Muslims and science

I went to an observatory here in Texas where I had the chance to look at stars and planets through some high powered telescopes. The fun, yet, sad part about it all was that the only fee required to use this awesome observatory was just the parking fee. It is in the middle of a state park far away from the city lights so that the night sky is viewed without any light pollution. Saddening because back home in Pakistan, such a facility is not even imaginable. Worst of all, I did not see a single Muslim there.

One of the activities at the observatory involved listening to a short lecture about space from an astronomer from NASA. Houston is where the moon landing was controlled from when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. The Johnson Space center is about a 10 minute drive from where I live. The astronomer was talking about how some of the early stars and planets have Arabic names because astronomy was first studied by the Muslims. Baghdad was the center of science and learning for the world to go to. It was the Muslim world’s Cambridge where Harvard and MIT are. Guess where we are today: the world’s richest Christians are focused on taking humanity to Mars and beyond. The world’s richest Muslims take pride in having a gold made commode and are actively involved in fighting against the science of climate change.

I read a lot about the work of Einstein, books by Carl Sagan, Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I am convinced that knowing about space would only strengthen our knowledge about God and where we came from. We will gain a much better understanding about our faith and our Creator if we keep looking up at the sky and try to make sense of it all. That is what Einstein was driven by as well. He once said that he wanted to understand the mind of God.

There are a lot of sad facts about the Muslims of today but one that is arguably the worst is the common belief among Muslims that science is for the non-believers and that facts popularised by science in the western society are a negation of our beloved Islamic faith. My only logical question from them is this: why are you afraid to search for truth if you know your faith is right? I am a practising Muslim and I pray 5 times a day. Yet, I do have questions and I do want to find answers. As Carl Sagan once said, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.”

And that is where it gets very difficult for me. The scientists and astrophysicists come mainly from Christian and Jewish beliefs. They either support or discard the Bible and Judaism in light of the ever growing and ever correcting knowledge about space. For years, I have been reading and listening to these scholars and never came across one single comment about Islam and space. And then I realised it is because there is no Muslim scholar who understands space studies or even cares about it enough to make sense of it all. The Muslim scholars can tell me all about how the different times of the day have different significances, but if I dare ask about how time was relative and what Islam’s stance would be about that, I’d meet a dead end.

Actually, exactly such a thing happened last Friday. I was listening to this speech by this young Imam before the prayers. He was saying that we can’t understand Islam without understanding science and space. That was music to my ears. After the prayers, I went up to the Imam with excitement and expressed my gratitude. He said that he didn’t know much and that he was only reading a memorised speech. He was willing to give me a lecture about the benefits of donations to the masjid though.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 8^th, 2023.

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