Muslim Contributions to the US and the World

Factual Questions
41

People are so quick to be bitter and unforgiving against an entire culture because of “what I heard.” Well, I hear some stuff too, and not just from Fox News. I have a friend who is Canadian by birth and citizenship, with Pakistani and Indian parents, Muslim, homosexual, and was raised in Saudi Arabia. He’ll tell you that the situation in Saudi Arabia is certainly not great, but that it’s nowhere near as bad as it’s portrayed to Joe Sixpack on Fox News. He’ll also quickly tell you about how people need to have the right to choose their own government. The royal family that runs the country is not a popular government but rather a government that would have probably been overthrown long ago had it not been for US backing.

It’s a mistake to view the oppression of Saudi women as oppresson by Muslims. It’s oppression by Christians, through proxy.

If you’d like to continue down this road, may I suggest GD?

42

Before anyone (like Jill) gets huffy about the status of women in “Moslem countries” (as if they were a bloc, rather than a collection of very different nations), it’s worth noting that Pakistan, an overwhelmingly Moslem land, has elected a woman as head of state.

Has the U.S. done this yet? Have MOST Western nations?

43

JillGat: Your comments are not entirely without merit. Like all the Judeo-Christian religion, Islam retains a certain amount of patriarchal baggage, despite what can probably be described as a genuinely enlightened attitude of Muhammed to the sexes for his time ( a very important qualifier of course - if we indulge in a bit of pop psychology, we might conclude Muhammed’s relatively progressive attitudes as being heavily influenced by his first wife, a women 15 years his senior who owned her own merchant business and who took on her soon-to-be husband as a junior partner ). In areas where this is taken to a cultural extreme, i.e. recent Arabia and Afghanistan, we do see Islam taking on cultural accretions that are highly restrictive. Wahhabism and the Deobandism of the Taliban are both in fact exceptional examples of this.

However Jomo Mojo’s rebuttal is equally valid. For example in classical times a surprising amount of Islamic scholarship was done by female scholars, who held symposia and gave lectures on this material to rapt audiences of both sexes. Check out this article on “Women Scholars of the Hadith” :
http://www.jannah.org/sisters/womenhadith.html

Indeed the origins of Sufism are often laid ( partially, at least ) at the feet of freed slave and scholar named Rabi’a. Here’s a link:
http://www.tl.infi.net/~ddisse/rabia.html

Since women can both inherit and run businesses under Islamic law, they likely had a rather more significant, or at least direct, impact on Islamic economies than women in corresponding Christian nations up until the early modern period ( eventually of course the relative level of freedom first equalized, then in many areas reversed, at least vis-a-vis the developed west )

Or we have the wealthy 11th century Cordoban princess and independent poetess Walladah al-Mustakfi ( an example of class and wealth buying freedom from male control, but such was pretty universally the case in the pre-modern and especially 11th century world everywhere ). Check out notable women of the year 1000: http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/notables.html

The situation has not been so enlightened in the 20th century, though certainly there have been landmark Muslim feminists that have struggled for more equality, like Huda Shaarawi in Egypt and Nazira Zain al-Din in Lebanon ( both in the early 20th century ).

Or, for the other side of the coin :), there are women like Zaynab al-Ghazali, a prominent female leader in the Egypt’s fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood ( which shows the diversity of non-Wahhabi fundamentalism. To quote:

*Zaynab al-Ghazali believes that Islam permits women to take an active part in public life, to hold jobs, enter politics and express their opinion. She believes Islam permits them to own property, do business and be anything they wish to be in the service on an Islamic society. Yet she believes that a Muslim woman’s first duty is to be a mother and a wife, and that no other activity should interfere with this role of hers, for this should have priority over everything else. If she has free time to participate in public life after her first duty is fulfilled, she may do so because Islam does not forbid her. *

So, no, it isn’t entirely one-sided. Saudi Arabia and Taliban Afghanistan really and truly are very extreme aberrations ( though again, in practical terms women’s rights in most Muslim countries today need a heck of a lot of work ).

