Guest Post by Ibrahim Arsalan

Recently I was hipped to a presentation made by one of my favorite modern scientists, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He’s one of my favorites, not on the basis of his erudition – after all it’s my constant contention that present scholarship is increasingly devoid of erudition – but because of his lively presence and acute wit. That being said, in this presentation he ventured into a field of study far removed from his expertise, something he ought not have done without adequate research – one of my criticism of present-day scholarship is their tendency toward specialization and almost abysmal lack of knowledge on various other sciences. He’d have gone a long way toward developing his premise had he done a bit more research into this new frontier for him; History.

ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website

The gist of his presentation was that the greatest scientific minds all fell back on a concept of intelligent design whenever faced with a problem beyond their reckoning. He was doing rather well so long as he focused on individual thinkers such as Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and others. But as a rule, scholarship shouldn’t rely on individual examples to prove a universal thesis, it’s anecdotal and such a method is relegated to a bygone age despite its modern prevalence. So to support his idea he references the massive advances in scientific thought developed by Islamic thinkers in Baghdad between 800 and 1100 CE. He prefaces this with a criticism of George Bushes statement in a speech after 911, “Our God is the one who named the stars”. He used this misstep by Bush to launch into his point that two-thirds of the known stars have Arabic names because of this 300-year period of intellectual development in Baghdad. Then he contends that it was extinguished by the writing of a single man, Al Ghazali, who equated mathematical and scientific research as the works of the devil. But, as Shakespeare would say, “There’s the rub”.

ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website

ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website



Al Ghazali was a religious reformer, philosopher and mystic who countered the Neoplatonist metaphysics espoused by Muslim philosophers in his work “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”. Furthermore, he would certainly forever alter the Islamic intellectual landscape, but it was not in opposition to scientific thought, as Tyson would have us believe. After all, Ghazali pioneered “methodic doubt” and “skepticism”, both of which would play a foundational roll in all the secular movements to come. He was also opposed by one of the greatest minds the Muslim world would produce, Ibn Rashid (Averroes). Both men were renowned polymaths in their day (accomplished in multiple fields of science, as apposed to the vast majority of present-day scholarship). The dispute Al Ghazali would have with the philosophers and that Averroes would have with him in his rebuttal “The Incoherence of the Incoherence” would be over the nature of Aristotlelian metaphysics, not the demonic nature of scientific thought. Such an attack on Al Ghazali by Tyson is laughable considering he furthered the development of secular methodology and would later be praised by European secular thinkers who Tyson is so eager to praise. Also, Tyson is in error when he says of Al Ghazali, “… out of his work, you get the philosophy that mathematics is the work of the Devil”. Al Ghazali actually called the sciences and mathematics of his day mamduh (praiseworthy) adding, “…because of their absence, the community would be reduced to narrow straits.”

But that’s not what I found most remiss about his presentation. He neglected to reflect on the single most important event to occur in Medieval Western Asia, the Crusades. Just as the intellectual and cosmopolitan developments of the Islamic world were in full swing, a rag-tag band of European barbarians called the Franks, armed bearded-axes and Papal sanction, stopped massacring each other and focused their genocidal efforts on “the Holy Land”. This would occur right around 1058 and continue right into the 12th century. These events would all occur in Al Ghazali’s lifetime and would radicalize the region. Pursuits in science would gravitate toward warfare, eclipsing questions of the universe; but not completely, as they would continue in Moorish Spain and Africa until Europe would visit upon them the same fate.

The true effect Al Ghazali would have on the philosophy of the Muslim world, and probably most egregious to Western thinkers, would be to steer it from the Greco-Roman stream of development and back toward an Afro-Asiatic stream by popularizing Sufism. Born from the cosmology of Ancient Egypt (Kemit) that was originally called Al-Kemi (Alchemy) by the Arabs, Sufism would come to define the philosophical teachings of the entirety of the Muslim world, as Greek metaphysics would quickly fade into obsolescence. That is until European would reclaim Greek thought from Arabic translations. In so doing, Al Ghazali would bring the Muslim world, if only for a short while, in mental alignment with such great minds as Imhotep, the worlds first recorded polymath, among whose achievements are the construction of the first pyramids and the writing of the first book of medicine. The turn away from the classical thinking of Greece and toward unified thinking of Egypt would cement unification in scientific and religious thought, where in “Allah” was seen as the living universe and the study of the universe the highest act of worship, as was the case in Egypt. In the Muslim world there would be no conclusions equivalent to those of Europe, ergo “whatever I cannot understand is a mystery known only to God” but rather “whatever I discover is proof of the wondrous order of God as the mysteries hide in plain sight.” Furthermore, the Quran and the precepts of Sufism would support all of this. For this reason, the schism between science and religion, secularism and orthodoxy would never occur as it had in Europe. Instead, the stagnation of totalitarian regimes, entrenched in the wake of successive invasions from Europe, would grip much of the Muslim world.

WAR, that’s the great death knell and silencer of all beneficial inquiry! Since the beginning of time, scientific research has relied heavily on social investment and peaceful interaction with neighboring populations. The only sciences that can thrive in wartime are those devoted to war, and so it is today. Our country slips the dogs of war at the slightest provocation, and nowadays with no provocation at all. Then the “scholars” of our nation, hopelessly dependant on that war-machine, point their fingers at everything but the elephant staring at us from the corner of our consciousness. The best of them are often sycophants while the worst of them are always sophists, distracting us from the truth that hides plainly in our sights.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, like all scientists, should be held to a higher standard and simply ought to know better. Five minutes reading on Wikipedia could have prevented him from completely misquoting Al Ghazali and shamelessly misrepresenting history; let alone what he could have learned from actually reading his works. All the while the answer to the question he sought was in plain sight, with just a bit of research it would have revealed itself. But in his attempt to push a separate agenda he lost sight of his attempt to be as he claims in the presentation, “a truth seeker”. What’s worse is a large number of people who trust his scholarship will also be mislead by this abject unscientific approach to history.