Islamic Education, Madrassah Reform, Rationality and Dawkins

Dear Asifbhai,
I was Sud Divisional Officer/Asst. Collector of Balapur Sub-division in Akola Dt. in Maharashtra state (India) in the mid 60s (last century!) and there was a ``Haji Naqshabandi``, a very eminent person, resident then at Balapur. A near namesake of yours!

I liked your article and your pleas. May I raise a few points?
1) Why have you relied so much on philosophies and scholarship and interpretations? Let past texts be past historical texts. Why not relegate them to history and take only the basic morals? Why re-interpret every word or sentence from Holy Quran or Hadith? Western civilization has left the western philosophers as irrelevant in its inexorable scientific and cultural march. Even in India, the Hindus do not worry about the word of the vedas, Puranas, Shastras etc and left them to the priesthood and conduct their life in a somewhat secular way, without however ignoring the concept of God.

2) Why have you not advocated the separation of religion from the State? Enlightened and progressive Malaysia has done this. Why should Islamic theocracy run the State or have a stranglehold on a country?

3) Why should you imagine that we should be materialistic? You seem to think that western materialism is the way for all of us (the underdogs). Don`t you see that the rich western societies have a high proportion of criminals! A man would think of selling his wife to Robert Redford for a million dollars for a night - surely you have seen that film! I mean that richness and materialism is not really our objective per se. Our objective should be knowledge in all its gamuts, learning, morals and virtues. Goods and happiness will follow. If people have jobs, are industrious and work harmoniously, richness would follow.

-V.S.Gopalakrishnan

Krishna: You say, ``...Under the proper electromagnetic radiation, and viewed at the proper angle, the Koran could give up the ``revealed`` verses on the ``Theory of Everything``, and that`s just to begin with. It`s all in there. You just have to look hard enough. Skin your cat (interpret) any way you want it....``

This method is too high a technology method and expensive. I suggest a low technology method . Take the Book and squeeze it and lo, behold you can get anything out of it!

I once squeezed and twisted Sear`s Catalog- pretty hard, believe me, I can extract any thing I want out of that! A fool proof method!

BTW: what is ***.abcd stands for?

Kamath

Re: # 3 by Krbhatti

Another similar article named ``Which Islam?`` was released on November 26, 2006

I`ll repeat my comments and Krbhatti ROCKS!

Some beings spread religion by force upon public; rather, spreading should only mean to pass on the knowledge and give party the freedom to choose. Even the freedom to choose to involve religion in daily-life. Making something universal is a great idea cuz` that`s when you end up with diversity and choice. However, freedom of choice needs to be a nother universal phenomenon :)

No doubt focus should be on spread of education rather than religion at this point in time -- it`s just that religious education is free :)

[Traditional Islamic learning needs to be enhanced by the addition of modern subjects such as post-Renaissance philosophy, hard sciences, modern mathematical logic and history and IT....]


Enhancing is okay, as long as the faithful use the latest scientific techniques to tease out more and more divine meanings out of ``revealed`` chapters like ``The Cow``. Masadi could prove to be a valuable resource. Under the proper electromagnetic radiation, and viewed at the proper angle, the Koran could give up the ``revealed`` verses on the ``Theory of Everything``, and that`s just to begin with.

It`s all in there. You just have to look hard enough. Skin your cat (interpret) any way you want it. It`s called ``free will``. And don`t blame Al-lah if your interpretation is wrong. Okay?

Naqshbandi sahib,

(Sorry about my past references to you as “wolf Naqshi.” No physical resemblance with that creature was implied.)

The aims of what you are trying to bring about – a more liberal outlook on the part of the Muslims, may be laudable. But your reasoning appears highly specious.

You wish to put the blame on the five hundred years of the absence of “ijtehad”! What happened – did people suspend their common sense and good judgment, too?! And five hundred years is a rather long period, don’t you think, for people to stay with – if it is something that makes them uncomfortable – don’t you think?!

With the reasoning you put up here, you will have a tough time convincing ANYBODY! It is because you are conceding nothing. You still implicitly assume – that being a Muslim amounts to having a special monopoly on truth.

It does not!

And nowhere in your write-up you seem to be willing to concede that non-Muslims are as much the children of God as Muslims! Why is this obvious fact so difficult to say aloud for Muslim “religious scholars”?