-Tamerlane

44

Recognizable Arabic, Muslim, Pakistani, etc, names appear frequently in the news, in American positions such as doctors, engineers, professors, and higher administrative positions such as spokesman for the Center for Disease Control, etc etc.

In Silicon Valley you see the names as heads of departments in tech companies and as software engineers, etc, and you also see the names as founders and owners of tech companies, ie as entrepreneurs. (A couple of years ago you could have said “successful entrepreneurs” but lately their luck has probably been no better than any other dot-coms’.) However there were undoubtably Muslim contributions to the creation of the Internet and other software and hardware advances.

45

This is some very interesting stuff. I gotta say, one of my favorite things about this place is that sometimes, fascinating and obscure information pops up- even from sharp disputes. :slight_smile:

46

A quote from Kalt:

Absolutely correct, with billions of examples – please don’t ask me for a cite.

Furthermore, most in this thread have correctly answered it in the correct spirit – there have been numerous contributions from people who happen to be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, what have you.

These contributions had nothing to do with the contributor’s religion (except, perhaps, in some tangential fashion in literature or philosophy), and, in fact, were made in spite of and in the face of the contributor’s religion.

47

Ice cream (sherbet) came from Arabia. Don’t know if it was pre- or post-Islam.

48

On what do you base this assertion? Are you suggesting that Islam discourages scientific progress and endeavor? Or are you perhaps referring to all religions?

49

I read history the other way around—that the religion of Islam, because of its injunctions to study the world and seek knowledge, directly stimulated a civilization that worked to advance science. Geographically, early Islamic civilization was well situated to take in the heritage of ancient Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Indian science, synthesize all these, and from there make contributions of its own.

50

Back to Bibliovore (love that name, by the way):

No, I am not singling out Islam here. All religions, in my opinion, manage to be in the way of progress in divers manners both overt and covert.

51

Just for the record Bugg and Jomo, before you make assumptions about me (like I make assumptions about Saudi Arabia), I live in a country with a sizable Muslim population and have spent time in Malaysia, which is predominantly Muslim. I know that all Muslim countries and sects are not the same.

Even if you go beyond “sound bytes,” you have to agree that what I said about Saudi Arabia’s women is true. They are not allowed to travel without the permission of a male relative or guardian, etc. Women are second class citizens in many parts of the world. I think it is fair to say that women, as a general rule, are even more oppressed in countries ruled by religious Muslims of any sect. Even if the government supports the education and other rights for women, get away from the big city in some Muslim countries and you will find cultural support for treatment of women that would be appalling and indefensible in most of the enlightened world.

I agree that the Western press loves to play up stories of women being stoned to death for fraternizing with males who are non-relatives or wearing the wrong kind of clothes. But can you deny that these things happen in certain countries in the Middle East? I know that, at least in enlightened circles in US/European/Western culture it is offensive to make bigoted generalizations about other cultural/religious groups. But supporting human rights is also part of our culture. Now go to any predominantly Muslim country in the Middle East and ask them what they think of me and my culture. I could go on, comparing views and laws re. human rights and freedom in the US vs Afghanistan/Saudi Arabia/Pakistan/ but I’ve already moved this into a debate. So I will end here and let you get back to the topic of the thread: major contributions by Muslims in the world.

52

Those of us who like astronomy are forever using Arabic contributions to that field - most named stars have Arabic names. (That’s why so many stars start with AL.)

JillGat, your points about Arabic countries are valid, but they don’t appear to have anything to do with the OP. If I asked you what America contributed to the world since independence, and when you answered I said, “Well, yeah, except for black Americans, who you’ve treated like shit,” how would that invalidate the contributions of Americans? You can’t deny blacks have been treated like shit over the course of U.S. history. Does that mean we can’t have a discussion of American contributions to the world of science and art?

