the rule of reason and Nature. The influence of religious fundamentalist
movements is having a deleterious effect on the academic conditions especially
in the humanities and social sciences. The intellectual stagnation of Muslim
countries threatens to imprison a significant proportion of humanity into
permanent servitude.
There is a great urgency to create and nurture conditions promoting academic
excellence and to develop strategies to arrest the decline of the institutions
of higher learning to ensure an honorable survival of future generations of
Muslims. This is probably the greatest and growing challenge facing the
governments of the Muslim countries today.
Riaz Hassan
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
The writer is Australian Research Council professorial fellow and emeritus
professor in the Department of Sociology, Flinders University, Adelaide,
Australia.
The Jakarta Post is a member of Asia News Network.
saiyed shahbazi
www.shahbazcenter.org
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