First,  just to be clear, your tracker is pretty much a religion ignoramus. That is, happily secular and not afraid to use the A-word in reference to self. Hardly a clue – despite a childhood in Sunday schools that ended at age 13 or so when I said goodbye to that – which gospel says what and god knows what Revelations is trying to declare other than display exuberance and a knack for meter. Zero on the Talmud although scholars of it always seem terribly kind and wise, nothin’ on the Koran except it inspires wonderful non-representative-of-people artistic and architectural motifs. Next to zip on the Upanishads. The tales of  Siddhartha’s enlightenment did not engross back in the day when they were the rage among America’s young and long-haired. Bafflement at those of non-American-Indian heritage who are earnest in their respect for sacred sites in the US that are just mountains, or valleys, or other geographic formations deserving of care but not for animist cosmology reasons. As for Scientology, the fabulations of L. Ron Hubbard seem funnier than serious. LDS – what is up with it and American Indians and Israel anyway?  It is clear to me that all or almost all scripture contains wisdom and reflects the thoughts of many very serious people determined to codify proper behavior. Prayer is undoubtedly a good way to focus one’s thoughts on a proper course.  But it seems deeply doubtful that, when one prays silently, anybody or any thing else pays attention. One thing religion generally gets right is the sense of awe, reverence even, one ought to feel when looking at our world including down by microscope or up by telescope.

Nonetheless, at the urging of a regular ksjtracker reader, NY science freelancer Jonathan Beard, I just read a longish essay and article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Steve Paulson, a top exec. and producer at Wisconsin Public Radio. I am glad I did.  His topic is on the role, or lack of it, by science in most of the world’s Islam-majority nations and whether there’s much chance for secular science – including tolerance of evolution as a norm in public education – in those societies.

It is an impressive piece of reporting for its scope. Read it. I got a clearer sense of what the Golden Age of Islam contributed to medieval science and preservation of older texts. One learns that many within the small corps of Islamic scientists strive to remain faithful to their prophet but to employ all the muscle of modern science available to them including the theory of evolution. One reads that efforts at modernization are underway. Also that resistance to broad swaths of science is tremendously deep in much of Islam – as deep as what one may find in any fundamentalist Protestant congregation.  The huge price that Islamic-majority nations pay in education, economic vitality, and scientific plus technological achievement gets sharp documentation,

Only one complaint, a big one. Paulson mentions the most essential difficulty Islamic-majority societies may have in reforming their use of science, and in joining the modern, prosperous, and largely peaceful industrial world. His primary nod to this fundament is this sentence: “There is no clear separation between church and state in most Muslim countries, so scientists lack the autonomy that they enjoy in the West.” Science is not all that lacks autonomy. Ditto for art, for the courts, and for protectors of free speech. Why? Ataturk cut the cord in Turkey in the 1920s – by iron fiat, not anything democratic. But he showed it is possible (for awhile anyway – Turkey’s leaders are moderate but nonetheless real Islamists now). This seems to me to be the nub of the problem – as long as a religion is officially part of a government, and as long as elements of that religion have their own authority to order punishment including murder of non-believers, apostates, and the like, that country has little chance of escaping the dark ages. This I’d like to read more about – whether a genuine separation of church and state is becoming an acceptable topic for public conversation in Islamic nations. Or, is “Islamic Republic of….” a permanent feature of the U.N. roster?

- Charlie Petit

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