The mother of all oxymorons.

To wit, Islamic science.

I ran across an impressive piece by a Pakistani physics professor. An excerpt:

. . . With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? . . .

* * * *

A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of published scientific research papers, together with the citations to them. . . . A comparison with Brazil, India, China, and the US reveals significantly smaller numbers. A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia showed that [Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)] countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. . . . Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US NSF records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.

* * * *

The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.

In the rest of Mr. Pervez's excellent article he relates that

• films, drama, and music are frowned on at his university in Pakistan;
  
• student vigilantes sometimes attack those they believe are violating "Islamic norms";
  
• his campus has three mosques but no bookstore;
  
• Pakistan's one Nobel prize winner for physics is not allowed on Pakistani campuses because he's from a now-heretical Islamic sect, the Ahmedi sect;
  
• in the "1000 years since the reign of the caliph Maa'moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year"; and
  
• some Islamic scholars have been able to calculate the temperature of hell (the groundbreaking research on whether hell is endothermic or exothermic already having been done some years back).
  

Any way you slice it, the bottom line is that science is stagnant in the Islamic world.

He correctly blames the West for actively assisting the Islamic fundamentalists along the way. The U.S. did this by doing nothing to prevent Saudi export of Wahhabism, not to mention U.S. support of jihadi resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Ditto, Israel supporting Hamas against PLO.

Mr. Pervez indulges in some criticism of Western imperialist greed for overthrowing secular regimes in Indonesia, Egypt and Iran. His apparent assumption is that but for that Western transgression all would be well in those countries, fundamentalism safely at bay. This is an assumption that I consider questionable, to say the least.

All told, I anchor my views on Islam in the truth about it found in Churchill's 19th century observation -- "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."

Period.

"Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement." By Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, PhyicsToday.org, August 2007 (emphasis added, footnotes omitted).

ADDENDUM:

Although the Islamic world can ape science, it could never have developed it indigenously, since it cannot tolerate the structural prerequisites of science. They can only steal and imitate science, just as they can only imitate and ape democracy, liberty and equality. For science developed only in one time and place on earth, because a precondition of science was the Judeo-Christian ideal of liberty -- something like 99.98 percent of all scientific inventions and discoveries have occurred in Western Christendom.

"The Historical Undertow of Constitutional Envy." By Gagdad Bob, One Cosmos, 8/20/07 (emphasis added).