And you fail to even touch upon the simplest question that comes to mind…

WHO WILL BELL THE CAT?!!

Are you going to start a movement so all those fatwas against the Rushdies and against the various other intellectuals around the world who have been declared apostate will be lifted?

You will do none of those things – perhaps because you fear what will happen to you if you do any of those things – or perhaps because inside, the core of your thinking has stayed exactly the same!

So one may be forgiven for thinking that this “changed” thinking on your part is just a maneuver – to get your clams out of the fire where they seem to have landed due to the unwise action of some of your fellow co-religionists and absolute apathy on the part of most of the rest!

And no matter what you say….

It is all Book, Book, and Book with you – no sense of common sense and human love!

To bring you down to earth, let me throw some Dev-Anand on you:

“Falsifa pyaar ka tum kya jaano?!
Falsifa pyaar ka tum kya jaano?!
Falsifa pyaar ka tum kya jaano?!
Tum-ne kabhie pyar na kiya
Tum ne yeh karar na kiya!”

In my humble opinion, the problem is – you have read too many books, sir!

And the problem is – you have read too few Books, sir!

You are so sure in your own mind sir, that like the Jinnah – you miss the obvious!

Re: # 22

GT
On the second question Daniel Dennett in his book ``Breaking the spell `` opines that perhaps the creation of God is another facet of evolution. We may have needed it to survive. Hence there is no rationality there.

Boot Dawkins nay banaya maiN nay ek misraa likhaa
meraa misra ruh geyaa hur turf jootaa chal geyaa

Naqsh,

You are basically an arm-chair thinker with a sharp object stuck up his nose. You yourself espouse what is wrong with the ummah … even as masadi continues to blame the colonialists. A dog chasing its tail comes to mind.

If ummah`s ‘closed human thought’ concerns you, start with your own views regarding prophets flying into the night to meet god, parting the ocean by waving a stick, residing above clouds in flesh and blood for thousands of years only to descend down to earth on shoulders on two angels to fight a one-eyed monster. I could on and on …

Mere fairy tale beliefs is not the main problem here. It is a diseased social outlook that keeps doing the ummah in ...

Your support for killing apostates, adulterers, blasphemers is only the tip of the iceberg. And then you advocate separation of church and state! Are you nuts or what ...???

As long as ummah supports such nonsense, they will continue to degenerate in every aspect of life.

++++

kulharee (#18),

You can teach a monkey any trick, but it remains a monkey after all. Advanced college degrees will not solve this problem. Look at Naqshbandi MiaN here ... working on a PhD in some scientific field, but devoid of reason and sensibility ...

GT,

Ur to-the-point question is a difficult one to answer. Recently the top scientists met in one place to debate abt this question of God. (``Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival`` to be more appropriate)

Since Asif is not a riff-raff type he`d write something readable (but he cant shake-off from the nawabi thoughts in India where his ancestors bossed over the dark skinned natives like us for no superiority of them excpet for the fairer skin colour of the freeloaders from Persia. They just came to have it free from us!)! This part is a digression. Pl go to the following paragraphs.

I quote some relevant highlights of the article:

1. Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford would have none of it. Weinberg, he said, was being inexplicably conciliatory, ``scraping the barrel`` to have something nice to say about religion. ``I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion,`` Dawkins told the assembly.

2. Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who had been charged with providing an answer for the second question: if not God, then what? Science, she said, could do at least as well as religion. ``If anyone has a replacement for God, then scientists do.`` Porco said. ``At the heart of scientific inquiry is a spiritual quest, to come to know the natural world by understanding it... Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is about as meaningful and awe-inspiring as it gets.``

3. The big challenge, according to Porco, will be dealing with awareness of our own mortality. The God-concept brings a sense of immortality, something science can`t offer. Instead, she suggested highlighting the fact that our atoms came from stardust and would return to the cosmos - as mass or energy - after we die. ``We should teach people to find comfort in that thought. We can find comfort in knowing that everyone who has ever lived on the Earth will some day adorn the heavens.``


IF U HAVE PATIENCE PL READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19225780.142-beyond-belief-in-place-of-god.html

(I doubt if u can access this page without an Athens account. Thats why I reproduced this)


It had all the fervour of a revivalist meeting. True, there were no hallelujahs, gospel songs or swooning, but there was plenty of preaching, mostly to the converted, and much spontaneous applause for exhortations to follow the path of righteousness. And right there at the forefront of everyone`s thoughts was God.

