An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam (ISBN 1591024498)

This book deserves a wide audience:
This is a rare book, informative and precise, yet perfectly accessible to the non-expert. Anyone who wants to know the nature and history of the Muslim interaction with the modern sciences could not do better. Taner Edis at no point condemns the Muslim attitude; rather, he understands and explains the effect on science of the traditional religion that permeates the social structure of the Muslim people, determines their view of the world and reality, and forms the basis for a kinship that transcends even national identity. And he explains how it is that religious people, by a socially normal insistence on the perfection of Islam as a religion and a social force, have boxed themselves into a corner in which theoretical science, to the extent that it might contradict religious orthodoxy, cannot be easily tolerated; it is antithetical to an entire way of looking at the world. The book is fascinating. There is food for thought and a cautionary tale embedded within this story of Islam and science. It might be wise if our own society gave serious consideration to the consequences for theoretical and innovative scientific research when the results of such research have to be stifled and forced to conform to the dictates of a religious orthodoxy that insists that nothing can be allowed to deviate from its particular beliefs.

A Different View of Religion vs. Science:
In America, a large proportion of the population rejects the findings of science whenever those findings conflict with scripture taken literally. The scripture in such cases is usually the Bible, but it is good to be reminded that fundamentalists Christians are not the only ones who can't accept all that science has to offer. With even more fervor, believers in Islam have such a degree of faith that they are able to reject even larger chunks of science. Many American scientists and believers in the scientific way fret that churches who instill doubt about scientific discoveries may undermine young peoples' understanding of the natural world around them, a world that is the target for all scientific explanations. But Islam's difficulty in accommodating science is even more fundamental. In _An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam_ (Prometheus Books), physicist Taner Edis has written an overview that will provide a new way of looking at the classic religion vs. science conflict if you are used to considering only Christianity as representing the religious side. For Christian fundamentalists, the idea that the Bible could be anything but literally true is unacceptable. This is even more the case, Edis shows, in Islam which is centered on the Quran as the word of God, a divine text whose freedom from error must not be questioned. Of course there is a creationist movement in Islam, often allied with Christian creationists. American creationists, "due to their ever-fruitless but always hopeful expeditions hunting for the remains of Noah's Ark in the mountains of eastern Turkey," have been considered scientific experts by Muslims in the region, experts who could spout an anti-evolution position. The refusal to accept evolution reflects but one part of Islamic rejection of science. Muslims can view scientific thinking as part of the Western or Christian culture, yet another import that corrupts the faith. There is emphasis on applied science in Muslim countries. There are plenty of engineers among Muslims, and especially among their political leaders, and technology is valued. Science is equated with practical technology; astrophysics or evolutionary theory are among the pure sciences that demonstrate at the deepest levels how material causes are sufficient to understand our world, and are thus suspect. There are Muslims who favor liberal views similar to many Christians; if the science conflicts with a passage in the respective holy book, for instance, it is best to take the passage metaphorically. There is a western tradition of doing so going back to Copernicus, and millions of Christians with liberal views, notably even Catholics, have no problem accepting that the Bible is not a text to be used as a science book. Muslim thinkers who advocate such liberal, metaphorical views are subject not only to censorship but to persecution. Edis has a fine vantage from which to view these issues, and to help explain them. He was born and raised in Turkey, where his introduction to Islamic concepts was within the secular state advocated by Kemal Ataturk. He admits that his personal sympathies are with Enlightenment ideals. He does his physics research in American institutions rather than even in the secular Turkish ones not only because the resources are superior, but because of the better intellectual climate. Muslims who want to do pure scientific research have to go abroad to study, because Muslim culture does not now accept the experimentation and formation of theories which is the way science is done. Edis reflects that it isn't impossible that Islam and science will take their own paths as Christianity and science have done, but he makes clear that such a separation would mean a complete reinterpretation of Muslim thought, a change which is likely no time soon.

