Can the DNA of ISSR Be Changed?
Muzaffar Iqbal
President of the Center for Islamic Sciences
Preamble
The contemporary “Science and Religion” discourse is historically rooted in the redefinition of “science” and “religion” that took place in Europe under the complex kinetic forces arising out of the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and—more importantly—through introduction of a radical new concept of the cosmos and Insān, which is the gender-neutral Arabic word for a human being. This redefinition was the result of an ugly divorce that continues to create binaries (see below).
The SR-Discourse has gone through distinct phases over the last three centuries, but its anatomy has always remained fixed within the broad spectrum of this relationship conceived as two entities in the equation which are either in “conflict,” “harmony,” or “mutual independence”.
When this framing was extended to the rest of the world through colonization, economic coercion and sheer brute force by the four colonizing powers (Britain, France—and to a lesser extent—Germany and the Dutch Republic (1581–1795), called the Kingdom of the Netherlands after 1815), this approach to the relationship between science and religion was extended to other religious traditions. This extension also coincided with the near complete eradication of all other scientific traditions; from then on, only one mode of exploring the natural world was deemed “valid” and it was called “science”, whereas it was really the enterprise of science that arose in modern Western civilization. The cosmos and insān, as conceived by this science, became the monolithic “objects” of inquiry through the scientific method which claimed universality. This reductionism, together with the forceful implantation of European model of science and religion discourse in the colonies created a foreign-super-structure that forced the “natives” to respond to the charge of following “backward religions”, charges which have harmed the cause of science for centuries. This can be seen, for instance—in the case of Islam—in the correspondence between Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838 or 1839-March 1897) and the French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1892).
Afghani arrived in Paris at the beginning of 1883 after a short stay in London [1]. His arrival there coincided with the defeat of the Urabi Movement [2] in Egypt which was brutally crushed by the British forces; it also began what was supposedly a temporary British occupation of Egypt. In Paris, Afghani wrote his famous “Answer to Renan” on May 18, 1883 in response to a lecture by Ernest Renan on “Islam and Science”, which he gave at Sorbonne and published on March 29, 1883 in the Journal des Débats [3]. Renan repeated the usual orientalist claim that “early Islam and the Arabs who professed it were hostile to the scientific and philosophic spirit and that science and philosophy had entered the Islamic world only from non-Arab sources.” The rest, as they say, is history. The discourse on “Islam and science” was framed in these terms and it continues to echo in the reductive chambers of modernity: “Ghazali killed science in Islam.”
Fast forward to the contemporary discourse on science and religion and one can retell the tale of its current state from several perspectives; the one I use in this blog has a personal tone, as it is meant to be a reflective text for ISSR members.
It all began when the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) entered the domain of science and religion. Among the various initiatives funded by JTF, the one relevant to this text is “Science and the Spiritual Quest (SSQ)” Project. Implemented by the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences (CTNS) SSQ reached out to representatives of several religious traditions and over the course of seven years (1996-2003) brought together many scholars from around the world. CTNS website tells us:
SSQ recruited more than 120 internationally, leading scientists into intensive dialogue on the connections between science and spirituality. SSQ involved over 11,000 people in 17 public events in nine countries on four continents, featuring nearly 300 speakers at these events. By conservative estimates, SSQ reached over 400 million people through media coverage. SSQ published groundbreaking volumes, and produced new video products. SSQ forged programmatic and financial partnerships with some 40 organizations and fostered numerous new efforts in science and religion around the globe…During the next phase of the program, SSQ II (1999-2003), took the concept worldwide with multiple workshops and conferences in the United States, France, Spain, India, Japan, Romania, the Vatican, Morocco, and Kazakhstan [4].
In addition, CTNS also organized another JTF-funded Program: the eight-year-long Science and Religion Course Program:
The Course Program was initially administered by Gordon College and focused primarily on scholars in North America and England. From 1998-2002, CTNS administered and broadened the program in a variety of ways, which centered principally on three aims: (1) to strengthen the base of scholars currently teaching in this field, (2) to broaden the impact of science and religion on leading research universities and theological seminaries, and (3) to further internationalize dialogue and augment its inter-faith context by introducing and cultivating programmatic work in Africa, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, continental Europe, and Latin America. Ted Peters served as Principal Investigator for the CTNS-administered program. During the entire history of the Course Program, over seven hundred US $10,000 Course Awards were distributed to institutions and professors across the globe. The intercultural and inter-religious community of scholars and the extensive legacy of pedagogical resources that the Course Program created continue to influence ongoing dialogues between science and religion. This program was made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation… The scope of the program’s success—in the level of scientific participants, number of events, number of attendees, media impressions, number and quality of partnerships, publications, and fundraising successes…far exceeded our expectations [5].
