TOLEDO, Spain -- Islamic medicine and science led the world for centuries while Europe stagnated in the Dark Ages.

From 800 AD to 1500, Arabic was the language of science, as English is today. Muslims occupied Spain, and Europeans flocked to Toledo and other Spanish cities, or traveled great distances to Baghdad or Damascus, to translate Islamic science and medical books into Latin.

Islamic medicine in the year 1000 was a marvel of sophistication, featuring competency tests for doctors, drug purity regulations, hospitals staffed by nurses and interns, advanced surgeries, and other practices beyond the dreams of medieval Europeans.

So why is much of today's Islamic world a "scientific desert," to use the stark language of a 2002 article in the journal Nature? Why do many predominantly Muslim countries, home to 1.3 billion people and 75 percent of the world's oil wealth, neglect science and technology? And how might they recapture their amazing scientific heritage?

In Islamic Spain, Islam's Golden Age was at
first imitated, then exceeded, as scholars poured
in from the Muslim east. One example is the
ninth-century scholar 'Abbas ibn Firnas who
experimented with flight 699 years before
Leonardo da Vinci and constructed a planetarium in
which the planets revolved. This reconstruction by
Michael Grimsdale, based on descriptions dating to
that era, suggests the elaborate gearing that Ibn
Firnas had to have developed.

These questions have resounded at international, Arab and Islamic scientific conferences and have made headlines in science journals. Here's how the Nature article summed up the situation in the Middle East, for instance:

"The region is, for the most part, a scientific desert. In some states, oil wealth has allowed the construction of fabulous cities, magnificent mosques and sumptuous shopping malls. But little scientific infrastructure has emerged. Collectively, the Arab nations spend only 0.15 per cent of their gross domestic product on research and development, well below the world average of 1.4 per cent."

Muslims account for 20 percent of the world's population, but less than one percent of its scientists. Scientists in Islamic countries now make barely 0.1 percent of the world's original research discoveries each year.

Authorities on Islamic science cite various reasons for this state of affairs, but the Koran is not among them.

"The Koran actually forms one of the cornerstones of science in Islam in a way unlike any other scripture of any other religion," said Glen M. Cooper, a professor of the history of science and Islam at Brigham Young University.

"The Koran enjoins the believer and the unbeliever alike to examine nature for signs of the creator's handiwork, evidence of his existence, and his goodness," Cooper said. "Reason is revered as one of the most important of God's gifts to men. The examination of nature led historically into a scientific perspective and program."

Farkhonda Hassan, a professor at the University of Cairo who has written about barriers to science careers for Islamic women, agreed.

"The teachings of the Holy Prophet of Islam emphasize the acquiring of knowledge as bounden duties of each Muslim from the cradle to the grave, and that the quest for knowledge and science is obligatory upon every Muslim man and woman," she said. "One eighth -- that is, 750 verses -- of the Koran exhort believers to study, to reflect, and to make the best use of reason in their search for the ultimate truth."

Search they once did.

The rise of Islamic science

After Muhammad's death in 632, Muslim armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and expanded the borders of Islam east and west.

They absorbed not just land, but also scientific knowledge from India and Greek learning planted centuries earlier by the armies of Alexander the Great. Muslims translated into Arabic the treasures of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Archimedes and other great physicians, philosophers and scientists.

By 711, the Muslims had reached Spain, and they ended up dominating the region until Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella drove out the last of them in 1492.

The impact of Islam's discoveries during this period went far beyond individual innovations like algebra or the establishment of models for modern hospitals and universities. The spread of Islamic knowledge to Europe sparked, or at least helped to spark, the Renaissance and scientific revolution of the 17th century.

"It is highly probable that, but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would never have arisen at all," Sir Thomas Arnold and Alfred Guillaume wrote in their 1997 classic, "The Legacy of Islam."

Robert Briffault wrote in the "Making of Humanity" in 1938 that "Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, and Toledo, were growing centers of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution."

Yet most Americans are completely unaware of Islam's rich scientific heritage, said George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic science at Columbia University, and more than a dozen other experts interviewed for this article.

"That is unfortunate," Cooper said. "Much of our modern science and philosophy owes a large debt to Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages for preserving the classical heritage in all intellectual fields, and for improving upon it in many of these fields. If the average American understood this, there would be fewer smug citizens looking down on 'backward Muslims' with hate and fear."

Two reasons Americans are relatively clueless on the subject are the Arabic-English language barrier and a long tradition of U.S. historians focusing on European scientific traditions, said Jeffrey Oaks of the University of Indianapolis.

"Anything not taught in high school is going to escape public consciousness," added Thomas F. Glick, an expert on Islamic history at Boston University.

Some historians from mainly Islamic countries see it differently.

"We believe that, for dishonorable purposes, there is in the West an intention to ignore the important scientific role played by Muslim scholars during the medieval age," said Abdul Nasser Kaadan, a professor with the Institute for the History of Arabic Science at the University of Aleppo in Syria. "This is to support the allegation that Muslim and Arabic mentality never in the past and not in the future can lead any scientific research."

