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Pakistan’s well-known physicist-teacher Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy—a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has often bemoaned the way the Muslim world in general, and Pakistan in particular, have reacted to the sciences by “converting” them into a subordinate of their faith: ”The insistence that religion must be brought into everything—including science—puts certain critical faculties to sleep. Kids are taught science as though they were memorizing a holy text. The student is asked to reproduce facts of science, not to use them in a manner that demands reasoning.”
According to Hoodbhoy, this view was adopted by the Pakistani state under the patronage of Gen. Ziaul Haq to fulfil an ideological mission. To debunk it, he wrote Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, stating it is in the realm of living things that Muslims and science have their biggest clash. Most, though not all, flatly deny human evolution, and schoolbooks dismiss the notion that life evolved from simpler to more complex forms. A biology textbook declared that the theory of evolution, as proposed by Charles Darwin, was wrong: “The theory of evolution, as proposed by Charles Darwin in the 19th century, is one of the most unbelievable and irrational claims in history.” In the biology department at Hoodbhoy’s university, he notes: “Students tell me that their professors say that they teach the theory of evolution only because they are obliged to. In fact, they say they don’t really believe in it.”
Pseudoscience in Islamic garb comes in a variety of forms, seeking a “scientific interpretation” of the Quran, Islamic creationism, and various academic projects to “Islamize” science. Hoodbhoy is, however, relieved to say: “Fortunately, the so-called intellectuals who set out to create a pure Islamic science are less to be seen today than 30 years ago. Then, under the patronage of [Gen. Zia], these people had been adopted by the Pakistani state to fulfil an ideological mission.”
In a column for daily Dawn last month, Hoodbhoy stated: “On the other hand, India has sent Indian spacecraft to the moon and Mars, placed India’s IT and pharmaceutical companies among the world’s largest, filled America’s best universities with professors who are graduates of Indian universities, and created some of the world’s biggest business empires. Several top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are Indian.” According to him, the secret of India’s success is well-known—strong systems of education that create skills, knowledge, attitudes and social behaviors suited for modern times. Together with that comes a strong work-ethic in the labor force. Stated differently, high national achievement springs naturally from the quickness with which a country universalizes or ‘westernizes’ its education and creates positive attitudes towards work.
Post-Partition India spent 50 years creating a pluralist, secular, scientifically minded society. It reaps rich harvests to the present day—which the BJP happily appropriates as its own. Under the extremist BJP, the attitudes formed earlier are difficult to erase, and the most effective deterrent to a race backward is the rational status of India’s educated class. Hoodbhoy wrote recently: “An attempt to situate Pakistan’s science and technology may be made using two different lenses; to compare today’s situation with what existed in 1947 (and even earlier); and to draw parallels between Pakistan and other countries in the region.” Unfortunately, Pakistan now lags far behind the rest of its region in preparing its youth for a world increasingly reliant on modern education for its skilled workforce.