I feeling extremely annoyed at my colleague over at No Cross No Crescent today. He’s getting slammed as a nasty Islamophobe. No fair! How’d he get hammered with that one before I did?
He has recently written, very well, about Dawkins pointing out that, when it comes to Islamic scientific achievements of the last five hundred years, you can read about them on the back of a matchbox. Go read it, and then come back.
If people don’t believe Dawkins because he’s a horrid Islamophobe, how about taking it from the mouth of Mehdi Hasan? No Islamophobia there. In his infamous speech where he’s yelling about us kaffirs, Mehdi goes on to say:
I watched this programme [“Science and Islam”, BBC4] and I really enjoyed it: a well-made programme, presenter very good…and yet I watched it with a sense of despair and a sense of sadness. Because this programme was pure history, every contribution was from the past, and the elephant in the room is the current Islamic contribution to knowledge and science and learning. Where was that in the series of programmes? It wasn’t there because fundamentally there isn’t one.
[…]
It is no surprise then that when you look at the Muslim world you see that we 1.2 billion Muslims have just 10 Nobel prizes to our name.
These are the wages of faith, Mehdi. Your religion rejects reason and sterilised the soil from which any human endeavour might grow. There’s your ‘civilisation’ – go and enjoy it.
For those interested further, please stand by for my next “Enlightenment Rebooted” section where I discuss Andre Servier.
