An Islamic Enlightenment is needed

The Ulema are the educated class of Muslim scholars best known as the arbiters of sharia law but they also specialize in other fields. The fields studied, and the importance given them, will vary from tradition to tradition, or even from seminary to seminary. During its period of cultural dominance in the European Dark Ages Islam was a conduit of Eastern learning to the West. However, it started to lag badly in scientific advancement after 1500 AD because of opposition by traditional ulema to attempts to formulate systematic explanation of natural phenomenon with “natural laws.” They believed such laws were blasphemous because they limit “Allah’s freedom to act” as He wishes. In fact traditional interpretations of Islam are simply not compatible with the development of science. In the early twentieth century ulema forbade the learning of foreign languages and dissection of human bodies in the medical school in Iran. The ulama at the Islamic university in Cairo taught the Ptolemaic astronomical system (in which the sun circles the earth) until compelled to adopt the Copernican system by the Egyptian government in 1961. In recent years, the lagging of the Muslim world in science is clearly shown in the disproportionately small amount of scientific output as measured by citations of articles published in internationally circulating science journals, annual expenditures on research and development, and numbers of research scientists and engineers.