For a couple of centuries, the Arab world took the science that the Greeks had developed and advanced it considerably further. But then the Muslim theologian al Ghazali persuaded everyone that science was contrary to true religion, and so it was abandoned. The result was when modern science was born and then lead to the industrial revolution and enormous economic and military power, the Middle East never modernized.

subheading: "Religious fanaticism has been catastrophic for a region that was once the intellectual hub of the world"

mirror: https://archive.ph/eW0m6

It happens everywhere, not only in the middle east, not only with religion. People who crave control rise to the top, apply tight control to stay there, kill creativity in the process.

> I guess I am not alone in wondering how different the Middle East might have been had it not been for the seismic influence of Al-Ghazali, that revered scholar of Sunni thought, who in the 12th century argued that science is not a liberator but a threat to the word of God and a danger to the clerics, who had every incentive to thwart the thirst for knowledge to maintain their power and privileges. “Innovator” was not regarded as a term of praise but, as the scholar Toby Huff has put it, “a term for a heretic and non-believer, subject to death”.

This quote has two parts, both of which are wrong and sensationalized. About al Ghazali being anti science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QjSXJSt7KI

And on the status of innovator. The author is equivocating, the negative term innovator is applied to people who innovate in religious matter, ie: altering the religion. Not referring to people who advance knowledge of the "worldly sciences".

While this article focuses on the anti-science stance of fundamentalist Islam, I wonder if it isn't also an oblique reference to the current anti-science campaign in the U.S., and for the same basic reason, to stifle logical and critical thinking for church-state control.

I'd offer a much easier explanation! Middle East only became a laggard when it became wholly owned by Ottoman Empire. It meant that when Europe transformed into unitary nation-states where unity of blood, religion, language, and culture defined what the state was (the only exception being Roma and Jews that lived everywhere and were kicked around at the first opportunity), nothing like that happened there because Ottoman Empire was well, an empire - it didn't care about ethnicities.

As a result, once it collapsed in 1921, we got a bunch of places that had nothing intrinsic to hold them together - places randomly drawn on the map by dudes in top hats somewhere in Paris and London, populated by a multitude of peoples holding a great variety of sectarian beliefs (not just Sunni vs Shia, but also different schools of those, some of those like Druze, becoming like ethnicities of their own). Because there is no internal cohesion - people living there are well, random people speaking random languages with random faith and having nothing to do with one another - there is either a hard power that forces them into obedience (e.g. Syria under Assad the Elder), in which case there is order, but no true progress - or not even that, in which case well, there is endless bloody chaos.

Only solution here is slow, gradual genocide of "others" until a semblance of an individual ethnicity defining a state, is formed. In Europe it took centuries and culminated in World Wars. Eastern Europe only became truly unblocked in its progress after the end of Communism, predated by the ethnic purges orchestrated by victorious Allies ("move all Poles to Poland, all Germans to Germany, etc") in late 1940s. Before WWII, Eastern Europe states resembled modern Middle East with ethnic strife preventing development and forcing those countries either into hard-power authoritarianism (Poland), or dysfunction (First Czechoslovak Republic).

Ethnic cleansing, i believe, is deemed "bad" for the only reason: it gives a nation that executed it, a massive competitive advantage, so those who did it a long time ago, strive to prevent others from doing the same.

This is all very good but like most articles written by Westerners ignorant of 19th and 20th-century history it completely forgoes the part where European colonialism did everything in its power to remove progressive governments, generate division amongst any clans that could have possibly aspired to modern identities, and sabotaged anyone who could have posed a thread to Western interests who, coincidentally, we some of the most educated and promising elites of the Middle East.

Really just another fluff piece about how great and smart us in the West are while we carry the weight of millions of corpses in Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe.

Philosophers have long pointed out the missing feature with Science/Rationalism.

And that is when faced with randomness, unpredictability and lack of control, in general, a retreat takes place.

"There is no solution in the book/there is no time/there are no resources/it's not my fault/everyone else has to do x y z/don't hold me responsible for that persons suffering".

Basically any time a problem doesn't have a solution or a "elegant" solution, do a poll on how many scientists/innovators/business leaders/engineers will avoid it or not take responsibility for orchestrating an organized response to hold the space, until a solution is found. Its not in their training. So the majority just retreat. Into their work. "Doing" science/tech provides a very easy path to detachment. And then that detachment gets defended in all kinds of misguided ways, causing more confusion and misunderstandings as can be seen in this specific debate. But it applies in all debates.

Religious systems are much older and they have learnt to occupy the space when things get unpredictable. They will be there when people get cancer holding hands. They will offer rituals and prayer. They will be there praying with soldiers about to enter the battlefield and die. They will be there after they die. They will show up when people have health issues/financial issues/relationship issues. Do they fix all the problems? No. But all problems can't be fixed.

Showing up and holding the space and having something to offer and doing it in an organized and institutional way until a solution is available is what is missing.

All religious systems, not just the Abrahamic ones, people are trained for years to not run away from suffering but hold ground and have something to offer. Its not easy and can't be done without training.

Very few Fred Rodgers are produced by science and engineering institutions.

What is produced instead is mockery of religious systems, the uneducated, the misguided, the ignorant. And it naturally creates more issues.

That's a very interesting video. It persuaded me that Al Ghazali was much more pro-science than I had thought.