Yet this was no religious gathering - quite the opposite. Some of the leading practitioners of modern science, many of them vocal atheists, were gathered last week in La Jolla, California, for a symposium entitled ``Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival`` hosted by the Science Network, a science-promoting coalition of scientists and media professionals convening at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They were there to address three questions. Should science do away with religion? What would science put in religion`s place? And can we be good without God?

First up to address the initial question was cosmologist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin. His answer was an unequivocal yes. ``The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion,`` Weinberg told the congregation. ``Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilisation.``

Those uncompromising words won Weinberg a rapturous response. Yet not long afterwards he was being excoriated for not being tough enough on religion, and admitting he would miss it once it was gone. Religion was, Weinberg had said, like ``a crazy old aunt`` who tells lies and stirs up mischief. ``She was beautiful once,`` he suggested. ``She`s been with us a long time. When she`s gone we may miss her.`` Science, he admitted, could not offer the ``big truths`` that religion claims to provide; all it can manage is a set of little truths about the universe.

Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford would have none of it. Weinberg, he said, was being inexplicably conciliatory, ``scraping the barrel`` to have something nice to say about religion. ``I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion,`` Dawkins told the assembly.

He was soon joined by Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who had been charged with providing an answer for the second question: if not God, then what? Science, she said, could do at least as well as religion. ``If anyone has a replacement for God, then scientists do.`` Porco said. ``At the heart of scientific inquiry is a spiritual quest, to come to know the natural world by understanding it... Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is about as meaningful and awe-inspiring as it gets.``

Astronomers in particular, she suggested, regularly confront the big questions of wonder. ``The answers to these questions have produced the greatest story ever told and there isn`t a religion that can offer anything better.`` Religious people, she claimed, use God to feel connected to something grander than they are, and find meaning and purpose through that connection. So why not show them their place in the universe and give them a sense of connectedness to the cosmos? The answers to why we are here, if they exist at all, will be found in astronomy and evolution, she said.

A secular icon

Science provides an aesthetic view of the cosmos that could replace that provided by religion - a view that could even be celebrated by its own iconography, Porco added. Images of the natural world and cosmos, such as the Cassini photograph of Earth taken from beyond Saturn, Apollo 8`s historic Earthrise or the Hubble Deep Field image, could offer a similar solace to religious artwork or icons.

The big challenge, according to Porco, will be dealing with awareness of our own mortality. The God-concept brings a sense of immortality, something science can`t offer. Instead, she suggested highlighting the fact that our atoms came from stardust and would return to the cosmos - as mass or energy - after we die. ``We should teach people to find comfort in that thought. We can find comfort in knowing that everyone who has ever lived on the Earth will some day adorn the heavens.``

“We can find comfort in knowing that everyone who has ever lived on the Earth will some day adorn the heavens”
Like many of the others at the meeting, Porco was preaching to the choir, and there was no more animated or passionate preacher than Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Tyson spoke with an evangelist`s zeal, and he had the heretics in his sights. Referring to a recent poll of US National Academy of Sciences members which showed 85 per cent do not believe in a personal God, he suggested that the remaining 15 per cent were a problem that needs to be addressed. ``How come the number isn`t zero?`` he asked. ``That should be the subject of everybody`s investigation. That`s something that we can`t just sweep under the rug.``

This single statistic, he said, gave the lie to claims that patiently creating a scientifically literate public would get rid of religion. ``How can [the public] do better than the scientists themselves? That`s unrealistic.``

DeGrasse Tyson clearly found it hard to swallow the idea that a scientist could be satisfied by revelation rather than investigation. ``I don`t want the religious person in the lab telling me that God is responsible for what it is they cannot discover,`` he said. ``It`s like saying no one else will ever discover how something works.``

For others, the idea that it is somehow unacceptable for scientists to maintain a religious belief was going too far. ``They`re doing science, they`re not a problem,`` said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist based at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Scientists are not a special class of humanity, he pointed out, so it is hardly surprising that a small number of academy members are also believers. ``It would be amazing if that figure were zero,`` he said. ``Scientists are people, and we all make up inventions so we can rationalise about who we are.``

Krauss says he found the meeting at La Jolla a peculiar experience. He is a veteran of campaigns against religious incursion into science, and testified against the scientific credentials of ``intelligent design`` in the Dover school board trial in Pennsylvania last year. ``I`m not usually the person who defends faith,`` he told New Scientist.

