This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

Nature Middle East is a Cairo-based portal, one which is devoted to promoting and exploring science and research in the region. It is part of Nature, the institution which is most famous for its premiere journal of science, but which also has recently produced a series of specialized publications (Nature Biotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics, and many others), regional portals (Nature India, Nature Europe/Germany, Nature Asia-Pacific, and Nature Middle East), blogs, and other projects and endeavors.

Nature Middle East, which has existed for the past three years or so, has been quite active, regularly publishing original research, commentaries, and interviews, and also advertising and reporting on scientific meetings, announcing job openings, and keeping a regular blog (House of Wisdom) by its young editor, Mohammed Yahia, a blog which I recommend keeping an eye on. Oh, and most importantly, Nature Middle East publishes quality science articles in both English and Arabic (sometimes providing Arabic translations of articles that were originally submitted and published in English); this question of science and publication in English versus the local language is an important one, which I plan to comment on sometime in the future.

I am happy to advertise for an article of mine that was published at Nature Middle East a week ago. Titled ‘Does the Arab world (not) need basic science?’, it addresses the question of whether basic research should at all be pursued and supported in a region like the Arab world where, many argue, research should be in fields and topics that can directly and immediately benefit society. Indeed, nowadays when one hears of the importance of research or even of science itself in the media and in the pronouncements of officials, it is almost invariably in relation to applied research. All examples are taken from fields of direct relevance to daily life and problems which need to be solved, and where science is called to the rescue.

In this article, I first argue that basic research cannot be dissociated from applied research; this is the classic argument that what appears to be purely “basic” today can find very rich applications tomorrow. I cite well-known examples, such as: radiation therapy, positron emission tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, DNA and genetic engineering, and even "pure mathematics", in relation to Einstein's general relativity, which in turn found applications in GPS technology, etc.

But then I explain the limitations of this argument. And, more importantly (in my view), I insist that science is not solely, or even primarily, a human endeavor aiming at improving lifestyles (that has come as bi-product); science is about exploration and discovery, and it leads to human progress. I write:

Science, alongside other important human disciplines (religion, art, etc.), allows us to understand and appreciate the world that we have been placed in and entrusted with. Human history has shown that science, more than any other field, leads to a renewed and sometimes transformed understanding of our own nature and our place and role in the cosmos. That is why, even though people are often briefly attracted to the latest technological innovations – everyone is fascinated by every new astronomical discovery. Furthermore, the last few decades have shown that countries which do not have a strong basic science program in both education and discovery can pursue "research and development", but their scientific and intellectual progress will remain modest.

I then go on to explore the situation (basic versus applied research) in the world in general (the data is quite interesting) and in the Arab world, where data is extremely scarce, but one can draw some tentative conclusions from various observations and secondary indicators.

I conclude with the following statements:

And while joint ventures are forged with European and other partners, it is important that a balance be recognized and articulated between "priority areas" (e.g. water, energy, agriculture, new technologies) and between the educational, cultural, and social importance of basic science.

Bob Wilson, the first Director of the Fermilab accelerator centre, was once asked by a congressional committee "what will your lab contribute to the defense of the US?" He replied "nothing, but it will make it worth defending."

I encourage you to read the article here.

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This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

A panel event titled “Creation of the Universe: Qur’anic Concepts and Scientific Theories” was organized this past Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at the University of Iowa. This was put together by the American Islamic Congress and the Nur Project, which is conducting a ‘Science & Islam’ series of panels over the next couple of years.

This first event gathered Salman Hameed and John Farrell as panelists, Ali Hasan as moderator, and me as “keynote speaker”. Dr. Hasan is a professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa; he specializes in epistemology but clearly has solid interest and knowledge in science topics in relation to philosophy and theology/Islam. John Farrell is a writer and producer working in Boston; he is the author of ‘The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology’ (which I’ve reviewed here at Irtiqa); his blog, Progressive Download, I highly recommend.

The main objective of the panel, at least from what could be gathered from the event’s brochure, was: “to understand interpretations in the Islamic tradition as it regards the creation of the universe and where this interpretation conflicts or is compatible with concurred theories on the birth of the universe from the scientific perspective.” A related idea was: “Exploring where the strongest harmony and serious tensions between scientific cosmology and Islam lie.” There was also the question of “Qur’anic cosmological descriptions and their relative accuracy from the scientific perspective”, and of course the role of God in cosmology, from both the scientific perspective and the theological/Islamic viewpoint.

