Science

Harun Yayha, otherwise known by his born name Adnan Oktar, is setting up a "creationist museum" at the ICNA conference in Hartford, CT, this weekend.

Follow this link to a discussion of the state of Islamic science. A quote here:

Yes, Islam cannot solve poverty and science cannot solve you going to Hell or Heaven. I figured this out, maybe alot later than you did, while I was writing a comment on Umar Lee's blog about Ayan Hirsi Ali's recent interview on NPR.

I, too, heard her interview on NPR. I was pretty disappointed that because of the social problems of her homeland, she decided to leave Islam and disbeleive in God, the hereafter and so forth. Instead, she could have found that these social problems are not because of Islam and fought to reclaim it from the cultural Muslims. Instead, she became a cultural Muslim herself.

Now, I also thought that we need to face reality and see that such problems DO cause people to diseleive when perhaps they might not have if they had better lives. So, even though she does not beleive, it does not mean we can simply ignore the very real problems she experienced. Also, just saying the ultra-simplistic motto "If we followed the din, these social problems wouldn't exist" is partially true, but is often used as a cop-out! The ethics and morality we must get from the Quran and our acts of worship are only the beginning! After that, we still have to use our brains to solve the problems after Islam has put our souls in the mood to address the problems in the first place. Simply following to the letter all of Ibn Taymiyya's books won't benefit a person more than a solid education can.

Who is better to solve poverty: an beleiving Western Muslim economist who can tackle it from the national level or the beleiver like Abdul Sattar Edhi who does great good on a personal level? Both. Both have thier roles, so let's remember that Western knowledge plays the role of helping us work smarter while our Islamic knowledge lets us know that a good person will use this scientific advances for good purposes and not for selfish gain or the destruction of others. They do not exclude the other.