Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Pervez Hoodbhoy

Quote by Pervez Hoodbhoy

“The rote nature of education in contemporary Muslim societies can be traced to attitudes inherited from traditional education, wherein knowledge is something to be acquired rather than discovered. and in which the attitude of mind is passive and receptive rather than creative and inquisitive. The social conditioning of an authoritarian traditional environment has. as an inescapable consequence. That all knowledge comes to be viewed as unchangeable and all books tend to be memorized or venerated to some degree. The concept of secular knowledge as a problem-solving tool which evolves over time is alien to traditional thought.”

Quote by Pervez Hoodbhoy

Book:Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality
Create image

Work

Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Pervez Hoodbhoy

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Pervez Hoodbhoy. more

You May Also Like

“The new Islamic science has been fathered by the global resurgence of orthodoxy in Muslim countries; it is not peculiar to Pakistan by any means. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia are also particularly active centres. However, it is not confined by national boundaries and is particularly to be found amongst immigrants settled in the West. It evidently provides a form of psychological defence against the continuous battering by modern science in its many manifestations. For this reason, one must not expect the phenomenon to disappear in the decades to come.”

BackwardnessMuslim Orthodoxy
Book:Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality
Create image

“We Pfliegmans, however, are incapable of imagining anything. From the get-go, Pliegmans were outcasts in a country of outcasts. We were then, and probably always have been, whole ages behind the progress of the company we kept. When men were bashing rocks together to make tools, Pliegmans were slithering from the ocean, coated in a greenish much; when men were grunting, sneezing, and lighting fire, hirsute Pfliegmans lay recluse in a dark musty corner of a cave, hissing; when men began wearing pelts and eating meat and painting walls, Pliegmans were stealing pelts to make fun of the pelt-wearers and would return to a cold cave hungry again, goddamnit; when men began forming languages and speaking in recognizable tongues, Pliegmans snorted and threw their heads in the mud in protest; when men began eating with forks, Pliegmans licked their dirty nails; when men were building factories to work in and homes for themselves to live in, Pliegmans rolled in the gross, deliciously; when Edison illuminated the world, Pliegmans squealed and covered their eyes; when Ford made the world go faster, Pliegmas stood at the curb, fearing for their lives, gaping at the shiny wheels, which explains why my father, János Pliegman, who, one Christmas morning in 1984, after receiving a VCR as a Christmas present from my mother, spent four minutes examining the buttons and one minute examining the manual before bashing it in the face with an elbow -- But I digress.”

BackwardnessSad Humor
Book:The Convalescent
Create image

“The transmogrification of Islam into Islamism is bad news not only for the West but also for the majority of Muslims who have no desire to live in totalitarian theocracies. “For the West it is but a physical threat in the form of terrorism,” said Pakistani journalist Ayaz Amir. “For the world of Islam . . . to be trapped in bin Ladenism is to travel back in time to the dark ages of Muslim obscurantism. It means to be stuck in the mire which has held the Islamic world back.”

IslamBackwardnessIslamistObscurantism
Book:The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
Create image

“Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.”

IndoctrinationHeredity
Author:Richard Dawkins
Create image

“There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel’s laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type.”

BiologyExtinctionHeredity
Book:Revolt Against the Modern World
Create image

“And so,' smiled the Witcher, 'I have no choice? I have to enter into a pact with you, a pact which should someday become the subject of a painting, and become a sorcerer? Give me a break. I know a little about the theory of heredity. My father, as I discovered with no little difficulty, was a wanderer, a churl, a troublemaker and a swashbuckler. My genes on the spear side may be dominant over the genes on the distaff side. The fact that I can swash a buckler pretty well seems to confirm that.”

GeneticsHereditySwashbuckling
Book:Czas pogardy
Create image