According to thinker Jaber Asfour, what is required is a factor of scientific awareness in the life of the nation. Advanced nations are measured by the extent to which they represent the values of sciences. He sees that freedom is one of the most significant underlying factors for scientific prosperity. In fact, he believes that freedom is the primary precondition for the foundation of general scientific awareness, paving the way for progress to flourish. Freedom is the logical introduction for the advancement of methodological thinking.

What are the characteristics of scientific culture that must be reinforced in order to reach a renaissance? Asfour sees that science in our national inheritance continues to deteriorate due to the Arab culture’s submission to the state’s authoritarian rules, which adopted the theme of a nationalistic project. The Arabs realized their regression too late when they culturally clashed with the West. But the brutality of Western colonization caused the Arabs to consider science as a hostile product of the West. This is Asfour’s argument. But we can counter it by pointing to the Japanese experience, which was able to find a solution to this dilemma by harmonizing between Japanese originality and westernization. The Japanese first contact with the West took place with the pounding of American battleship artillery. That is to say that the blessing of the workshop and the curse of artillery that Asfour figured did not break the will power of the Japanese.

Asfour equates the setback of science in modern Arab culture to a series of negative and widespread traits. These traits have themselves turned into rules that oppose the consolidation of science and that deter its advancement. Here are some of the significant traits:

First: The traditional tendency to follow and which opposes the trend for modernization and innovation, and gives always priority to the previous and turns  the forthcoming  into a synonym to deficiency and corruption. 

Second: The individual’s tendency to hold on to the past and to turn it into a point of reference that cannot be altered in the future unless compared to a prior origin. This is followed by a decreasing tendency for the future and a form of escape from confronting today’s challenges on the path to the future. This in its part leads to the cancellation of the chances of positive accumulation that leads to advancement.

Third: Distinction between sciences, such as between serviced sciences and serving sciences and those that are in between. This is coupled with religious rhetoric that only values Sharia sciences, compared to which other forms of sciences are increasingly insignificant. This trend expresses itself through political ideology as with the Marxism of sciences during the Stalin era or the Islamization of sciences during the rule of Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. Among the forms of scientific distinction is the class-based and ethnic view of sciences. This implies a hierarchal distinction based on gender, ethnicity or race. The result, however, is an unconditional and preferential view of the American or European world compared to the view of the eastern or western world.

Fourth: Religiosity, which means involving religion where it is not concerned. Religion then becomes a precondition that hampers and condemns progress. A consequence to this extremist view of science is to refer the natural or human disasters to divine anger like what happened during the tsunami.

Fifth: Indoctrination, the trait that links science and new knowledge; establishing complete unison between the scientist and the learner. Science then becomes traditional and does not aim to communicate with minds and develop their potential to analyze and innovate. Instead, it merely fills minds with information that encourages tradition rather than innovation.

Sixth: The culture of consumerism, i.e. to be content with being at the receiving end of innovation, relying on others and copying from them instead of competing with them in a creative manner.

These traits are deeply rooted in our Arab and Islamic history, according to Asfour. The culture of imitation and religious domination and tyranny dominated this history and ended in the deterioration of our societies at a time when the thoughts of Averroes and Ibn Sina became one of the underlying factors of the European renaissance. The reason for this is that civil states are founded on tolerance while the religious states, by definition, advocate strict censorship.

Asfour takes a bold step by saying that Sheikh Mohammed Abdou denied that Islam has an official authority that practices religious tyranny. On the contrary, Islam destroyed religious authority and erased its traces. In addition, Islam did not award anyone, after God and the prophet, the power over people’s ideology or faith. The prophet himself was a messenger, not a tyrant.

2010 - ISSUE 90