Islamist political parties are taking over from secular ones across the Muslim world. What does this mean for science at home and scientific cooperation with…
Why Google is master of the world
The American company has so much investment and infrastructure that it will soon be impossible for even big governments to challenge it I was an…
Beyond the troubled relationship 3/3
Sacred science My proposition is clear: the decline can only be reversed by a conceptual shift. Science will only take root in Muslim societies if…
Beyond the troubled relationship 2/3
Under colonialism So what is missing from the standard analysis? I have argued for the intimate and constructive connection between Islam and science. But Islamic…
Beyond the troubled relationship 1/3
If scientific culture in the Muslim world has changed since the golden era of Islamic science, so has the practice of Islam. Reintroducing knowledge and…
The science of farce
By Nadeem F. Paracha I still remember a conversation I once overheard between two cops standing just outside my grandfather’s office as a teenager in…
The Role of Bewilderment
The philosophical definition of scientific truth is a debated issue. Apart from theories which are not self-consistent and should be either rapidly eliminated, or re-elaborated,…
The Structure of Reality
What is the spiritual lesson we can draw from the scientific pursuit of modern cosmology ? It seems that, in spite of its program to…
From Puzzles to Metaphysical Issues 2/2
The intelligibility and universality of the laws Some cosmologists use the word « universe » for each of these causally-disconnected patches, and the word « multiverse » to name…
From Puzzles to Metaphysical Issues 1/2
This quick survey of the view of modern cosmology shows how quantitative the approach is. However, there are several fields in which our incapacity to…
Modern Cosmology in a Nutshell
We know focus to modern cosmology to illustrate how recurrent puzzles point at the nature of reality. We live in a very peculiar epoch for…
The Connection of Faith and Reason
The way the Islamic tradition regarded the connection between science and reason can be briefly illustrated by the debate between al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd on…