The bibliographic detail for this article I have not read would be most helpful for an article that I will not source.

1 - I'll put the details in the comments section. You can link to it there.

Don't worry Armsmasher, a cursory and inaccurate Google search led me to this article, which I will provide a broken link to, as if anyone wanted to go to it anyway.

It isn't any different. Except that the Christians are American. And mostly white.

Fundamentalism is dumb.

Yeah, that's stupid. How many Muslim science grad students are there out there? Whole lots, right?

You can say that anyone who does scientific work isn't a good Muslim because they're defying the mullahs, but that only works if any formally Christian biologist isn't a good Christian because of evolution. Obviously, calling yourself a Muslim doesn't get in the way of being a scientist at all.

I am reminded of Robert Anton Wilson saying that the most hateful hate mail he received could be evenly divided by source between Fundamentalist Religionists and Fundamentalist Materialists.

There's no difference. We have the Creationist museums and theme parks to prove it. The chief difference, as I see it, is that in our society we launder the funding for research through enough institutions that it is possible - not that it always happens - for money to become detached from the dogmatic views of its source so that the researchers who get some slice of it are in theory free to publish whatever they find. In more totalitarian societies I imagine money doesn't get to pull at the leash that way.

You wanted ex recto, you got ex recto. Tah-dah!

I thought that the conventional wisdom was that Christianity went through a lot of pretty divisive and bloody conflicts back in the day that left the religion in a less political and generally healthier state - the whole Protestant bit - while Islam had yet to really go through that phase. Is this wildly wrong?

And are there whole lots of Muslim science graduate students?

So I guess this means Iran doesn't have a nuclear program.

7: Clearly, Muslims don't yet hate each other enough.

Huh. This is interesting.

Well, anyone from Pakistan is awfully likely to be a Muslim, and there are plenty of Pakistanis in American and UK colleges. So, yeah, whole lots.

I thought that the conventional wisdom was that Christianity went through a lot of pretty divisive and bloody conflicts back in the day that left the religion in a less political and generally healthier state - the whole Protestant bit - while Islam had yet to really go through that phase. Is this wildly wrong?

I think so. The political development of Islam over the last century has been really warped by the fact that the Saudi dynasty with all the oil money is tightly affiliated with what used to be a weird little fundie sect. But there are a whole lot of much more chilled out Islamic societies, and have been for the last thousand years.

Remember, this is the religion that preserved classical philosophy and mathematics through the Dark Ages -- any theory that Islam just hasn't developed to the point that it can tolerate intellectual inquiry is profoundly ahistorical.

7: Not necessarily wildly wrong, at least as regards Christianity, but the analogy to Islam's a bit murky. It's not like religions necessarily follow the same developmental pattern. And yes, there are tons of Muslim science graduate students, at pretty much every research university in the US.

11 was not meant to denigrate the academic achievements of non-Pakistani Muslims, just that it's an easy substitution of national origin for religion, and obviously people of that nationality are well represented in the sciences.

This particular use of 'Islam' seems either totally thoughtless or gratuitously provocative on the part of the editors. Without knowing which, I'm not sure how exactly I should hate them.

I guess this means Iran doesn't have a nuclear program.

If you really want to get into it, engineering is not the same thing as science. All those "Left Behind" books are chock full of techno-enthusiasm.

But this is needlessly pedantic.

This better, slol?

Tons of Persians, too.

Algebra's pretty tight.

Whatever happened to the Iraqi Dr. Germ? Given how the war went, she's probably either being held by us incommunicado someplace, or was killed by a car bomb.

18: Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?

I could list out x, y, and z for you.

4 seems to pretty much sum it up.

This better, slol?

I wasn't disputing the existence of Islamic or Iranian scientists; I was describing your quip as inapt. In a pedantic, boring way.

Algebra's pretty tight.

So's al-cohol. Yay, Islamic science!

14 - Before we start getting too harsh on the magazine, remember that I didn't actually read the whole article. The author could have come to the same fundamentalism vs. Islam conclusion later in the piece.