In my talk, I attempted to emphasize the following main points:

• Cosmology used to consist of myths describing the world around us, its origin, and our place in it; it invariably put the earth and humanity at the center of everything; cosmology used to be part of philosophy and theology, or “culture” more generally.

• Modern Cosmology, which has only existed for a century or so, has turned the subject into a scientific discipline; it is now able to describe with great precision not only the history of the universe but its content (although some aspects, e.g. dark matter and dark energy, are still a matter of ongoing research); the main point is: cosmology is now part of science.

• What place then for theology/Islam or even philosophy? Here I argued that although cosmology is produced by science, humans still need to construct a “worldview”, which cannot violate or disagree with the scientific findings, but which interpretation can be open to fit one’s philosophy or theology; in particular, it can be theistic or materialistic. I gave examples of how contemporary thinkers have taken one route or another in this way.

• What “cosmology” can one draw from the Qur’an? Actually, one must talk of a Qur’anic “worldview”, not “cosmology”, as argued in the previous point. And here, looking at various Qur’anic verses, I drew the following conclusions: a) the Qur’an always relates the cosmos to God; b) it uses the ‘Argument from Design’ quite repeatedly, either in its old formulation or in its more modern (fine-tuning) formulation; c) several Muslim thinkers have insisted that the Qur’an uses an ‘Argument of Providence’ (that humans have been particularly well taken care of through the creation of the cosmos and the various objects and phenomena therein, what I call an “ultra-anthropic principle); d) the Qur’an seems to be formulated for humans, as it keeps referring to Earth (“the heavens and the earth”) in a particular way.

•  What constraints and challenges does modern cosmology pose to theology/Islam? Here I argued that cosmology forces us to construct a theology which must take the following ideas into account: a) the staggering size and age of the universe; b) the fine-tuning of the cosmos (design? centrality of life, intelligence, and consciousness? multiverse? are we one among zillions?); c) the discovery/confirmation that other earths/worlds are more than common in the universe and perhaps other species too (are we just one “unimportant” planet/world?)

Salman followed up with his own views on the subject, which I’ll let him summarize. John Farrell recalled that Lemaitre, the father of the Big Bang, was both a first-rate scientist and a catholic priest, and it was interesting to see that he was very clear that one should not be tempted to find confirmation in science for one’s theology: in particular, he resisted the pope’s explicit identification of the Big Bang with the Genesis story.

A good discussion followed, particularly since a number of philosophers (Dr. Hasan’s colleagues and students) were in the audience. The questions revolved around the fine-tuning issue, as well as around the extent to which one could take scientific results from cosmology as definite, and the role and place of theology in constructing a worldview around cosmology.

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This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

‘Roqia’, which I’ve translated above as “Islamic healing”, is the tradition of having some Qur’anic verses read over a sick person in order to achieve some betterment, most people assuming it to be medical. There are hadiths relating that Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) practiced it, and it is still widespread in many Muslim communities around the world, including ones in the west (more on that below).

I do not intend to get into the controversy of whether one should believe (or accept) that prayers do produce healing of some sort. First, it depends on whether we’re talking about a spiritual or a medical effect. Secondly, it makes much difference (in my view) whether the praying is done by the sick person himself/herself or whether someone is praying for them. Thirdly, it comes down to whether one believes that spiritual effects within a person can and do lead to a physiological effect or not. I will leave all these issues hanging, although if people want to debate them in the comments section, I’ll gladly oblige.

The problem today is that this practice has turned into a widespread scam. First, there is a social phenomenon to be investigated, namely the strong return of tradition “Islamic” medicine, including bloodletting, “Prophetic”/herbal medicine, and ‘Roqia’/healing through prayers performed by a sheikh. A year ago, I had written a post on this effect, focusing on Muslims’ (and to some extent other peoples’) current infatuation with herbal medicine. Indeed, there is today a huge social trend toward old, medieval medical procedures, such as bloodletting. For Muslims, it is on the one hand because the Prophet practiced that and sometimes recommended it (what else could he have recommended?), and on the other hand, because modern medicine is western and suspect with all its secondary effects and (perceived) disregard for human “wholeness”.

More importantly, however, this social shift toward traditional medicine has been noticed and taken advantage of by the charlatans. There are now “roqia clinics”, both in the Muslim world and in Europe, where charlatans administer “roqia treatments” to ignorant and gullible patients who suffer from anything ranging from “evil eye” to cancer, not to mention sexual problems, which are easier to explain (through allusions) to a sheikh than to a physician. They charge anywhere between $2 for a quick consultation and prayer (in poor places in Algeria) to 100 euros in France, and oftentimes the “healers” ask their patients to undergo regular treatment sessions (weekly or 2-3 times weekly), and to pay for the “medicine” (often in the form of a bottle of mineral water which has been “infused” with the proper verses), hence increasing their scammy wealth… Oh, and some have come up with “group roqia” procedures to multiply the income in each session.

