Astronomy: The outer frontier of MbS’ liberalization
Credit: SPA
By James M.
Dorsey
Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s investment of $1 billion and option to pump a
further $480 million into Richard
Branson’s ventures in space, confirmed during the prince’s recent visit to
the United States, was more than just another headline-grabbing move.
By focusing
on space sciences, long a field rejected by ultra-conservative Islamic scholars,
some of whom insist that the earth is flat, Prince Mohammed was setting the
outer limits of his top-down redefinition of Saudi Arabia’s austere
interpretation of Islam.
In doing
so, Prince Mohammed was seeking to end the dampening effect Islamic scholars have
had on the kingdom’s technological and scientific development for both civilian
and military purposes.
As recently
as 2014, a Saudi astronomer
complained that the kingdom’s “general culture,” a reference to religious
ultra-conservatism, had resulted in a “lack” of teaching and study of
astronomy.
Islamic
scholars rejected astronomy as contradicting religious precepts as well as a
form of astrology despite the fact that space research could help them
calculate prayer times and the dates of religious holidays.
“The
Salafis as you know, have no mercy,”
Saudi physicist Haisham Abad told Jorg Matthias Determann, author of ‘Space
Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the
Middle East,” a recently published history of Arab exploration of space.
Mr Abad
described how he felt he had to publish his efforts to reform the Islamic lunar
calendar on a lunisolar basis outside of the kingdom even though he had
garnered support from some within the religious establishment.
Similarly,
when he wanted to give a public lecture at the King Faisal Center for Research
and Islamic Studies, which is chaired by Prince Turk al Faisal, a former head
of Saudi intelligence and ambassador to Britain and the United States, who at
times publicly articulates views that Prince Mohammed shares but prefers not to
air, Mr. Abad was rejected because his research was “outside the Salafi line.”
Space
science threatened the long-standing religious status of scholars who each year
determine the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan by sighting the moon. The
Jeddah Astronomical Society opted in 2012 to halt its statements on moon
sighting after the Abu Dhabi-based Islamic Crescents’ Observation Project
(ICOP) declared that astronomical calculations indicated that a
sighting of the moon in countries like Saudi Arabia Iraq and Syria was not
possible.
“People who
see the new moon with the naked eye, are the same people who have been seeing
it for the past 20 years or so. With all this technology, astronomers and experts,
we have special telescopes directed to the moon and then traditional moon
sighting people say they saw the moon. I believe it’s time to trust science,” said
ICOP president Mohammed Odeh in justification of the group’s conclusion.
Religious
opposition to endeavours of scientists like Mr. Abad and groups such as the
ICOP and the Jeddah society as well as past international sanctions against
some countries like Iraq had stymied or prevented the development of space
research but was unable to force a complete shutdown.
Government-sponsored
scientists and institutions as well as independent scholars remained looped into
the science through activities under the auspices of the United Nations, collaboration
with European research facilities or because of their involvement in US
research program, including an association with American universities in Beirut
and Cairo.
Astronomy
remained, however, a touch-and-go proposition. Authorities in Algeria, for example,
were forced to back down from taking a compulsory astronomy course designed to
enable religious scholars to apply the science to Islamic jurisprudence to the
next level when they had to cancel plans to establish an institute of astronomical
sciences and a planetarium.
As a
result, students made their way to universities in the west while scientists
migrated to the Gulf. “Astronomy, like the rest of Algerian science culture,
and education, is in total disarray,” Mr. Determann quoted Nidhal Guessoum, a
scientist who returned to Algeria after completing his doctorate at the
University of California and working for NASA, as saying.
In a separate
interview, Mr. Guessoum asked whether “Muslims (were) still in the dark
ages.” He warned that without “a review of the education given to Muslim youth
today…the future will be very dark.”
Writing in
Gulf News last year, Mr. Guessoum noted that professors at the sciences faculty
of the University of Sfax in Tunisia had allowed a PhD
student to submit a thesis declaring the earth to be flat, unmoving, young
at only 13,500 years old, and the centre of the universe.
Mr.
Guessoum said the PhD was the result of an “adherence to religious, scriptural
literalism, in other words taking the meanings of religious texts literally and
blindly, at the cost of rejecting all knowledge that appears to contradict it,
no matter how much evidence supports it.”