Explaining the decline

So what happened to the once glorious scientific legacy of Islam and Arabia? Experts cite many things.

Universities were an Islamic invention later adopted in Europe, but Muslim universities did not shelter and preserve scientific knowledge during wars and other upheavals. Christian warriors carved up the Islamic empire and cut off contact between great scientific centers. Here in Spain, the Catholic reconquest of Ferdinand and Isabella deprived Islamic science of the great libraries and schools in Cordoba, Seville and Toledo.

Conflicts also cut off science's lifeblood -- cash for research and education. And the Ottomans, who took over much of the Islamic world in the early 1500s, used their resources to make war, not science.

In the 1700s, a puritanical form of Islam took root in Saudi Arabia, with a doctrine that rejected knowledge acquired after the first 300 years of Islam's existence.

Several scholars said one problem is the lack of awareness among Arabs and Muslims about their own scientific heritage.

"Muslims generally are unaware that their civilization had a high point of superiority in nearly every aspect," Cooper said. "Their current challenge is to face the fact that the Islamic edge has been completely lost.

"It would be a hard thing, I think, to be part of a religion and culture with such a glorious history as that of Islam, when that glory is all in the distant past, and an essentially godless civilization -- from their perspective -- enjoys the lead in power and science."

Eventually, in the United States and Europe, science began paying some of its own bills. Inventions like the telephone, radio, plastics and antibiotics led industry to pour billions into scientific research. In much of the Arab world, science remained dependent on handouts from sultans, kings or caliphs.

"Science and scientific research can flourish only when a country is affluent and has a sound and balanced economy," said Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, also a faculty member of the Arabic science institute at the University of Aleppo. "But when agriculture is the dominant sector, then a country will remain poor, and when petroleum is the only source of income, then this economy in the long run also is doomed."

Others also cited Arab oil wealth, and how rulers spend and invest their billions.

"They probably would have been better off without their mineral resources," said J. J. Witkam of Leiden University in The Netherlands. "It is a corrupting element in any society. But when societies are so unbalanced as most Islamic countries are, then it gets cancerous proportions."

The United Nations Development Program called oil wealth "a mixed blessing" in a 2003 report that called on Arab countries to reclaim their scientific heritage. It focused on the 22 members of the League of Arab States and their 280 million people.

UNDP pointed out that Arab rulers invest much of their oil money in the United States and other foreign countries, rather than using it to develop their own nations, and import technical know-how instead of educating ample numbers of their own citizens to be scientists and engineers. The report also cited "the pursuit of personal gain, the preference for the private over the public good, social and moral corruption, the absence of honesty and accountability and many other illnesses." 

Experts also link the stagnation of Islamic science to a movement that took root more than a century ago that contends all knowledge can be found in the Koran. Meanwhile, the industrialized world has been moving toward a "knowledge society" fueled by information and liberal education.

Signs of rebirth?

The UNDP report also described what's needed to re-energize scientific inquiry in Arab and Islamic societies.

It included relatively straightforward suggestions like spending more on scientific research and ordinary education rather than religious schools. Other recommendations would involve reinventing new systems of government in some countries. One called for "guaranteeing the key freedoms of opinion, speech, and assembly through good governance bounded by law." Some involved correcting tenacious problems like poverty and unemployment.

"Our civilization once supported a knowledge society that was the envy of the world," said Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, a U.N. assistant secretary general who helped prepare the report. "They will do so again if we clear away the defective social, economic and political structures we have piled upon them. We can free our minds to reason without fear; free our people's souls to breathe."

Columbia University's Saliba echoed the need to focus on education.

"What's needed to increase research in Islamic countries?," he asked. "The same thing that is needed in any other country: priority on education, funding, training of teachers, building better relations between school and home, educating the parents, allocating higher budgets for education than for defense -- a situation that is not too different from what we face in this country, as well."

Arab scientists and governments are making some progress.

In 2000, a group of leading scientists formed the Arab Science and Technology Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The emirates are among a handful of Arab countries -- which include Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan -- that are investing more in science education and research.

Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al-Qassimi, the ruler of Sharjah, donated $1 million from his own pocket to start the science foundation and provided its $5-million headquarters building. The foundation hopes to raise $100 million so it can provide research grants and encourage Arab scientists in other countries to return home.

The emir of Qatar is backing the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, which is building a vast "Education City" featuring branch campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Cornell universities.

"The pendulum can swing back," wrote Ibrahim B. Syed of the University of Louisville in an article about Islamic medicine:

"One thousand years ago the Muslims were the great torchbearers of international scientific research. Every student and professional from each country outside the Islamic Empire aspired, yearned, and dreamed to go to Islamic universities to learn, to work, to live and to lead a comfortable life in an affluent and most advanced and civilized society.

"Islamic countries have the opportunity and resources to make Islamic science and medicine number one in their world once again."

Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette