As a Jew living in Israel who believes any real progress and betterment of the lives of the surrounding population, our cousins, is to be applauded, I was very interested in the article on science in the Islamic world, and in the news report on a new research university in Saudi Arabia (Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 8 2007 33 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2774093 August 2007, page 33 ). I think the Saudi university report was fair, but Pervez Hoodbhoy’s generally excellent article needs some comment, both on specifics and on general philosophy. I claim to represent no one but myself with these comments.
First, as Hoodbhoy notes, at times Israelis did help Hamas against the Palestine Liberation Organization, and at times Israel helped the PLO against Hamas. In all cases those were local military antiterrorist decisions and not a policy of the Israeli government. If foreign countries funded terror by one of those groups while withholding funds from the other, Israeli military personnel could often buy the cooperation of the deprived terrorists. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel has often tried to help the PLO. Sometimes that help was used against Israel, but Hamas was then defined as an enemy because it has never yet recognized the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.
Second, did Hoodbhoy meet with the scientists, the wealthy donors, or the religious authorities working on the breeding of a “red heifer”? Mainstream rabbinic Judaism has always taught that the temple will be restored only through peaceful means. The red heifer program may signify a greater understanding of both real Islam and real Judaism than Hoodbhoy acknowledges, and the peace between those two religions may be restored to what it was during the Golden Age. A reading of Leviticus 19:33–34 and the Qur’an’s Jonah 93 suggests that religion can be a positive force toward peace between the two peoples.
The great question of why Islamic science declined has a simple answer. Before 1915 Islam was generally a tolerant religion—toward secular humanism, toward Judaism, and toward Christianity. Jews and Christians could and did visit Mecca, the center of Islam. The land now called Saudi Arabia had no blanket prohibition against construction of a church or synagogue, only the requirement that the building’s height not exceed that of a neighboring mosque. After 1915 a desert tribe that had served British interests by attacking Turks was given the oil and Mecca; that tribe’s intolerant version of Islam has spread. It is not Western imperial greed but the desire for cheap and dependable oil that has fueled the spread of this Islamic distortion and its terrorism.