Some of these charlatans have even opened up satellite TV stations, taking international orders for their medicines, which usually consist of herbs, oils, and honeys, and cost up to $150. Others have set up 900-type phone systems, making money just through the calls.

Finally, and most shockingly, a series of cases have recently appeared (at least in Algeria and in Saudi Arabia), where charlatan “raqis” were charged with raping innocent and naïve young women, in one case as many as 30 (sorry, the links are in Arabic and French)!

This is turning into a social catastrophe, combining ignorance, abuse of religious tradition, and multiple frauds and crimes. This needs to be denounced and exposed. Educators and sincere and clear-minded religious scholars need to speak up and address this, in the classrooms and in the mosques. It is truly painful and depressing to see Muslim communities even in the west succumb to this kind of socio-cultural corruption. We must, however, remain steadfast and hardworking in our ongoing efforts to educate everyone at various levels and from many perspectives.

We have a long way to go…

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This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

Two months ago, Khaled Elahmad, a Social Media instructor in Jordan, produced a ranking of the 100 most influential Arabs on Twitter. He stressed the fact that such rankings are prone to change quickly, as they depend strongly on the level of activity of the various players. However, I will venture that the list he produced is, at least in its general contours, not only very interesting but also largely still valid, particularly with regard to the remarks I would like to draw from it.

The reason for this assessment of mine is because as Elahmad himself emphasized, the ranking is not solely based on the number of “followers” that a person who’s active on Twitter has; it also relies strongly on evidence of influence, which can be reflected in the numbers of re-tweets, comments, dialogues on a given tweet, quality of the accounts following the person, etc.

Now, before getting to the list and its noteworthy aspects, it is quite interesting to note that, according to the 3^rd Arab Social Media Report, there were, as of September 2011, some 650,000 twitters in the Arab world (counting those who tweet at least once every two weeks), producing a total of 37 million tweets per month (or 14 tweets per second), 70 % of them being generated in the Gulf and Egypt. Even more remarkably, Twitter grew in the region at a staggering annual rate of 2,146 % -- which means that the numbers I just mentioned are obsolete and presently much larger. Also, English and Arabic are used in roughly equal frequency in these tweets.

Now, in the aim of determining the most influential Arab twitters, Elahmad used tweet.grader.com and mtwtron.com/top_users to get the top 50 Twitter users in major Arab countries; then he turned to Klout, a website which claims to determine a person’s online influence by using many different variables on Facebook and Twitter, including the size and social importance of one’s audience, the level of its engagement with the messages being posted or tweeted, etc.

The entire list can be found here, but I would like to reproduce the top 10 ranked Arab twitters and make a few comments:

Rank	Name	Country	Profession	Klout Score	Number of Followers
1	Sheikh Salman Alodah	KSA	Religious Scholar	82	625,147
2	Abdelaziz bin Fahd	KSA	Royalty	82	224,400
3	Faiz al-Maleki	KSA	Media	81	235,457
4	Dr. Mohammed Al-Arifi	KSA	Religious Scholar	81	760,367
5	Sheikh Dr. Ayid al-Qarnee	KSA	Religious Scholar	80	551,076
6	Battal Al-Goos	KSA	Media (Sports)	79	293,107
7	Nabil Al-Awadhy	Kuwait	Religious Scholar	78	427,449
8	Saad Hariri	Lebanon	Political Leader	77	85,164
9	Belal Fadl	Egypt	Media	76	268,884
10	Nawara Negm	Egypt	Media	76	172,396

Two things immediately jump up from this table:

·      The top 6 personalities are all from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia;

·      Four of the top 7 twitters are religious scholars (strongly conservative ones).

Also, only the tenth person is a woman, a leftist Egyptian media personality who is also the daughter of a famous popular leftist poet. Notice that the number of her followers is dwarfed by those of the religious figures in the list, but still her influence is quite high, denoting a certain quality of the audience she enjoys. On the representation of women, I should note that among the 100 personalities, I counted only 10 other women (and that included a popular singer and the Queen of Jordan). Which is consistent with the ratio of 14 % found for women overall among Arab twitters.

Oh, and Barack Obama, with his ArabicObama account, clocks in at # 18 – the only American figure in the top-100 list.

