A revival for Islam, a boost for science?

TODAY is the first of the fifteenth Islamic century: a century in which Islam again is becoming a potent force in world affairs. Ziauddin Sardar, Nature correspondent for the Muslim world, recently visited eight key states — Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Tunisia — to report on their varied attitudes to science and technology policy. He found an increasing interest in the concept of an ‘Islamic Science’, a socially concerned science set within the philosophy of Islam. In the first of a number of articles which will appear in Nature over the next few months, Sardar here reviews opinion on whether science and technology can be so ‘Islamised’. Next week he will discuss thinking in Iran; after that, nuclear power in Turkey.