He warned
that “we are not only failing to educate the public (that is manifest in the
trendy ‘flat earth’ and ‘Nasa lies’ memes on social media) but also our
brightest students.”
Saudi
Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari told students at a UAE university two years
earlier that the earth was stationary and did not orbit the sun.
“Focus with
me, this is Earth;” Mr. Al-Khaibari said, holding a cup. “If you say that it
rotates, if we leave Sharjah airport on an international flight to China, the
earth is rotating, right? So if the plane stops still on air, wouldn't China be
coming towards it? True or not?”
Waving the
cup in a circle, Mr. Al-Khaibari argued that “if the earth rotates in the other
direction, the plane will not be able to get to China because China is also
rotating.”
Libyan
leader Moammar Qaddafi, a self-styled essayist and short story writer, shared
religious leaders’ opposition to astronomy. In one story, entitled Suicide
of the Astronaut, Mr. Qaddafi described a man who found nothing of interest
when he visited the moon. On his return to earth, the man discovered that his qualifications
as an explorer made finding a job impossible. In the end, he commits suicide.
In a twist
of history, it was Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman’s voyage in 1985 into space as
a payload specialist aboard the American STS-51-G Space Shuttle that constituted
a first step in countering religious opposition to astronomy.
The voyage
of Prince Sultan, Prince Mohammed’s older brother, and the first Arab and
Muslim astronaut, helped set the stage for the crown prince’s more recent push.
“It took
the return of a Saudi prince for Ibn Baz to cease his assertions” that astronomy
is un-Islamic because the sun moves and the earth is fixed, Mr. Determann
reported. He was referring to Abdulaziz ibn Baz, the then head of the Islamic
University of Medina and grand mufti of Saudi Arabia whose
assertions were taken to mean that the earth is flat.
The
fascination with the first Arab and Muslim space explorer may have had a
dampening effect on religious resistance but didn’t squash it. Neither did a controversial
effort by Saudi universities that started at the turn into the 21st
century to kickstart the study of astronomy and boost their international
rankings by enlisting prominent western astrophysicists who were offered lucrative
packages.
The
experience of Mr. Abad and his colleagues fit a pattern. Efforts at the
beginning of the 21st century by Saudi scientists, who pointed not
only to civilian and economic implications of space studies, including satellite
technology that had been embraced by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but
also its national security and military applications, long failed to get the
hearing they deserved.
That all is
changing with the rise of Prince Mohammed in 2015. There is little doubt that his
quest for Saudi advances in space studies as part of his effort to take the
kingdom into the 21st century was also driven by Iranian space
efforts and inspired by the United Arab Emirates determination to make the
development of a space industry “a primary national objective.”
By pumping
money into Mr. Branson’s trio of space-focused companies, Prince Mohammed was
joining the UAE which already has a stake in Virgin. “The future of Saudi
Arabia is one of innovation…and it’s through partnerships with organisations
like Virgin Group that we will make active contributions to those sectors and
technologies that are driving progress on a global scale,” Prince Mohammed said.
Not someone
to play second fiddle, Prince Mohammed’s investment potentially signals a Gulf
race into space. The UAE announced that it intended to land a space craft on Mars by
July 2021, the country’s 50th anniversary, and would build a $140
million Mars
Science City that will cover 176,000 square metres of Emirati desert,
making it the largest space simulation city ever built..
The UAE initiatives
and Saudi efforts have prompted Kuwait to think
about establishing a space agency of its own despite the high cost at a
time of depressed oil revenues.
Saudi
Arabia’s investment in Virgin follows an agreement
with Russia concluded in 2015 to partner in efforts to build a second international
space station by 2023.
“The
Kingdom seeks through the space and aeronautical technology program to achieve
a regional leadership in this vital sector relying on its preeminent position
and vital capabilities that will allow the country to obtain its objective,” the
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology said at the time the
agreement with Russia was signed.
Chances are
that Prince Mohammed will succeed in promoting space science. His success is, however, likely to depend on his ability to keep ultra-conservatives in the kingdom in
check, groom a generation of more liberal Islamic scholars that enjoy popular
credibility and deliver on his economic reforms. The jury on all of that is
still out.
Dr.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture,
and co-host of the New Books in
Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well
as Comparative
Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North
Africa,
co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and
Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and
the forthcoming China
and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
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