Science -- it's not scary to Muslims

I was so swamped with work and planning for an upcoming trip that I missed the third annual Doha Tribeca Film Festival, which is really a shame as I enjoyed the first two a lot. I will definitely go next time.

This morning I was looking through the paper and realized that the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) was being held here in Doha. It's a three day conference with some of the best educational minds in the world discussing ways to improve education. I have discussed the educational system in Qatar numerous times in the past on this blog and while it appears things are improving the country still has to undergo a lot of changes.

But that's not why I was posting. Thanks to media showing mostly Afghanistan, Iraq or Saudi Arabia to represent the Islamic world most Westerners assume that all Islamic countries are fundamentalist and somehow anti-science. I think in some cases Westerners are also projecting their own experiences with fundamentalist Christianity, assuming since many fundamentalist Christians attack things like evolution, or minimize scientific education to focus on religious study, that fundamentalist Muslims must be the same. Today in the paper there were two articles that highlights how in Qatar, an Islamic nation who are mostly from the Hanbali school of Islam (similar to Saudi Arabia), are not anti-science.

First, Qatar Foundation and Exxon Mobil have announced a new program to give more training in math and science to elementary school teachers. The project focuses on elementary school because, as one of the project developer said,

“It is important to train maths and science teachers. If we need good engineers, we should have good maths and science teachers,”

And another article mentioned that an episode of the Arab reality show “Stars of Science” would be on tonight. This is the third season of the reality show. Participants bring innovative science and engineering ideas and the show helps them develop it. I'm not sure if there's anything like it in North America.

So there you are, two newspaper articles about science in Qatar in one day. Just because the country is Muslim does not mean that it is anti-science.