Are attitudes toward science changing in the Muslim world?

You’d think so, based on recent developments. Over the last year, a science and technology park opened in Qatar’s Education City, Jordan’s particle accelerator fired its first ray, and Saudi Arabia celebrated the inauguration of its multibillion-dollar King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. For scientists, one of the best things about KAUST is that:

Rather than having to submit a never-ending stream of grant applications to government agencies and face depressingly low success rates, each faculty member has been given substantial internal support—$400,000 annually for assistant professors, $600,000 for associate professors, and $800,000 for full professors—from which they can hire students and technicians, buy materials and supplies, travel, and otherwise tend to the needs of their individual labs
(Science).

Which led us to ask a pertinent question: Is financial investment really the key to scientific progress in Islamic countries?

It’s a good start, says theoretical nuclear physicist Jim Al-Khalili. “It has been shown time and time again that bigger science budgets encourage greater scientific activity,” he explains. But “it is not simply a matter of throwing money at the problem. Even more important is having the political will to reform and to ensure real freedom of thinking.”

For real progress, he believes:

The whole infrastructure of the research environment needs to be addressed, from laboratory technicians who understand how to use and maintain the equipment to the exercise of real intellectual freedom on the part of the scientists, and a healthy skepticism and courage to question experimental results.

A cultural renaissance leading to a knowledge-based society is urgently required if the Muslim world is to accept and embrace not only the bricks and mortar of modern research labs along with the shiny particle accelerators and electron microscopes that they house, but also that spirit of curiosity that drives humankind to try to understand nature, whether it is to marvel at divine creation, or just to know how and why things are the way they are (Physics World).