Reimagining ISSR
Muzaffar Iqbal
The immediate impetus for this blog is the November 2021 post by Fraser Watts (“Cross-cultural Issues Regarding ‘Science and Religion’”), wherein he expresses reservations about calling ISSR a society for “science and religion”. The concerns raised there are a continuation and expansion of what Watts had expressed in his July 2020 blog (“What is ISSR For?”). Both posts are essentially concerned with the self-claimed identity of ISSR “wanting to be an international and multifaith society.” This introspection by a founding member of ISSR, who is also its current Executive Secretary, signals a possible opening of space for reflection and self-critique, which will, one hopes, lead to certain changes in its programs and activities.
The concerns raised by Watts are so fundamental that one wonders why this kind of conversation did not take place twenty years ago, when ISSR was established. The reasons for this may not be known to all current fellows. ISSR was willed into existence in the charged time when the world was at the threshold of the post-9/11 “you are with us or against us” era. That political context had its impact on the Science-Religion discourse as well as on interpersonal and institutional dynamics. Fellows present at the foundational meeting in Granada were presented the key components of ISSR as a fait accompli and effectively asked to rubberstamp decisions which had already been made behind closed doors. There was no room for any discussion on any aspect of the Society, including the scope of its work, parameters of what it would promote, the composition of the executive board—everything had already been decided. When concerns were raised in the meeting, they were tactfully squashed. The rest is history, as the saying goes.
Those of us who had anticipated the flowering of a truly international discourse on science and religion at that time can still recall with nostalgic sadness the initiatives on which such hopes were built. There were others, of course; just the ones I personally was involved in (which I remember being characterized by much hope for productive dialogue and investigation) included the four-year “Science and Religion Course Program” of CTNS (1998-2002) led by Ted Peters, the “Science and Spiritual Quest” project (1996-2003) spearheaded by Philip Clayton, and the international conference held in Islamabad in 2001 under the joint sponsorship of CTNS, Islamic Research Institute of the International Islamic University, Islamabad, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). The title of the Conference, “God, Life, and the Cosmos: Christian Muslim Perspectives” is indicative of the intent behind holding it. It was the first such conference in a Muslim country, where three generations of Muslim scholars and leading Christian scholars in the field interacted with each other and which produced a book with the same title (Ashgate, 2002; re-issued by Routledge 2017). All these initiatives became collateral damage of what happened in America on that fateful day of September 2001.
As James Joyce poignantly told us, history is a nightmare from which it is hard to wake up. Yet we have to start from where we are. Twenty years, you’d think, is a long enough time to realize that the token inclusion of a few non-Anglo-American scholars in conferences, seminars, and forums—or even in the executive board of a society—does not make a discourse “international”, because the framework of discourse remains unchanged by these tokens. Such “internationalization” is akin to taking a McDonald’s to Makkah, Tehran, Jakarta, and other urban centers around the world and calling its products “international food.”
We all know that the birthplace of our contemporary discourse on the relationship between science and religion is Europe, its religious context is Christianity, and its early contours arose within the broader historical context of various religious and intellectual movements in Europe. This trajectory should lead us to ask “why” questions: Why Europe? Why Christianity? Why the seventeenth century? Most importantly, why is the international discourse still hostage to this early cast? While these questions have been raised in a limited number of scholarly publications, they have not been given their due in the mainstream discourse—nor, crucially, in the activities of ISSR. Such lack of attention to fundamental questions has translated into a lack of meaningful diversity and self-reflexivity in ISSR fora.
Considering what kind of science and religion discourses historically existed in other regions and religions would be one way of internationalizing the dominant contemporary discourse. Examining the parameters of such discourses and giving their study space in our contemporary activities might help realign, enrich, and diversify ISSR programs.
For example, let us take the case of the enterprise of science in Islamic civilization, where from the ninth century onward the most vigorous scientific activity occurred across a vast geographical region. This scientific enterprise is variously understood to have flourished through the fourteenth, fifteenth, or even early sixteenth centuries. However, if we seek in that context a religion and science discourse of the kind we know today, we come up empty handed. There is not even a word in classical Arabic which can be said to be a true equivalent of the English word “Nature” (and this in a language that has over one hundred words for the camel!). Already this precludes the possibility of discovering “Laws of Nature” to be pitted against or reconciled with “Laws of God”. That tells us a lot about why there was no Islam and science discourse in those centuries of high intellectual activity.
What is more important is the foundational difference between how the object of study of science is conceived in Islam and post-Renaissance science. The cosmos is theologically defined in the Islamic tradition as “everything other than God”. The Qur’an, believed by Muslims to be the actual “Speech of God”, consists of 6,216 verses, called ayat (sing. aya; meaning “sign”) in Arabic, and the entire cosmos is also said to be filled with “signs” (ayat) of God, which the believers are invited to explore, for worldly benefits as well as for gaining knowledge about the purpose of life. Both signs serve the same purpose: lead humanity on a path that fulfills the purpose of its creation. “Laws of God” are operative everywhere, in the vast cosmic spaces as well as in the tiniest of particles of sand in the desert, in the moral and ethical behavior of the believers, and within the innermost recesses of the human beings who study the distant galaxies and the marvelous arteries of their bodies going into the ever-pulsating hearts, the seat of Divine knowledge and mysteries. There are no “Laws of Nature” to be discovered and posited against or in harmony with the “Laws of God”.
Other religious traditions have their own concepts of what science studies. Reimagining ISSR means opening space at the foundational level to accommodate such diversity of beliefs. This cannot be done by translating existing material into Spanish and Portuguese, this amounts to merely propagating the same Anglo-American-Christian discourse in another language and region of the world. Nor can it be done, I am afraid, by establishing special interest groups; the need is to open up space and insert the corrective in its main discourse. (Sprinkling spices on Big Macs will not internationalize that food.) Thus, the need of the hour is to do justice to the “I” of ISSR by reexamining the foundational framework of the discourse it attempts to nurture and promote.
Such an effort has many side benefits. For instance, we know that religious traditions are built upon texts and revered human beings. Both have definable features common to all as well as some that are specific to each religious tradition. When and if the “international” in “international science and religion discourse” is given its due, the new discourse will generatively bring into focus the status of religious texts and revered persons in non-Christian traditions. Propagation of these perspectives may, in turn, provide insight to the broad perplexity of those who cannot understand why there are such strong reactions in the Muslim world when a Qur’an is burnt or cartoons of the Prophet are drawn.
I am sure ISSR fellows from other religious traditions will have more to say on these foundational topics and additional perspectives will emerge. Yet for this effort to go beyond self-reflective blogs, certain concrete executive decisions are needed, leading indeed to a concerted and willful reimagining of ISSR. Recognizing that the world has radically transformed since the Society’s founding, through the long and savage war of/against terror as well as through the emergence of new platforms of dissemination of ideas, the survival of the organization as a productive forum calls for a serious reconfiguration of its raison d’etre.