Krauss wasn`t the only participant who seemed to think some of the more militant speakers were a tad over the top. Joan Roughgarden, a professor of geophysics and biology at Stanford University, California, described some of the statements being made as an ``exaggerated and highly rose-coloured picture of the capabilities of science`` while presenting a caricature of people of faith. Attempts by militant atheists to represent science as a substitute for religion would be a huge mistake, she said, and might even set back science`s cause. ``They are entitled as atheists to generate more activism within the atheist community,`` she told New Scientist. ``But scientists are portraying themselves as the enlightened white knights while people of faith are portrayed as idiots who can`t tell the difference between a [communion] wafer and a piece of meat.`` People of faith are being antagonised, and this is ``a lose-lose proposition``, she said.

She also suggested that science, like religion, had dogma and prophets of its own, citing as an example the ``locker-room bravado`` of many biologists in promoting the received wisdom regarding sexual selection. What`s more, she said, science`s ethics were open to being manipulated - notably by biotechnology companies - leading her to seriously doubt that a workable morality could be developed by the rationalist scientific community.

Biology rules

This was not a view shared by Patricia Churchland of the University of California, San Diego, who was charged with answering the question ``can we be good without God?``. Values, Churchland said, are set by what we care about, and as social animals we care about mates, kin and insider-outsider relationships. Every human social value and moral, she said, can be traced back to group dynamics and biochemistry; there is no need for a scriptural mandate. Thus the answer to the third question of the meeting became an overwhelming yes.

With three positive verdicts in the bag, the mood was clear: science can take on religion and win. ``We`ve got to come out,`` urged chemist Harry Kroto of Florida State University, Tallahassee. Dawkins also used the same phrase, and compared the secular scientists` position to that of gay men in the late 1960s. If everyone was willing to stand up and be counted, they could change things, he said. ``Yes I`m preaching to the choir,`` Dawkins admitted. ``But it`s a big choir and it`s an enthusiastic choir.``

Kroto certainly declared himself ready to fight the good fight. ``We`re in a McCarthy era against people who don`t accept Christianity,`` he said. ``We`ve got to do something about it.`` His answer is to launch a coordinated global effort at education, media outreach and campaigning on behalf of science. Such an effort worked against apartheid, he said, and the internet now provided a platform that could take science education programmes into every home without being subject to the ideological and commercial whims of network broadcasters. He has schools run by religious groups firmly in his sights too. ``We must try to work against faith schooling,`` he said.

For all the evangelical fervour, some attendees suggested that a little more humility might be in order. ``This is Alice in Wonderland, it`s just a neo-Christian cult,`` Scott Atran of the CNRS in Paris told New Scientist. ``The arguments being put forward here are extraordinarily blind and simplistic. The Soviets taught kids in schools about science - religiously - and it didn`t work out too well. I just don`t think scientists, when they step out of science, have any better insight than the ordinary schmuck on the street. It makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.``

Krauss was similarly critical. ``The presumption here was that any effort to respect the existence of faith is a bad thing,`` he told New Scientist. ``Philosophically I`m in complete agreement, but it`s not a scientific statement, and I`ve seen how offensive it is when scientists say `I can tell you what you have to think`. They make people more afraid of science. It`s inappropriate, and it`s certainly not effective.``

Dawkins, though, is ready to mobilise. The meeting, he says, achieved ``probably a little`` - but every little helps. ``There`s a certain sort of negativity you get from people who say `I don`t like religion but you can`t do anything about it`. That`s a real counsel of defeatism. We should roll our sleeves up and get on with it.``

From issue 2578 of New Scientist magazine, 20 November 2006, page 8-11
Should science do away with religion?

``It is just as futile to get someone to give up using their ears, or love other children as much as their own... Religion fills very basic human needs.``

Mel Konner, ecologist, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

``Religion is leading us to the edge of something terrible... Half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This kind of thinking provides people with no basis to make the hard decisions we have to make.``

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

``Religion allows billions of people to live a life that makes sense - they can put up with the difficulties of life, hunger and disease. I don`t want to take that away from them.``

Francisco Ayala, biologist and philosopher, University of California, Irvine

``No doubt there are many people who do need religion, and far be it from me to pull the rug from under their feet.``

Richard Dawkins, biologist, University of Oxford

``Science can`t provide a sense of magic about the world, or a community of fellow-believers. There`s a religious mentality that yearns for that.``

Steven Weinberg, physicist, University of Texas, Austin

``Science`s success does not mean it encompasses the entirety of human intellectual experience.``

Lawrence Krauss, physicist and astronomer, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

If not God then what?

