LOSING THE RACE:

The Arab World's Scientific Desert: Once a leader in research, the region now struggles to keep up (DANIEL DEL CASTILLO, 3/05/04, Chronicle of Higher Education)

Eleven centuries ago an Islamic renaissance occurred in Baghdad, attracting the best scholars throughout the Muslim world. For the next five hundred years, Arabic was the lingua franca of science. Cutting-edge research was conducted in cities such as Cairo, Damascus, and Tunis. In the ninth century, algebra (al-jabr) was invented by a Muslim mathematician in Baghdad under the auspices of an imperial Arab court dedicated to scientific enrichment and discovery. Ibn Sina's monumental Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the 12th century and dominated the teaching of the subject in Europe for four centuries.

Today, no one looks to the Arab world for breakthroughs in scientific research, and for good reason. [...]

Many of the most promising and successful Arab scientists and researchers end up in the West. Khaled Bouri, a Syrian, has been a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health since 1996, where he has been searching for genes that cause neurodegenerative diseases like muscular dystrophy.

Mr. Bouri received his bachelor's degree in biochemistry at the University of Damascus. A lack of graduate programs in his field in Syria led him to Louis Pasteur University, in Strasbourg, France, where he finished his Ph.D. in pharmacology. "Those who are lucky try to leave Syria and go abroad, but most stay home frustrated trying to find other jobs," he says.

Mr. Bouri chose biochemistry only because he was rejected by the University of Damascus's program in architecture. "The only opportunity after graduation for science majors is teaching in schools, and that is not the best thing a young person would look for as a career," he says.

He laments the state of science education in Syrian universities. His textbooks were almost a decade old, the labs were underequipped, teaching was solely by rote, and there were not even basic research opportunities.

On top of that, everything was taught in Arabic. "It was a nightmare for two years learning a whole new vocabulary in French and then English," he says. "The Syrian education system doesn't put a lot of emphasis on foreign languages -- definitely not enough to read a textbook in a foreign language."

Mr. Bouri says he was so academically underprepared when he got to France that he had to spend a remedial year learning basic life sciences to enter at the graduate level. "There was a huge gap between what I learned as an undergraduate and what I needed to know," he says. "There were technologies in my field that I had never heard of until I moved to France."

Most countries in the region use English or French when teaching science, often supplementing them with Arabic. Syria is one of just a few that have experimented with an intensive policy of Arabization, using only Arabic for teaching and instruction. But most scientific literature is written in English, and universities rarely have the money to spend on translation.

"There are serious difficulties in teaching in Arabic because of a lack of a system that would enable universities to have access to up-to-date information in Arabic," says Victor Billeh, who is director of the Regional Office for Education in the Arab States at Unesco and has a Ph.D. in science education.

The Arab world has found itself in a Catch-22. Without top-notch scientists, it cannot produce the research necessary to develop a strong private sector. But without a dynamic private sector, there is little money to invest in scientific research. Even at the best institutions in the region, like the Jordan University of Science and Technology, with 16,000 students and 650 faculty members, money for research is a pittance. [...]

In the meantime, Mr. Bouri, the postdoctoral fellow, continues his research projects at the National Institutes of Health, knowing he is too highly educated to ever return to Damascus. "There is absolutely no place in Syria I could do the kind of research I am doing now," he says. "Research doesn't exist at all in academic institutions."

A thousand years ago in Baghdad or Damascus, Mr. Bouri would probably have been treated as a great scholar, given access to the most comprehensive libraries of the time, and provided with lavish endowments to think, create, and discover among a vast coterie of polymaths.

"When I think of Ibn Sina in the 10th century it provokes great frustration, especially for those of us who are conscious of our history," he says. "It pains me to think of where we were and where we are now."

Imagine believing that your closeness to God is reflected in the comparative health of your society to others even as you fall further and further behind...

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2004 6:13 AM