IMAD-AD-DEAN AHMAD - A BOOK REVIEW
Ahmad, Imad-ad-Dean, Signs in the Heavens: A Muslim Astronomer’s Perspective on Religion and Science, Writers’ Inc. International, 1992.
Reviewed by Paul Roasberry
Having known some immensely gifted people in my time, it always baffled me that a certain number of them cleaved to particularly outrageous superstitions and dogmas. A girlfriend who was gifted in her own right -- possessing not just a refined intellect but also a well-developed flair for skepticism -- suggested that the super-bright gravitate towards bizarre beliefs just like any other people (usually out of some burning emotional need), but instead of feeling discomfort or a sense of betrayal of their intellectual abilities, they come to rely on those very intellectual abilities to rationalize nonsense with better-than-average skill. Being bright has nothing to do with being right - it has more to do with a kind of mental agility that allows the gifted person either to become a mental athlete, or a mental sleight-of-hand adept.
It is with this in mind that one should delve into the convoluted apology of Islam that gurgles up in Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad’s Signs in the Heavens: A Muslim Astronomer’s Perspective on Religion and Science. Perhaps the only meaningful statement in the entire book is one that appears in the Preface:
"By training and by profession I am an astronomer. By ancestry and by choice I am a Muslim."
But before I introduce you to this strange work, I will turn the clock back forty years and take you to Tucson, Arizona where this writer and the Match’s editor knew "Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad" as simply "Dean Ahmad." Dean was, in those days, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Arizona, and he liked to hang around the local community of anarchists. Although he had the same set of forebears then as he does now, apparently his "ancestry" hadn’t kicked in at that time, because by choice, Dean was an unashamed devotee of Ayn Rand - the atheist Ayn Rand.
Dean was tolerated because on a certain level, he showed a measure of courage. When several students were arrested at an anti-war event, Dean tagged along to the PimaCounty Sheriff’s office to try to learn something of their fate. A confrontation ensued, and Dean sat down of the floor, reading from the Bill of Rights until he, too was arrested.
Like a lot of bright people, Dean was inept and graceless in his interpersonal dealings and particularly in affairs of the heart. While I was actually living with a girl in Tucson, Dean appeared one evening, guitar in hand, to serenade the young woman as we both sat there, somewhat appalled. Not only were the songs rather corny, but Dean had a terrible problem with acne at that time, and the whole idea of this pimply-faced little guy showing up to strum love songs to a girl in her own home, in front of her current boyfriend, was just downright pathetic, and neither of us had the heart to kick him out until, hours later, he had bored us both into a soporific state and he left.
Enough, then of the background. I simply wanted to establish the fact that the man who today peppers his prose with words like "all praise to God, the Exalted and Magnificent," once ran around spouting quite different ideas about the mere existence of such a "God," exalted or not. Nor is Dean the first to disappoint us with a chameleon-like metamorphosis once he falls into the clutches of his orthodox religious kinsmen - as I write this, a former friend who led the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Boulder, one Arnie Zaler, sits in jail in Atlanta awaiting extradition to Colorado on thirty counts of fraud and racketeering following a long post-Vietnam era career in mainstream politics, Zionist fund-raising, running a kosher meat business, and most recently, the running of various Ponzi schemes, forgery and other assorted swindles.
The theses of Dean Ahmad’s book seem to be 1) that Muslims invented astronomy and had a science-based culture while European Christers were wallowing in ignorance, and 2) that there is no inherent contradiction between science and the Islamic religion.
As for the former thesis, we hasten to point out that the "Prophet" of Islam was an illiterate goat-herd who had to have someone else jot down his "revelations" from God for him, and judging from the rather unintelligible gibberish contained in his Koran, he could hardly have belonged to the class of scholars and mathematicians who predicted eclipses.
As for the second, more subtle thesis, which we find echoed among Christian religious fundamentalists who are eager, too, to point out that their Bronze Age beliefs are likewise not incompatible with science, we quote a passage from chapter two of Dean’s book. It is noteworthy for its utter mastery of sleight-of-hand rationalization:
"Suppose that God created the heavens and the earth and devised the rules by which they operate. Suppose that this same God created reasoning beings to populate this earth and revealed to some of the more trustworthy among them His authorship of Creation and the moral principles under which these beings would prosper. Is there any reason that an objective study of the Creation itself by these reasoning beings must necessarily contradict the substance of the revelation? It should be apparent that the answer is no."
Of course, what strikes us immediately about this argument is that it assumes its own conclusion. Certainly you are going to see no conflict between science and religion if you suppose a God who created everything, including the practice of science, and by supposing nonsense to be fact, it actually is possible to believe in almost anything.
In the smokescreen discourse on "logic" which follows, Dean Ahmad either fails to realize, or fails to admit that a syllogism with one or more false premises and a false conclusion can still be perfectly logical in structure (All Africans are ant-eaters; all ant-eaters are girl scouts; therefore, all Africans are girl scouts).
But Ahmad is no Kurt Godel, and his book fails miserably to convince us of the glory of Islam or of the "Magnificence" of its god. It is, from beginning to end, an apology, a futile if clever rationalization of belief, and an admission on Ahmad’s part that the primary determinant in his becoming a Moslem is his "ancestry," as though this were a good reason for believing in anything. His attempts to "reconcile" historical astronomical events with the ramblings of his "Prophet" remind us poignantly of the failed efforts of Emmanuel Velikovsky.
We are confirmed in our original estimation of Dean Ahmad, whose eagerness to add the letters "PhD" to his name masks a personal, if not today pandemic, lack of resistance to infection by religious idiocy.