``It is the job of science to present a fully positive account of how we can be happy in this world and reconciled to our circumstances.``

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

``Let me offer the universe to people. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. I don`t know any deeper spiritual feeling that those thoughts.``

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, Hayden Planetarium, New York

``Let`s teach our children about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious and awesome and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture or God-concept that I know of.``

Carolyn Porco, planetary scientist, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado

``I`m not one of those who would rhapsodically say all we need to do is understand the world, look at pictures of the Eagle nebula and it`ll fill us with such joy we won`t miss religion. We will miss religion.``

Steven Weinberg, cosmologist, University of Texas, Austin

Can we be good without God?

``The axiom that values come from reason or religion is wrong... There are better ways of ensuring moral motivation than scaring the crap out of people.``

Patricia Churchland, philosopher, University of California, San Diego

``What about the hundreds of millions of dollars raised just for Katrina by religions? Religions did way more than the government did, and there were no scientific groups rushing to help the victims of Katrina - that`s not what science does.``

Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief, Skeptic magazine

``It doesn`t take away from love that we understand the biochemical basis of love.``

Ref mohar11 #2

[So stop being slaves to bedouinism... follow your own traditions, your own leaders... f****d as they are - they are still better than anything bedouins have on offer... :) ]

But the bedouins have money to offer.

That is why Pakistanis have been reduced to the state of being camel-jockeys to the camel-jockeys.

#23 hes our white guy cos he agrees w/ us :/

``2. Why are we fixated with causation vis-a-vis everything but `God`?``

Because, ``we`` are scared sh**less of Allah`s wrath... Putting the shackles of if-then-else on Allah is like defanging the divine and risking inexistence on oneself.


masadi:
invoke the ontological argument already and be done with it .. why get colonized by someone else`s thought specially when it is by a white guy who is being propped up by yet another white guy ... not cool.

Naqshbandi sahib,

Allow me to deviate and ask the following two questions to anybody who cares to answer.

1. Why is the concept of singularity (fixed points) so difficult to comprehend? I remember giving Romair a simple example, but he did not respond.

2. Why are we fixated with causation vis-a-vis everything but `God`?

#20 by masadi on November 29, 2006 2:32pm PT


the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life


comrade...this has been debunked since the days of the usenet creation-evolution flame wars...

the conditions on earth are perfect to sustain life as we know it..if the conditions were different, the life would be different...

By the way, the God Case can be proven quite effectvely using modern scientific discovery which none of your ``old time`` philosophers neither Dawkins can either approach nor refute, The New Scientific Case for God

Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics): ``Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say `supernatural`) plan.``

Another useless article in the same vein as the Gill article that will do nothing to solve the problem because it is viewing the problem from the Western perspective, while claiming to be ``free thinking``. Dawkins is a damn fool by the way where it concerns matters of religion and rationality, and Ghazali Christianized Islam, so I`m amazed at why the author chooses the examples of these two. If rationality and reason is so ``unislamic`` in determining belief why does every other verse of the Quran ``reason`` with the reader pointing to external evidence? Or does your ``Imam`` Ghazali supercede the Quran as Islamic? Like I have said before many times, there is no way to arrive at any truth except through the method of reason and science, otherwise the rat god is just as much valid as Allah logically speaking, if not established through reason. Your ``faith`` is worthless if not established through reason, as was Ghazalis.

The need for Muslims, what Muslims need to do is to try to figure out how to get out of the mess the colonials have landed them in, which in by itself is quite an insurmountable task, given how they dominate the world, next we need not desire to plunge head long into the modernity that is ruining societies in the West and is kept alive by illusions that most never attain but to seek an alternative on how to benefit the most in a most humane manner. Any society modern or primitive that harms the multitude, or forces them into a hand to mouth existance, as is happening in the most modern west is a BS society. Equally amazing (and quite funny) is Kulharee`s assertion that you need a BS degree in order to decipher the truth from false.