It was through these two initiatives that the idea of an international society for science and religion first emerged. There was a genuine interest among the participants to formally have a society that would be truly international and truly multi-religious. My own perspective, articulated in various books, papers, meetings, conferences, and seminars over these years is embedded in the historical context of the relationship between Islam and science. Its most concise statement is in the introductory chapter of my 2007 book, published in the Greenwood Press Series on science and religion [6].
Science and Islam draws from the understanding that there are, in fact, multiple ways of conceiving the object of study of science, just as there were multiple ways of studying that object. In other words, there were and can still be multiple “sciences” just as there are multiple religions, that “science and religion” is a reductive term that bulldozes the entire discourse on the relationship between sciences of nature and religions. The narrow tunnel of “conflict, harmony, independence” model is merely one out of many possible ways to conceive this relationship. The “object”—the manifest cosmos and its dwellers—is a wonder-full creation that has a metaphysical dimension that is inseparable from the physical.
The question of perspective and methodology is extremely important because the model constructed by the discourse on science and Christianity, the “two-entity model,” is not an international model. This is so because in this model, these two distinct entities are posited against each other and are allowed a variety of possible modes of interaction, such as “conflict,” “independence,” “dialogue,” and “integration” (Barbour 2000), but this variety is always within the two-entity model; in other words, these ways of explaining the relationship between science and religion all assume that “science” and “religion” are two separate entities that have a finite number of possible modes of interaction. Each of these modes can be further subdivided into various possibilities, refined, classified, and graded in terms of the degree of interaction being strong or weak, but the model itself remains anchored in the foundational paradigm that considers the two phenomena separate and distinct entities.
The two-entity model has evolved from a specific cultural, historical, and scientific background, and it is supported by episodes from the history of interaction between science and Christianity in the Western world. It is, however, now being claimed that this model is universal, and can be used to understand the relationship between all scientific traditions and all religions (Barbour 2002). While this model has been criticized for certain shortcomings, this criticism has for the most part itself remained within the two-entity framework. Since science as we understand it today is generally taken to be that enterprise borne of the European Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, and since this particular scientific tradition has had a series of conflicts with Christianity, the “conflict model” has gained credibility both in the scholarly world as well as in the popular mind. Furthermore, since the science begotten by the European Scientific Revolution has now spread to all corners of the world, the particular history of the interaction of science and the faith also seems to have accompanied this spread of science: the only adjustment deemed necessary is the substitution of Christianity with Islam or other religions of the world.
Furthermore, the particular history of the relationship between modern science and Christianity is especially inapplicable to Islam, since there is no church in Islam, no ecclesiastic authority that could have entered into interaction with scientists and scientific institutions in any formalized concrete form. There is no Pope who could have established the “Holy Office of the Inquisition,” as Pope Paul III did in 1542, or who could have issued an Index of Prohibited Books or encyclics on Islam and science. This is not to say that Islamic religious thought is without its own internal conflicts— and there will be much mention of these in subsequent chapters—but to underscore the reasons why the two-entity model, often used to describe the interaction of Christianity and science, is inapplicable to the case of Islam (and possibly other religious traditions).
There is no known scientist or religious scholar between the eighth and seventeenth centuries who felt the need to describe the relationship between science and religion by composing a book on the subject. This absence of “Islam and science” as a differentiated discipline is proof in itself that during these long centuries—when the Islamic scientific tradition was the world’s most advanced enterprise of science—no one felt the need to relate the two through some external construct. When the need did arise, it arose in an entirely different context and in an entirely different era— that is, with the arrival of modern science in the lands of Islam during colonization of the Muslim world.
Islam does not view nature as a self-subsisting entity that can be studied in isolation from its all-embracing view of God, humanity, and the cosmological setting in which human history is unfolding. Furthermore, in Islamic classification of knowledge, science—the discipline that studies nature—is taken as but one branch of knowledge, integrally connected with all other branches of knowledge, all of which are linked to the concept of Tawhid, the Oneness of God. Thus, the Islamic tradition does not regard any discipline of knowledge independent of other disciplines. For this reason, the connector “and” in the phrase “Islam and science” does not attempt to connect two separate entities, rather, it is used here as a copula. There is also a fundamental difference between the nature of science that existed in Islamic civilization between the eighth and sixteenth centuries and modern science; they approach nature in two very different manners and hence one cannot use the same methodology for narrating the stories of the interaction of Islam with both premodern and modern science.