Islam has gone thru several waves of Renaissance and Reformation, the most important I think occurring around 1200, when the question of the roles of reason vs authority were fully explored.

I consider Islam as practiced to be in a fine place somewhere between Catholicism and Protestantism. There is no central authority, but neither can anyone be his own priest or interpreter. More like a university or the academic world, each Iman is primarily a scholar, subject to peer review.
The faithful must voluntarily choose an Iman, and an Iman gains credibility thru the numbers and stature of his followers, in addition to the peer review. So Sistani cannot say "all sex is bad" and be listened to for structural reasons as well as political ones.

Islam strikes me as the most scientific and democratic of the major religions. Well, Judaism is interestingly similar, so Islam is simply better than Christianity.

To be clear, I didn't even read the post.

25: Fair enough. 14 was ex recto, in keeping with the spirit of the post.

oh god, i got cayenne pepper in my nose!!

The science/engineering distinction isn't boring and pedantic, it's accurate and to the point! At least it was going to be when I said it, so it must be when you say it.

22 is meant disparagingly, if I read the folkways correctly. A thread summed is a poor thread indeed.

29: I hope you don't expect Science to get it out for you, with your appeal to a deity an all.

Perhaps that's it. Islam is more advanced than Christianity in that it fused with politics earlier and more thoroughly. Right now we Christians are fumbling to catch up.

Disparagingly? Not at all. I was going to type roughly the same thing as Cala did in 4, and then decided not to. "Sums it up" referred to the argument in the post, not to the thread, which seems to have moved on to other contributions of Islam to science, and to cooking accidents.

Hang in there, Michael.

There are, from vague recollection of lengthy conversations with Muslim friends, some fairly clear injunctions in the Q'ran that promote the seeking of knowledge.

One friend was able to specifically quote scripture in order to justify postgraduate study when her parents wanted her to finish up her education and marry.

Ok, correction. I guess the possibilities of snake-handling spirit-slaying anything-goes-preachers makes Protestantism more democratic, but it is not very scientific.

And I don't think the Fundamentalists are easily comparable. In the hadith, as in the Talmud, Muslims have a wealth of secondary material that must be mastered. I have known Protestant "theologians" who have never read, and never would, Kierkeggaard or Niebuhr.

In Islam the Fundamentalism is intellectual;in Protestantism, anti-intellectual.

26: I think any Iman who counts David Bowie as a follower should be the preeminent one.

Do I need to clarify 4? The problem isn't with Islam per se, nor with Christianity per se, but with fundamentalists wrapping their neuroses and political agenda in an anti-science flag.

36: It really depends on the variety of Protestantism. It's a pretty big tent, and there's certainly a pretty broad intellectual tradition within it. I think painting the religions as 'every Muslim studies the hadiths and Protestants don't read their theologians' is a little superficial.

I could be wrong above. Just did some reading in 2003-2004. I can't even remember the good word:Muztali?

33:Islam & politics is an interesting and relevant subject. I do think the universalism and anti-idolatry do make Islam more resistant to nationalism and other meta-affiliations. It is tribal and local, and then universal. But localism may be the politics of the future, as it has mostly been in the past.

The nationalism of the West is just another of the horrors unleashed by the Enlightenment, like liberalism & science.

May the West fall in Jihad! Insh'allah.

I think that it's not right to regard religions (or much else) on some kind of path to perfection. It's not that Christianity is "more advanced" than Islam or vice versa. It's not like if you just give an ideology enough time, it'll eventually become all things to all people.

Rather, it's all about power. Whenever you have people in service to a dogma or an institution, they'll have the temptation to crush things which challenge the dogma or institution. If they have few enough checks on their power, they'll eventually succumb to that temptation, and start stomping on whatever gets in their way. That's true of Christianity, true of Islam, true of Hinduism, and true of any other ideology, from Republicanism to Greenism to Libertarianism to Marxism.

Does anybody ever question whether science is a good thing?

