Scientific progress in many Islamic countries has ¡°come to a grinding halt¡± thanks in no small part to a ¡°truly staggering¡­indifference shown by decision-makers¡±.

That is the view expressed by Moneef Zou¡¯bi, director general of the Islamic World Academy of Sciences in Jordan, in a series of essays by academics exploring the issue of educational reform in the Muslim world.

The essays are in the latest edition of Critical Muslim, a magazine designed to ¡°showcase ground-breaking thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a rapidly changing, interconnected world¡±.

For editor Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, research associate at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal?Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, Muslims need to steer a path between two opposing dangers when it comes to higher education and science.

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One is the ¡°lame duck¡± mentality, which frames answers to questions ¡°only in terms of ¡®catching up¡¯ with Western models of knowledge production, professionalism, quality assurance, critical thinking, research, liberal arts¡± and so on.

The opposite trap is ¡°the ¡®cosy corner¡¯ mentality, which prefers to occupy a parochial corner in which everything which is not explicitly ¡®Islamicised¡¯ is seen as threatening or deviant¡±.

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In his essay, Dr Zou¡¯bi writes that in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf are many?¡°multi-billion dollar educational and scientific projects¡±. All, however, are ¡°totally dependent on expatriates¡± and ¡°exist in a culture that is indifferent to science at best, or aggressively anti-science at worst¡±, as exemplified by a YouTube video of a Saudi theologian in Sharjah telling a large audience that the Sun revolves around a stationary Earth.

Another contributor to the issue is Martin Rose, former director of the British Council in Morocco, now a visiting fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge.

All the countries of North Africa, he argues, suffer from ¡°relatively inflexible education systems geared still, for the most part, to a phase of national development that is past, and finding great difficulty in adapting to the needs of a modern world economy¡±.

Muhammad?Nejatullah Siddiqi, professor emeritus in the department of management studies at Aligarh Muslim University in India, suggests that ¡°the theory and practice of Muslim economics and banking [are] flawed, full of anomalies, and have basically failed as projects¡±.

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However, perhaps the strongest critique emerges from the analysis of Abdelwahab El-Affendi, coordinator of the Democracy and Islam Programme at the University of Westminster¡¯s Centre for the Study of Democracy, which ¡°points to a fundamental crisis of knowledge-processing capacity¡± in the Islamic world, where ¡°the quality of higher education is still not up to international standards¡± and ¡°our contributions to international knowledge are so meagre as to be virtually non-existent¡±.

Yet although ¡°quite a few centuries have been lost already¡±, Dr El-Affendi also highlights the potential for change through the creation of ¡°centres of excellence¡­networked both among themselves and internationally¡±, where ¡°sufficient conditions of economic viability and guaranteed freedoms could be secured¡±.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com

Critical Muslim 15: Educational Reform was published by the Muslim Institute and Hurst on 23 July 2015.