"Internal causes led to the decline of Islam's scientific greatness
long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once
again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy
August 2007, page 49

This article grew out of the Max von Laue Lecture that I delivered
earlier this year to celebrate that eminent physicist and man of
strong social conscience. When Adolf Hitler was on the ascendancy,
Laue was one of the very few German physicists of stature who dared to
defend Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. It therefore
seems appropriate that a matter concerning science and civilization
should be my concern here.

The question I want to pose-perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else
-is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material
resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the
process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the
57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a
proxy for the Islamic world.

It was not always this way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th-
13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science,
and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created
algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body's
circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with
the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially
collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim
world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific
development is one important element-although by no means the only one-
that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a
growing sense of injustice and victimhood.

Such negative feelings must be checked before the gulf widens further.
A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will
surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life
on our planet-climate change and nuclear proliferation."


Read the rest at

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml

phillip brown