Twenty minutes before last Friday's departure from Charlotte to Cleveland, I made an observance as part of my irregular flying tradition — stepping into a nearby bookstore to purchase a copy of Discover magazine.
Cover story: "Science and Islam." In it Zaghloul El-Naggar, an Egyptian geologist and Islamist, establishes the theme through a series of statements. First, that a Muslim's practice of the scientific method is spiritually licit; second, that Western modernity has caused the Near East's degradation; four pages on, that the human archetype, Adam, is authenticated in the academy, rather than the mosque, by the word of Mohammed. "What proof?" asks the reporter. "It's written," answers El-Naggar, "in the Koran."
A Tunisian geneticist, next page, complains of difficulties in her obstetric exposition to people living under sharia mores, "giving them bad news that may also go against what they believe." Implication is clarified by the comparatively liberal brother of the dictator of Jordan, El Hassan bin Talal. "Are we talking Islam or Islamism?" He says that when the Ottomans fell and the empire was shattered, "we shifted to being dogmatic," and grew benighted.
The error to commit, turning from the last page of the article, is to regard religion with secular determinism, look at Europe half a millennium aforehand and perceive causation between the wane of the church and the wax of worldly knowledge. Fathers of Islamism — El-Banna, Qutb, Mawdudi, scholars and not holy men — wrote doctrine sharing the most with the twentieth century's implacable collectivism. Provisions of the Prophet's teachings were mostly decorative.
A contemporary obtrusion, something titled "post-normal science," is borrowed in the apologetics for curtailing industry, subduing consumers and even driving out unbelievers literally as "Holocaust deniers," all on the suspicion that every year — especially if July really heats up — is the last before climatic doomsday. It is tendered by one of its authors because "the traditional 'normal' scientific mind-set fosters expectations of regularity, simplicity and certainty in the phenomena and in our interventions. But these can inhibit the growth of our understanding of the new problems and of appropriate methods for their solution." Translated: science is a drag on the revolutionary force.
There is not a trace of religiosity in this new crusade. So, we look more closely, and — matching fingerprints on Islamist and militant environmentalist white papers are from the hoary hands of the totalitarian.