The relationship between the Islamic world and science is going through recent shifts. The stagnation that had long been prevailing in the field of science and Islam is now returning to the Islamic world. Before that, there had been ages in which Islamic world’s focused its attention on scientific development more than other Western countries.
During just one year 2005, Harvard University managed to publish more scientific papers than did 17 Arabic countries together. Fifty-seven Muslim countries included in OIC (Organization of the Islamic Countries) spend an insignificant amount of their GDP on scientific research and growth; it is alomst 0.81 percent whereas America has kept the greatest science budget in the world with total spending of 2.9 percent in this field.
A lot of critiques say that theses clashes are due to the aggression of Muslims towards science. This is the reason they tend to spend more attention to other fields than science. 1.6 billion Muslims of the world have managed to produce only two laureates in Physics and Chemistry, and both of them moved to the West. The one still-alive is a chemist at the California Institute of Technology. It has been claimed that this is because most of the Muslim countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and India are concerned more with false concept of learning; they tend to focus on book study rather than practical and critical thinking and analysis of the subjects.
It might be because of the traditional Islamic view that there are certain natural facts that cannot be explored and answered by science. On the other hand, the Western world attempted to reject all the superstitions and explore the natural facts on the basis of scientific developments.
However, this reason given by the critiques to explain the gap between Islamic world and scientific discoveries is not true necessarily because the situation seems to be improving. The gap that prevailed previously is narrowing down, and Muslims are increasingly contributing to the scientific world.
According to research from 2000 to 2009, the publication of scientific papers in Turkey had increased from 5000 to 22,000 while in Iran; the figure went up from 1300 to almost 15000. This increase in quantity did not lead to a small decline in quality; because the journals and scientific articles published in the Islamic world were still widely read and cited for academic purposes.
A research in 2011 conducted by Thomson Reuters, an information firm, displays that in the early 1990s other producers cited scientific documents from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (the most productive Muslim countries) four times fewer than the universal average. This number had increased significantly by 2009. Today, the Islamic world is flourishing tremendously in the field of mathematics papers where Iran has a good score and in other scientific fields, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are performing much better.
In a nutshell, the distance between the Islamic world and scientific publications has narrowed down greatly with the Muslims rising again and contributing in science.
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