To tell you honestly, except for the above remarks, which speak for themselves, I am not quite sure what to make of this ranking – having never used Twitter myself, and resisting getting onto that platform. I am sure many of the above personalities, especially the religious and political ones, have employees who take care of their tweets, Facebook pages, and various announcements and interactions with their followers (in both the usual and the Twitter meanings of the term). That probably explains why there was only one educator in the whole list: Dr. Nawal al-Eed, who is a professor of Islamic Studies at Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University in Saudi Arabia, and who has 54,000 followers…

Perhaps those of you with experience and knowledge about Twitter can shed some interesting light on the above and make recommendations for a constructive and productive usage of this important tool. Right now, I am getting the feeling that it is used to perpetuate the old system of thought…

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This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

Just as I was reading the recent paper ‘How useful could Arabic documentary sources be for reconstructing past climate?’, and I was planning to devote my weekly post to it, Salman posted excerpts from a Science article about it. But I decided to still write about it because a few interesting issues are raised by this paper (and its approach), and because it has produced a variety of reactions.

The paper, which came out in the March 2012 issue of the journal Weather, has already been commented on in noteworthy publications and websites, such as Science, Science-Daily, Popular Archaeology, and numerous blogs. The paper itself can only be accessed by those who have institutional subscription to the journal Weather; and since it does not carry an abstract, the first page is made available at the journal’s site, here.

The idea is simple: go back to medieval historical narrations of various aspects of life in those times and regions and see if references to climate can be extracted and aggregated robustly enough to include in the climate data, since real weather measurements (temperature, precipitation, etc.) are not available for those times, having existed only for less than three centuries.

I myself was intrigued about how much solid information one could possibly find in such historical accounts, since I imagined that the writers in those times were not much interested in relating to later generations how the weather or the climate changed but rather what was happening in those times and possibly how life was like. How could that be used to obtain useful climate data?

So I read the paper, and I was actually quite impressed. (I will mention the skeptics’ arguments of doubts about this approach further below).

What the authors (all Spanish, though one Portuguese institution was in the lot) did was collect any weather/climate information mentioned in books by ten historians of the region around Baghdad in the period between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries (CE), specifically about years when the following occurred: drought, flood, rain, hail, unusual coldness, unusual heat, unusual wind, and locust. They realize that in many cases, the narrators are copying from one another, and they try to determine which ones are independent and which ones are replications.

Then, and this is the part that impressed me, they map those references into a plot of “temperature” vs. year, where the “temperature” is a level of coldness ascribed by references such as “cold anomaly”, which would count as “below normal”, “frozen liquids”, which would be lower (somewhere around 0 C), snowfall, which is lower than that, and “frozen river” (Tigris and/or Euphrates), which would imply a very low temperature.

When they do this, they find that the documents present climatic references which line up quite interestingly in specific periods, particularly that between 900 and 945 AD. Incidentally, the time of Al-Ma’mun (who reigned from 813 to 833 AD) only gets one “data” point (just about the time of his death), and it is labeled “cold anomaly”.

Having identified an interesting period when there was apparently a significant climatic dip, the authors go and search the global references for any abnormalities during that period (900 to 945 AD), and they find references to an unusually cold summer in Sweden as determined by tree-ring reconstructions. They also find other bibliographical support for a “relative minimum centered in the first half of the tenth century, immediately before the Mediaeval Warm Period.”

Seeing that their research is apparently being vindicated by other, more scientific methods, they conclude that this line of investigation, of course with rigorous checks and corroborations, can be a fruitful research path that involves historians who are experts in the life and conditions of a particular area and period along with climatologists. They mention a project titled ‘Historical Climatology of the Middle East based on Arabic sources back to 800 AD’, which is funded by the German Research Foundation.

What methodological criticism could be leveled at this kind of research? In ‘Scientists practicing bad history’ and ‘Scientists and bad history’, Darin Hayton insists that historical narrations, which are often written long after the events, are almost always subjective and are influenced by political and religious interpretations of events, hence they are scientifically unreliable. Hayton further insists that just because someone says “the river froze” does not mean it actually did. Sometimes narrations of (hi)stories are metaphorical. Furthermore, translating “not being able to sleep on the house roofs (as people in Baghdad did and still do in the summertime”) into “night temperature must have been less than 18 degrees” (the minimal temperature at which ones sleeps comfortably) is far from scientifically rigorous or acceptable (according to Hayton).

