SIGN of the TIMES:Radicalism Among Muslim Professionals Worries Many

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates-They were some of the best and brightest in the Muslim world who toiled for years to master their knowledge. Now they stand accused of seeking mass murder.
For weeks,commentators and analysts in the Muslim world have been grappling with the implications that a Muslim doctor and engineer, at the pinnacle of their society, may have been behind the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow last month.The question being asked in many educated and official circles is this:How could such acts be committed by people who have supposedly dedicated their lives to scientific rationalism and to helping others?The answer, some scientists and analysts say,may lie in the way that a growing movement of fervent Muslims use science as reinforcement of religious belief, rather than as a means for questioning and exploring the foundations of the natural world.“It’s not that surprising for doctors and engineers to be involved in political Islamist movements-both of the violent and the more moderate sort,” said Taner Edis,associate professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri and author of “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam.”He and other researchers who study Islamist movements say that the involvement of doctors and engineers in terrorism is not shocking.Muslim scientists are among the most politicized groups in the region,and the Muslim approach to the scientific method,in the most extreme cases,can squelch the freewheeling curiosity at the heart of scientific discovery.“Fundamentalist-type attitudes are relatively common among people in applied science in the Muslim world,” Mr. Edis said.“The conception has been that modern science is developed outside, and we need to bring it into our societies without it corrupting our culture.”In other words, science is a tool for furthering an ideology rather than a means of examining core beliefs...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/world/middleeast/14doctors.html?ex=1342065600&en=8e247536fd32759b&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
As in the days of Noah...