to Syed Adil from Peter Joyce
 
Syed
 
Your claim that "Dr. Jamil is a medical doctor and understands Science (sic)" is deceptive. There are plenty of qualified doctors around who stray into loopy pseudoscience. You are perhaps aware of the hedgehog/fox analogy. A hedgehog knows a little about many things, while a fox knows a lot about one thing. Dr Jamil seems to think he is both. Yet, for all his medical training and "research", it is clear that Dr Jamil's bizarre attempts to promote some kind of new paradigm merely show that Farzana Hassan has a better grasp of the essence of science than he has. Clearly, Pervaiz Hoodbhoy would agree with her.
 
You write, "He has obviously done intense research in the field of Science in relation to Quran. Clearly he would have done it in order to come to terms with his faith and find a point of fusion between the two." Yes, it appears that is exactly what he has done. It disturbs me that you seem to think this is valid science. It is no more science than if my young nephew tried to reconcile science with the tooth fairy.
 
You ask the question, "Does it also mean that all of us Muslims, so addressed by God Himself in the Quran as, “O You the Believers” should cease being believers and reject all the scientific verses in the Quran if they don’t conform to the established Scientific principles of today?" No doubt this is supposed to be rhetorical, but the serious, non-rhetorical answer is "Yes." 
 
"...study of Science in relation with Quran has been a standard practice..." Yes, apparently it has. That is the sad truth, and it helps to explain the sorry state of scientific research in the Islamic world. Science is science. It has nothing to do with culture or personality. It certainly cannot be based on any holy book. "Islamic science" is not so much bad science as no science at all. Science is a process which, by definition, requires an inductive approach. Presupposing that your tribe's book contains valid scientific axioms is deductive. 
 
Any attempt to reconcile science with the Koran is doomed to success. I don't know the history of such attempts in Islam, but I would bet a dollar to a dime that it follows the line of biblical apologetics. When science did the real work and found out something new about the world, the theologians scrambled to their Bibles, riffled through them until they found some vague verse that seemed to fit, then pronounced gleefully, "Aha! God knew this all along." Here is the real test: if any holy book truly contains scientific insights, let the religious "scholars" point to texts which reveal unequivocally facts about the world BEFORE any scientist does. If the texts are specific enough, they could become testable hypotheses, and religion can show science the way. This will never happen, of course. In my account of biblical apologetics above, I used the past tense. This is because in the Western world most people realised some time ago that these attempts to reconcile science and the Bible were futile, and these days it's a minority pursuit on the lunatic fringe. The sooner people in Islam follow suit, the sooner their science will catch up. I hope it does, I really do.
 
"...our reluctance as a Muslim Ummah to collectively stand up and support our own..."

I find this an odd exhortation. In some ways it is of course ethical to support those with whom you share some characteristics. But not in science. In science, you should support whomever is doing the informed and unbiased research.
 
"Sister Farzana has not mentioned anywhere in her letter that she has a problem with Dr. Jamil’s hypothesis per se, but has no inhibitions in dismissing the same nevertheless simply because his work has not been tested through empirical research."

One reason that Farzana does not attack Dr Jamil's hypothesis is that she doesn't understand it. Neither do I. But this does not matter. Non-scientists are perfectly entitled to reject what we do not understand, for precisely the reason you go on to dismiss: that it has not been subjected to empirical research or accepted by the scientific community. Again, I suggest you consider Professor Hoodbhoy's comments in this light. He rightly points out that we should be suspicious of "grandiose", all-encompassing theories. Lay people can easily be wowed by these, because the language and concepts may flummox them. Yet it is notoriously easy to formulate a sexy grand theory. It is just words, after all. The modest and unprepossessing daily grind of true scientific research is what is difficult.
 
On one point I agree with you. I too have little sympathy with pseudo-secularists. I believe that the world will be a better place when everyone burns the holy books and becomes truly secular. Anyone who merely pretends to be secular is a fox in the henhouse, and needs to be hunted down and ejected. Finally, I had to smile at your claim that you are "a neutral observer and an implicit believer in the word of God". The latter surely precludes the former.
 
Regards
 
Peter Joyce