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All those who have been in the East, or in Africa, are struck by the way in which the mind of a true believer is fatally limited, by the species of iron circle that surrounds his head, rendering it absolutely closed to knowledge, incapable of either learning anything, or of being open to any new idea.
-Ernest Renan1
A true believer must, in fact, turn from the path of studies that have for their object scientific truth, studies on which all must depend, according to an opinion accepted at least by some people in Europe. Yoked, like an ox to the plow, to the dogma whose slave he is, he must walk eternally in the furrow that has been traced for him in advance by the interpreters of the law. Convinced, besides, that his religion contains in itself all morality and all sciences, he attaches himself resolutely to it and makes no effort to go beyond.
-Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani2
Islam neither destroyed knowledge nor was it destroyed with knowledge.
-Namik Kemal3
The iconoclastic French liberal Ernest Renan's 1883 lecture "Islamism and Science" provoked two of the most outspoken Muslim political activists of the time, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838/1839-1897) and Namik Kemal (1840-1888), to write seminal responses. Renan's work broadly condemned Islamic societies and the Arabic people from Muhammad onward as incapable of embracing reason- based scientific knowledge, the core of modernizing reform. These writings incited both Afghani and Kemal to defend Islam's compatibility with science and reform. Both Afghani, an influential Pan-Islamic thinker who helped inspire the first modern political parties in Egypt, and Kemal, a "Young Ottoman" reformer credited with introducing Muslim nationalism and innovative political measures to the Ottoman state, were well aware of Renan's anti-religious tendencies. These tendencies had been demonstrated in Renan's pioneering historical criticism of the life of Jesus and by his dissertation on the twelfth-century Islamic dissident Averroes. Yet Renan did not completely discount religious heritage as a factor in the success of a civilization. His work claimed, in broad historical terms, that Judeo-Christian societies were far more open to scientific thought and innovation than their Islamic counterparts.
Afghani's and Kemal's arguments with Renan took place during a critical time in Middle Eastern history. France and England, the two...