Writing about the international Urdu conference held in the federal capital last March, I had submitted that the English language was not the well spring from which science arose, as if of itself, as the ‘language-of-power’ proponents claim, but that science was a product of human intelligence and flourished in cultures that permitted freedom of thought and inquiry and it did not matter if your language was Wakhi, Shina, Urdu or English if you wanted to know what water was composed of. What science needed for its growth was a cultural space.

This was a pretty layman’s position in support of which I had mentioned Professor Fateh Mohammad Malik’s remark at a literary function that the White man’s scientific creativity was a product of his spiritual quest or roohani bedari in the Professor’s words. This was not an astounding conclusion for a renowned Iqbalist, as one mutual friend jested, but in fact a very honest thought and quite in line with the great poet’s idea of spiritual and intellectual dynamism that a society would need in order to be creative. That is to say, a spirit of inquiry and critical attitude, if not skepticism altogether, that at least a sizable number of people in universities and other places of learning must have and society should tolerate, if not encourage, if science is to find a suitable soil to grow in. It is the diminishing stock of such people in our milieu that explains the current rush on what Dr Nomanul Haq, a professor of Religion at Rutgers University and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, calls ‘scientism’ as opposed to science.

Writing on a lighter note, in his engaging essay titled Science, Scientism, and the Liberal Arts he defines scientism as “an excessive faith in the power of scientific techniques, and in the applicability of these techniques to all else — human behaviour, to ethics, to society, to religion, to culture, to everything.” It “corrodes the faculty of imagination and critical thought” and eats up that cultural space in which free exchange of ideas results in cultivation of scientific thought. We cry for more science, as we are doing today, but the result is not scientific thought but a glut of gadgetry, NMR machines, technicians, computer programmers and a “young generation with no cultural bearings, no cultural anchorage, and a future utterly contingent upon the fluctuations of market forces,” as we can see from the hordes of jobless computer workers thronging office corridors for clerical positions. And since English language is equated with ‘science’ the rush on ‘sapoken’ English is only as massive as on functional English though the most the average child achieves is the sheepish bleating of ‘ba ba black sheep’ to the utter delight of our ‘tote batote’ parents.

The bloated emphasis on science and technology does succeed in getting huge amounts of funds apportioned for its development which only increases the unemployed work force but does not result in the enrichment of our ‘human’ resources in any sense. “No wonder that in much of the world of Muslim peoples today there is a trend of rapidly depleting liberal arts from the curricula of colleges and universities, often to the limits of total extinction,” laments Dr Noman taking note of the mushrooming growth in Pakistan of what are called universities or institutes of engineering, computer sciences and the supposed mother of all sciences, the information technology! The government recognizes them as places of science education, whereas in fact these are merely factories and workshops. There is no realization that “science lies in the realm of creative and critical human thought and intellectually controlled imagination”. Education, Dr Noman says, is the burden of emancipating and nurturing the faculties of critical reflection, imagination, and creativity, and the provision of a cultural space for free intellectual inquiry. But this idea is trashed as being philosophy which has no career prospects. Dr Noman thinks this is misleading. He points out the shortage in the media profession of young people who can construct correct English or Urdu sentences, and that, while most young men are being drilled into becoming technicians of one kind or another, women who have devoted time to studying fine arts and languages are getting much better jobs in publishing houses and journalism. And if I am permitted this aside, I may add, there are more IT johnies out of job than all the poets and penmen put together. Not only that. Some of them occupy plush grade 22 positions that hardly any scientist can dream of rising to.

It is historically proved that eras in which nations were making scientific discoveries were also times when the study of language, arts, music, poetry, history philosophy, society, religion was flourishing. Dr Noman cites Roshdi Rashed, an outstanding contemporary historian of Arabic science, who has amply demonstrated that Islamic religious disciplines have played a fundamental role in the development of Islam’s natural scientific tradition. And he argues, as if in support of my earlier submission, that science does not grow in laboratories (I had made a much humbler though more plausible assertion that science was not a child of the English language). “It arises in a milieu in which there exists a cultural space for the unfettered expression of human mind’s critical, creative, and imaginative abilities, controlled only by human intellect itself.” How true! We see the bulk of our national creativity in our literature but when it comes to science we are told to do it in the ‘language of power’ only, in which, unfortunately, the mind refuses to sing. The result is scientism, not science.

Dr Noman, whose research interests lie in Islamic intellectual history, religion and Sufism, is in Pakistan these days and is going to be around for a while in connection with a research assignment and the publication of his book on Mansoor Hallaj. To the great delight of a very receptive audience he had read extracts from this book at the Academy of Letters on an earlier visit to Islamabad.