Review by G. F. Haddad:
"You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth," wrote Einstein to a friend in 1949; "I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being." Reminiscent of the all-but-humble Islamophobic V.S. Naipaul of "Among the Believers" less the literary craft, associate professor of physics at Truman State University Taner Edis, author of "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam" is one such crusading professional. With an overreaching title doing its best to enliven a text peppered with self-congratulatory Westernism and cocktail-hour inferiority complex such as "The problem is that Muslims have not be enable to become productive in basic science" (p. 202), Taner's "Illusion", though a miss on relevance, makes for entertaining reading as a Kemalist settling of accounts with Turkish religiosity and "creationism." This is one of the latest offerings by Prometheus Books, publishers of "God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist" (in their "Popular Science" series) by a Victor J. Stenger, which the same Taner Edis hurrayed with the blurb, "Both casual readers interested in what science has to say about religion, and scholars looking to acquaint themselves with the latest science-based arguments against God will find much in this book worth their attention." What adjudication on earth or in heaven science has over religion is itself a classic fallacy Hamlet dispatched, as did Einstein when he said "My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality." "My roots are in Turkish secularism," Taner says, "which tried to impose a version of the European Enlightenment on a deeply pious peasant population" (p. 22). In seven chapters of which the irritatingly solipsistic first (p. 14-32) and last (p. 239-251) respectively stand in for a missing introduction and conclusion, Taner's "Illusion" begins with "Seek Knowledge in China," the "coup d'envoi" of his crusade against youthful religious indoctrination. The chapter has a section entitled "Which Islam?" with profundities like "I agree that 'Islam' can be an impossibly broad term, serving as little more than a symbol for all that is good and proper as seen by someone identifying themselves as a Muslim" (p. 27). Such fantastic phrases in a book promoted as "Islamic studies" (!) are primarily a vista into the current standards of American publishing ("God: The Failed Hypothesis" made the 'NY Times' bestseller list). They only accidentally show how proper Westernized Turks make it a point, ridicule be damned, to know less and less about the religion which propelled their forefathers from tribal mishmash to world superpower. Far from bizarre, in the parallel world of the author's "Turkish popular Islam" - read Kemalism - it is politically correct to be able to boast with a straight face that "many Turks enjoy their alcohol" but are "very careful not to eat pork" - and still seriously claim concern about not "misrepresent( ing) the current state of Islam" (p. 27). Chapter 2, "A Usable Past," contains hilariously shallow assessments of the flourishing of science in the golden age: "Muslim rulers supported astronomers in order to obtain the best astrological advice" (p. 44), "medieval medicine did perfect the occasional useful technique" (p. 49). Such ill-tempered, reductive superficialities excuse Taner from having to reconcile his freely-dispensed awareness that "concepts like God, divine purpose, design, and morality were integral to the whole enterprise of acquiring and interpreting knowledge, whether it was in medicine or astronomy" (p. 47) with the fact that faith never impeded science, on the contrary. Like a scientistic caricature out of Dickens pontificating about "FACTS, Sir, FACTS is what life's about," Tener cries "myth, myth" every chance he gets - up to four or five times in the space of ten lines (p. 46, 94) just so you won't miss the point. About 10 per cent of his pages bring up "The Enlightenment." All Middle Eastern atheists are fond of trumpeting their allegiance to "The Enlightenment." Chapter 3, "Finding Science in the Quran," as misnamed as the book itself, discusses tourism in Turkey, Turkish cafés, Turkish rugs, Turkish TV, Turkish preachers (p. 81-86), proceeding to "the Nur movement" of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (p. 86-93), finally entering the subject 15 pages into the 25-page chapter with a three-page treatment of Maurice Bucaille (p. 95-97) then moving on to discuss Turkish MD vulgarizer Haluk Nurbaki (p. 98-100), finally lapsing into a paced diatribe against the religious abuse of quantum-physics terminology (p.101-111) with references to the book of Job, more Turks including "political scientist" Muhammed Bozdag, whose writings "can be hard to take seriously" (p. 104) and some Americans, but nary a word about the chapter-title. Taner's real target is not Islam but religion as a whole. In Chapter 4, "Created Nature," he takes potshots at the American "Intelligent Design" movement (p. 118-120), finding it relevant to mention their "ever-fruitless but always hopeful expeditions hunting for the remains of Noah's Ark" and how Protestant creationists envy Harun Yahya's bottomless budget and work in tandem with him and Mustafa Akyol, another self-promoting Turk and outright ally of the American Right (125-133) among other popular writers whose mention, again, hardly makes sense. An intellectual bully, he is careful to visit the bantam weight of his Associate Professorship in physics on easy targets, ignoring the more serious arguments for Intelligent Design forwarded by the likes of Fred Hoyle and his "Superintellect" or Sir John Archibald Wheeler and his anthropic principle. As the book nears its end it finishes losing touch with its purported subject-matter and actually disproves its own thesis with its best-crafted chapter 5, "Redeeming the Human Sciences," which seems written at a different time and by a different person than the rest. After briefly engaging Recep Sentürk's 'fiqh' paradigm in classical Islam, Taner, closing the door opened by the Columbia-trained sociologist and Azhari-trained 'faqih', retreats to the safer territory of absolute Westernization: ...Sentürk plausibly argues that the social and intellectual role that sociology plays in modern Western societies was filled by 'fiqh' in classical Islamic civilization. 'Fiqh' nevertheless concentrates heavily on moral and ritual prescriptions and does not really attempt to explain social dynamics.... Any sociology worth the name must have not just some overall framework and some ability to generate raw data about societies, it also must fill in the middle ground of modest explanations of limited social phenomena. And Islamic sociology has no success occupying this middle ground... (p. 179-180) Taner then launches into an apology for the skewed Western models of the sociology of religion and their tendentious reductionism and Christiano-centrism (180-183), then a critique of Islamic economics (p. 184-188) and historiography (189-194). He praises "the religious change and vigorous experimentation going on among ordinary Muslims" (one shudders to guess what he means in light of his winebibbing friends), but shows his exasperation with the moralism and traditionalism of Muslim social thought, which he is pleased to blame on "fearful conservatism" and "a failure of imagination" (p. 196). In chapter 6, "A Liberal Faith?" Taner unveils his program for progress. After rejoicing that "most elite scientists such as the members of the US National Academy of Sciences reject traditional religious beliefs," he declares that "the best way to achieve Muslim harmony with science might be to promote liberal tendencies within Islam" (p. 203). This is the soul of Kemalism as the author himself defines it elsewhere, stemming from the post-Christian Western model of separation of church and state: "Kemalists ultimately wanted Islam to take on a role similar to that of Christianity in modern Europe. They wanted religion to become a matter of private conscience" (p. 67). Taner's "Illusion" reads like a petulant introduction to a serious, scientific refutation which never materializes (no pun intended) but is not missed. It will find its niche among Islamophobes (even their theists will gloat in the present climate), although rebarbative from the pure viewpoint of science, as it is big on formulas and small on argument. In yet another betrayal of the purpose of academe, the author forsakes the need to appeal to the wretched, under-scienced Muslims, opting instead, like the run of the mill in his genre, to preach to the choir. As a result he indulges in such massive under-representation of scientific Islam as to seem maliciously ignorant of its standing as easily the most science-friendly Abrahamic religion with a more than respectable share, if not the largest proportion of inventors, theorists and scientists in human history.

