"Now, this is going to raise some eyebrows. I mean what I am about to say here. As if we have not raised eyebrows before by what we have had to say earlier.
In any case, if you are looking for Best Science, then, ab initio, or from the word go, Islam is your best hope.
I don’t mean Muslims make the best scientists. It would be unreal and quite possibly fanatical to make such a sweeping claim. Maybe the Brahmin Community in India has a much stronger Education Ethic than the Muslims anywhere have had in a long time.
What I am trying to say instead is that Islam will offer you the best science there is, if by science you mean a collection of robust truth-based models of reality in any aspect of life.
That means with regard to anything in this world, Islamic teachings are likely to be the best you possibly can find in the marketplace of science and ideas – scientifically speaking that is.
That is why the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) found it necessary to summarily steal – or should I say borrow, without so much as “By Your Leave” – the practice of hand-washing from Islam and Muslims. But after a great deal of research and after spending vast amounts of money.
But by then Islam had already made the method of hand-washing a household word in every Muslim home throughout the world by a millennium and a half and Johnny ASM was 1400 years late in coming to the water fountain from which the world of Islam washed it hands.
That is to say ASM’s reinventing of that wheel occurred after generation after unbroken generation of Muslims all over the world had been practicing hand-washing for all those 1400 years without a moment’s interruption or letup.
Whether or not ASM acknowledged its debt to Islam and Muslims is a question to which I do not know the answer. And whether any Muslim source ever demanded an answer or an explanation from ASM I have my doubts.
But the fact remains that you cannot improve upon the Islamic practice of Wudu as the most thorough and effective means of washing up and cleansing the often open human peripheries much exposed to the elements and a growing array of modern toxins, pathogens and pollutants.
What miracle could be more powerful than the fact that what an illiterate Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam) from the Arabian sands had so freely given the world in the middle of the Seventh Century, a most highly educated body of men and women like the ASM had to go through the motions of re-inventing at the end of the 20th Century.
So, when it comes to body cleansing, the Islamic method of Wudu remains the gold standard. And you cannot do a thing to make it any better than the desert-dwelling Prophet of Arabia (Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam) made it fourteen centuries ago.
Nor can you, to cite another instance of how Islamic teachings are at the cutting edge of the best and the most functional in this world, improve upon the two-piece white-cotton-sheet-Ihram that Muslim men wear during annual Hajj pilgrimage to make it a better or more fascinating exemplar of human equality transcending all time and space. Again, that clock has not stopped ticking for 1400 years." (Dr. Pasha)
Related article: Continuity and Change in Islam