Yes, we have modern medicine and agriculture and all these neat technologies so we can grow the population to 10 billion long-lived citizens commuting to call-centers and watching American Idol. Shall we try for 20 billion? To the stars, dudes!! Groovy little pale worm-masses oozing over each other in ecstatic sociability. We are so many and so comfortable!! And our GDP just keeps growing!!

Chartres puts everything after it to shame.

Here, bob, have a plague infested rat.

It's Gellner Time!

I like to imagine what would have happened had the Arabs won at Potiers and gone on to conquer and Islamise Europe. No doubt we should all be admiring Ibn Weber's The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which would conclusively demonstrate how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organization could only have arisen in consequence of the sixteenth-century neo-Kharejite puritanism in northern Europe. In particular, the work would demonstrate how modern economic and organizational rationality could never have arisen had Europe stayed Christian, given the inveterate proclivity of that faith to a baroque, manipulative, patronage-ridden, quasi-animistic and disorderly vision of the world. A faith so given to seeing the cosmic order as bribable by pious works and donations could never have taught its adherents to rely on faith alone and to produce and accumulate in an orderly, systematic and unwavering manner. Would they not always have blown their profits on purchasing tickets to eternal bliss, rather than going on to accumulate profits and more? ... Altogether, from the viewpoint of an elegant philosophy of history, which sees the story of mankind as a sustained build-up to our condition, it would have been far more satisfactory if the Arabs had won. By various obvious criteria--universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematisation of social life--Islam is, of the three great Western Monotheisms, the one closest to modernity.

Science created those anti-psychotic drugs, Bob.

Please do your part, and get back on them.

Thanks to Science, many people who annoy me are allowed to live full, productive lives.

The Black Death puts everything after it to shame.

I wonder how much the holding back of science by fundamentalism has to do with being wrong, getting a bad result, failure is visited on people by their god, who is very involved in the daily details.

IMX science is not for the faint-hearted, you're mostly coming up insignificant or inconsistent results, the rats died, you have to start over, the other guy published first, etc. If god is doing that to you, you're a bad person, and perhaps selling cars might be a better occupation.

You're mostly coming up insignificant or inconsistent results....

I used to have lunch with a guy doing his PhD research. For a period of a month or more, almost every day he'd spend several hours every morning trying unsuccessfully to try to get his prep process to work. He changed his procedures, bought new lots of reagents, read new manuals, etc. etc. It wasn't even the research, just a preliminary process he needed do before he could do the real research. If his morning work failed, the rest of the day was wasted.

Hmm; I spent a morning last week being lectured by a guy from Montreal on all the ways precisely in which Muslims had transmitted, and improved on, Greek learning in the Dark Ages and after. It is true, though, that they stopped contributing to science at about the time that everything we think of as "science" -- Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, etc, got rolling over here.

But I think this just proves that culture is more than religion,and if your culture goes badly wrong -- eg because the Mongols or even the British arrive -- then your religion will tend to take unhelpful forms, too.,

All the talk about Islam needing a reformation usually avoids discussing whether or not Islamism itself is that desired phenomenon.

The motivation behind the separation of church and state in Christianity was to displace the Catholic Church and its priesthood from the considerable political power they held. Their biggest problem was that they were corrupt, vampiric, venal, and all about torturing the church's opponents (they did, after all, invent waterboarding, etc.).

In Islam there mostly has been a separation of church and state from the very beginning. Following the death of Mohammad, power was seized by the warlords (the Caliphs) instead of transferring over to the family of Mo and his close religious disciples (who were slaughtered in present-day Iraq ... big reason for the Shi'i split). The clergy served mainly to support (and occasionally oppose) power structures that were established and run separate from the religious institutions themselves.

Perhaps an Islamic reformation will result in the opposite outcome of the one that occurred in Christianity. In the current Islamic world, it is the secular leaders who are corrupt, vampiric, venal, and all about torturing the opponents of their ruling cliques. Islamists, by and large, are notable for their honesty (which, admittedly, often leads to them saying rather uncomfortable things about us, for instance) and commitment to social service (e.g. Muslim Brotherhood). The solution in this case may lie in merging church and state, and displacing the secular elites from power.