The authors, however, had anticipated this kind of critique and note that just as we do not doubt the reporting of astronomical events (e.g. eclipses, meteor showers, etc.) in historical documents, we have no reason to doubt when a historian (or better yet, several historians) report snow or hail storms in Baghdad. The reported date may be inaccurate, but absolute accuracy is not really needed here, and multiple references for a whole period is what climate studies want to have.

Interestingly, a Saudi astronomer, Dr. Hasan Basurah (a professor at King Abdelaziz University in Jeddah and a friend of mine), who was very briefly mentioned in the introduction of this paper, does similar work pertaining to astronomical/space phenomena, such as aurorae and meteoritic impacts that can be found in the literary records of the Arabian Peninsula, e.g. poems describing such events. Very low-latitude aurorae then tell us about very strong solar activity in the years when the events are reported. The solar cycle could thus be reconstructed many centuries back, though probably with sporadic references/data-points.

Perhaps I’ll check out Dr. Basurah’s work and report on it in the future. But this is quite fascinating stuff, opening new windows for both historical and scientific investigations.

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This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor is the Malaysian astronauts who spent 11 days on the International Space Station in October 2007. He has been on a tour, giving presentations and promoting the idea of Muslims or people from the developing nations going to space.

A few weeks ago, he was in Turkey as the guest of Turksat Corporation, and the high-circulation Hurriyet newspaper, published a short article based on an interview it conducted with him. Our friend Gary, who picked up the piece (thanks for the tip), was struck by the fact that most of it was devoted to how he prayed (in which direction, how frequently and at what times), whether he fasted (he fasted two days, he said, as his trip was during Ramadan), and that the scientific goals of the mission were, as Gary put it to me, “almost an afterthought at the end of the article.” (After all, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor is an orthopedic surgeon, and he did conduct experiments on bacteria, cancerous cells, and protein crystals.) Even more striking was the following statement he made: “Everyone who goes to space feels a miracle. During my trip in space that took place in the holy month of Ramadan, I heard a ‘call to prayer’ in the Space Station…” No probing on this was done by the reporters.

I was puzzled by this, not expecting it from Hurriyet, which is, after all a strongly secularist paper, I went to the web and searched for articles and videos on Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor’s space journey and his ‘call to prayer’ reference, which I was not sure I understood. After all, perhaps he meant that he had a cosmic/religious experience and was drawn (“called”) to prayer.

First, no, the ‘call to prayer’ was stated in several interviews and articles, and indeed it was made quite explicit in a long piece in SingaporeScene, relayed by Yahoo News, in which he stated: “"During my time in space, I heard the azaan (Islamic call to prayer) and it was the most magical sound I've heard in my life." He did also refer to a cosmic/religious experience: "In space, you just feel closer to the Creator". In Turkey, he was also reported to have explained that he has become a better Muslim now, having felt that God had purposefully chosen him for that mission.

The Malaysian astronaut has explained in several interviews that the purpose of his space trip, granted by Russia as a bonus for the purchase by Malaysia of a number of Sukhoi fighter jets, is in fact to encourage youngsters to pursue science and math careers. It is thus greatly disappointing to see so much focus (on the part of everyone) on what are in the end rather trivial issues (how many times and in which direction he prayed, etc.).

Indeed, before his trip, Malaysia's space agency, Angkasa, organized a conference with no fewer than 150 Islamic scholars for the purpose of answering the religious questions (prayer time and direction, fasting, etc.). The result was a document titled “A Guideline of Performing Ibadah (worship) at the International Space Station (ISS)”, which was approved by Malaysia's National Fatwa Council. So much effort, when the Qur’an simply says “To Allah belong the east and the West: Whithersoever ye turn, there is the presence of Allah.” (2:115) And there are similar principles to allow every Muslim to solve such “problems” in unusual situations. But that requires a minimum of intelligent understanding of Islam and of personal decision-making, which the ulamas are often reluctant to grant to people.

And so trivial issues become the core of the topic, and the exotic aspects eclipse the main goals.

A “Muslim in Space” DVD has been made to chronicle the space journey of Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor. YouTube, on can find five clips of it (here): one is a 4.5- minute video about the whole trip (occasionally showing the astronaut doing some experients), one shows him praying in the space station, and another one shows him singing the chants of Eid, one has him playing with a bubble (in zero gravity) and uttering something about “surface tension”, one shows how he sleeps, and . Guess which one has the highest number of views?!

While I have no doubt that the Malaysian had the right intentions and objectives for this space trip project, it is quite disconcerting to see it to a large extent wrongly considered and hence missing its main goals.

Also see earlier posts:

Creating the image of a Muslim astronaut

Finding Mecca from space - praying at the space station

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