Advocating for an universal science

 

For all the wrong reasons - from ideological to sheer ignorance - the history of science(s) is predominantly Western/white - centered. Ignoring the very historical facts, the non-European figures are mostly absent from the general scientific narrative, although the exchange of influences and the free circulation of ideas contradicts this simplified official reality.

Fouad Laroui, Moroccan-born economist and writer currently based in Amsterdam, sums up in his Plaidoyer pour les Arabes the noticeable absences of references of Arabic authors and thinkers from the history of sciences as well as the simplified vision of the non-Christian world, reduced to emotional, terrorist-oriented tendencies. 

Although I am usually very careful with the temptation - which manifests as well in some ideological takes on science from Eastern European countries - of assigning a non-European author to generally patterned European ideas, when the genealogy is based on a careful selection and confrontation of sources, the official versions of the history of sciences deserve to be challenged. By outlining the circulation and meeting of ideas from one cultural space to another, the diversity and complexity of the human mind is actually stated. It is a proof that long before our worlds are connected by social media, the cultural afinities were always there.

On the other hand, the plurality of possible worlds has another consequence: it shows us that the extremes and religious exaggeration and intolerance do exist outside the non-Western realm as well. If someone may follow the far-right discourses of the religious extremism, he or she will easily recognize a pattern so easy labelled as anti-Western as being uttered by non-Western sources. Which is equally historically inadequate. The same with the extremism. the propension towards non-scientific interpretations and readings of the world, such as the alternative medicine or spiritual practices, are not the exclusive domain of the ´less developed´ areas of the world, but do co-exist in the midst of Western daily practices as well.

Plaidoyer pour les Arabes is a book which contributes to a shape a fresh, colonisation-free approach on sciences. Such approaches may further open the ways towards a different, more inclusive history.