53

Of course, **RickJay[/]. I readily admit I highjacked the thread when I noticed the examples of Muslim contributors were all males and it occurred to me that half the population is female, which got me thinking and that always sends me off on a tangent. This is why I suggested we get back to the topic at hand. There have actually been a few female Muslim authors publishing acclaimed books recently. Most of em, of course, have moved away from their homelands. I’ll see what I can find.

54

I recently read a fascinating book, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis.

It examines how the Arab, Turkish and Persian Muslim world, ascendent from about the eighth through fifteenth centuries, gradually lost leadership in trade, technology, military affairs, social development and other areas to Christian Europe. It looks at view of much of the Ottoman Empire during that time that Europe was a heathen backwater that did not have ideas worth investigating or incorporating. As such, much of the development during and after the European Renaissance was not absorbed into the Muslim world. Later, European colonialism and post-colonial monarchies and limited oil-based economics have restricted the development of much of the Muslim world.

55

Perhaps you’ve heard of the electroweak theory? Dr. Abdus Salam of Pakistan was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contribution to the mathematical unification of those two forces.

56

Fatima Mernissi, the leading Islamic feminist in the world, is committed to staying in her home country of Morocco and working with the people there to develop their liberal/progressive consciousness. Dr. Mernissi is renowned for having done her homework, researching the original sources of the religion of Islam and bringing to light a wealth of evidence to support women’s equality as essential to the religion. No one should make categorical statements about the status of women in Islam without first reading Mernissi’s works.

Also, as far as religion affecting science goes, it isn’t always a clear-cut issue of black and white. The development of science in Europe has been attributed, in part, to the doctrine of the Christian religion that the universe is orderly and knowable.

When I first read this, I went huh??? you’re got to be pulling my leg. But the more I thought about it, I came to understand that there is a serious argument being made here. Even though science and the Church came to a parting of the ways in the 17th century, it was the development of Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages that provided an intellectual underpinning that led to the minds of Christendom being equipped to investigate nature. systematically.

Also, I advise great caution about over-generalizing the relations of science and religion, especially in a non-Christian civilization. We have been brought up on the story of Galileo and his struggle with the Church, and unless we consciously draw back from our own cultural context, we are in danger of letting that unconsciously color our understanding of other civilizations, which would be an error. Galileo’s problems were specific to a certain locality (Western Europe) and historical period (the Counter-Reformation).

The development of science in Islamic civilization, at least for the first 900 years or so, was helped rather than hindered by the doctrines of the religion of Islam. The writings of Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, especially Science and Civilization in Islam and An Illustrated History of Islamic Science, shed much light on exactly this causality.

57

paperbackwriter:

I never meant to imply that people in Arab nations aren’t writing scientific papers, or doing any research. However, when you look at the most important developments of the past several hundred years - the development of electronics, space exploration, quantum mechanics, relativity - the really big things that make everybody’s lists of “Top Contributions to Society of the Past 100 Years” - it seems the contributions coming from the Middle East are pretty few and far between. That’s not to say they make no contributions, but as compared to their western colleagues, they seem to be lagging pretty far behind.
Jeff

58

I’ve skimmed through the Koran and it makes very clear the Islamic rule that men are the leaders and women must obey them or face “discipline.” And this obedience and discipline is described in detail in a number of places in the holy book in ways I can’t imagine being interpreted in a feminist way. Unless there are Muslims that don’t follow the Koran? Anyway, I will look for work by Fatima Mernissi. Thank you, Jomo. And to get back on topic, it sounds like we should add her to the list of Muslims who are contributing to the betterment of the world.

59

You’ll find all the same junk in the Bible, but you’re not levelling these kinds of charges against Christianity and Judaism. If you’re religious, or so inclined, do some searching in there for you. The King James Bible is online at www.bartleby.com - look down the pull-bar thing.
I like 1 Corinthians 14, 34 - 35:

60

I’m not at all saying I disagree, but given that this is GQ, you might want to rein in the opinionating a tad.