Fast forward to the foundation of ISSR: When we arrived in Spain in 2002 for the establishment of an international society on science and religion, we were all conscious of the dark cloud of 9/11 hanging over this JTF-funded initiative that brought a large number of scholars from around the world to Granada, yet, there was optimism in air. Finally, there was a possibility of establishing a forum where “science” and “religion” would be allowed to become international. Yet, I clearly recall the shock and dismay that spread throughout a certain segment of the “general body” that was forced to become a “rubber-stamping body” for the life-time “election” of Sir John Polkinghorne as the President of ISSR; the Executive Committee had also been “elected” and we had travelled all the way to simply say, “Amen”.
I distinctively recall that when I stood up and said, “I am sorry, but this is not the nineteenth century and we have not come here at the invitation of a Viceroy of the erstwhile British Empire”, there was pin-drop silence in the room. But those who had orchestrated and choreographed the event were not inexperienced hands; even though they were not anticipating anything but thumping of the desks and clapping of hands, they quickly arose to the handle the situation. When what they had cooked up was challenged, they adjourned the meeting. When the meeting reconvened, they presented a resolution to “kill” the unwanted voice; they were defeated after I reiterated my objections, but then they came up with the “committee-cold-storage-mechanism”; and the matter was buried.
I need not restate history and I did not even want to write this blog, even after the self-congratulatory blog by the current President of ISSR, but I strongly believe truth must be brought to light whenever there is a coverup and ISSR membership, especially those who were not present in Granada, need to know the true history of what transpired in the making of ISSR. The DNA of ISSR was modified, even before it was born, so, its members need to know how the possibility of a truly international forum for science and religions was strangled in 2002 and why the still-born-ISSR has never been “international” in any sense of the word, unless, we define “international” to be the inclusion of some colored faces to this or that organ and sub-organ of a society whose very foundation and legitimacy was morally, if not legally, corrupt.
Those who had cooked up the recipe for their selection knew well their colonial tricks of establishing their writ and thus those of us who were a minority in the 200 or so invitees could not make a difference, even though we saw through their strategy; we went home with no hope of establishing a truly international society for the discourse on science and religion. By truly international, I mean a forum where agenda is not decided by the parameters defined by the historical and contemporary interaction between science and Christianity.
I have raised some of the issues plaguing ISSR in my December 2021 blog, Reimagining ISSR,[7] after which a certain recourse was promised in January 2022 by a “responsible” member of the Executive Committee,” but two years and nine months later, not a feather has moved because he has been “too busy”, I am told recently! This is, once again, 2002 all over again, because the “Committee” formed at the first general body meeting has also been too busy ever since and not a single corrective to the problems raised in the foundational meeting has ever been undertaken. This dismal situation continues to “internationalize” science and Christianity discourse. There is no problem in it, because they hold the purse, but one hopes they would have the decency of correcting the nomenclature of their work and rename ISSR as British Society for the spread of Western Science and Christian discourse to the rest of the world!
[1] According to the report by the Government of India’s Thagi and Dakaiti Department (Department of Fraud and Dacoity), Afghani left India in November 1882, via the S. S. India, cf. F.O. 60/594, “Memorandum” by A. S. Lethbridge, General Superintendent, Thagi and Dakaiti Department, 1896, cited in Keddie (1972), p. 182, n.1. During his entire stay in India, he was under constant secret service surveillance.
[2] Headed by Colonel Ahmad Urabi, who was influenced by Afghani’s pan-Islamic activities in Egypt, this movement was successful in establishing its control over Egypt beginning in 1880; by 1882, this small group of revolutionary young men had become de facto rulers of Egypt but in September 1882, the British invaded Egypt with full force and crushed the movement.
[3] Ernest Renan (1947), Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1, Paris, p. 961, cited in Keddie (1972), p. 189, n. 18.
[4] The SSQ Program | Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (ctns.org); accessed October 4, 2024.
[5] Science and Religion Course Program | Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (ctns.org); accessed October 4, 2024.
[6] Science and Islam, In the Greenwood Guide to Science and Religion Series, 2007. Science and Islam: : Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion Muzaffar Iqbal Greenwood (bloomsbury.com).
[7] https://www.issr.org.uk/blog/december-2021-blog/
Comment from Niels Henrik Gregersen, President of ISSR: I thank Dr. Iqbal for his continuous interest in the development of ISSR. Allow me to note, however, that ISSR is not wedded to a particular two-entity model of sciences and religions. ISSR members have a great variety of views on science-and-religion, including secular ones. The DNA of ISSR is to take the transnational importance of the sciences seriously while acknowledging that their historical emergence, contemporary religious interpretations and societal uses are contextual. ISSR is open to all faiths; but we are not an interreligious society. Currently, we are developing the regional profile of ISSR, including the great Asian traditions. We are here in a process, and far from accomplished in this regard.