An Honest Analysis Of The Relationship of Islam and Science:
Taner Edis has done the world a huge favor in writing this book. Christianity has been bombarded heavily for 2000 years and its about time Islam was bombarded too. Hopefully Hinduism and Buddhism are next to get bombarded. This is an honest book that is objective and Taner does not say more than is needed to make his point. Muslims who read this book will of course be disturbed by some facts of historical Islam, but won't come out offended or feel like the author was aiming to ridicule Islam, because he writes in a calm, objective manner. He's after facts not slander. Islamic creation and reactions from Islam to science throughout time are the core focus of the book. Here is a short synopsis of what is contained within the book: Discussion of Islam in Turkey Historical Islamic Views of Science Different Views of Science from Modern Islam Scientific Progress and Technological Advances in Muslim Countries Speed of Technological Progress and Comparison to Western Scientific Progress Examples of Islamic Creationism and Critiques of Maurice Bucaille, Harun Yahya, and other Islamo-scientific apologetics Islamic View of History and Social Sciences and their Applications Islam's Reaction to the West and Modernization (Resistance and Acceptance) Conservative and Liberal Islamic Views of Science The Author's Personal View of Science and Belief Systems This is an awesome contribution to Islamic literature. Anyone interested in Islamic creationism or history should read this book. It helps understand and identify what difficulties future Muslims must face in order to maintain their beliefs as rational and objective.

A fascinating discourse and a top pick for Middle Eastern holdings.:
AN ILLUSION OF HARMONY: SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN ISLAM charts a changing relationship between science and religion in the Islamic world, departing from the usual Western Christian connections and focus and thus providing college-level holdings strong in Middle Eastern studies and spirituality with a unique coverage. From discussions of modern scientific routes possibly foreshadowed in the Quran to issues of intelligent design and the Muslim world, chapters consider history, religious developments, and trends which have pitted Western science's progress against Islamic traditions. A fascinating discourse and a top pick for Middle Eastern holdings.