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The Arabs and Technology
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17290 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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2 / 1990 |
4,416 Words |
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Andrew Hess
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Whether it be military equipment, medical techniques, or industrial machinery, the application of modern technology continues to have a violent impact upon Arab nations. Wars in the great arc of Arab states stretching from Iraq to North Africa make this region one of the world's major testing grounds for modern armaments; high rates of population growth fold cities and towns with alienated populations; and the exploitation of large oil fields connect economies to the whims of the world petroleum industry, creating new divisions between Arabs and non-Arabs and massively exposing society to alien cultures.
For Arabs, the irony involved in this explosive experience is that the West, which is perceived as having benefited from modern science and technology, owes much of its early ability to control the forces of nature to knowledge that Arabic scholars of the classical Islamic period transmitted to Europe. But only during the period of nation-state formation following World War I did Arabs ask why the tables had turned and what they could do to catch up.
On the first question there is yet no clear answer; concerning the second issue, modern Arab leaders and writers have responded with a number of programs. Each is legitimized by the argument that modern technology can be borrowed so long as alien (Western) values are not acquired.
This twentieth-century judgment on the cultural neutrality of modern technology and the desire to become independent of the West opened the door to the multifold impacts of the Industrial Revolution. On the basis of hindsight, it is clear that few Arabs had any idea how violent and difficult the absorption of modern technology would become. Nor does Western society widely appreciate how recently Arabs confronted this potent force. Finally, the longer Western experience with the consequences of the scientific, industrial, and democratic revolutions obscures an understanding of how the Islamic institutional setting the Arabs had inherited conditioned their absorption of modern technology.
THE ARRIVAL
Modern technology came to the Arab world not as something to be contained within the elite culture of Muslim ruling classes but as part of a Western earthquake whose lines of force undermined the foundations of both state and society. The institutional changes leading to the explosive combination of the scientific, democratic, and industrial revolutions began in the Middle Ages and gathered momentum until, by the eighteenth century, European imperialists understood the depth of their technical superiority. In the Arab world, during the same period, technological development lagged until, during the eighteenth century, it created a disastrous imbalance in power between an innovative West and a stagnant Arab world.
When the military balance swung against the Muslim empires in the eighteenth century, their leaders saw their losses largely in terms of the technological gap between European and Muslim military institutions. They therefore attempted to borrow Europe's military technology without understanding the degree to which other European institutional developments - modern science, rational bureaucracies, nation politics, expanded literacy, capitalistic economies - lay behind the performance of European armies and navies. The borrowed Western technologies - mainly military - failed to assist
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