Recently, a Saudi cleric had his 15 minutes of fame, to use the phrase supposedly coined by Andy Warhol. The cleric in a recent TV interview proclaimed — a video that made news around the world — that the Earth does not rotate. Many of us have certainly bowed our heads in shame.
We would have wanted to show the world Saudi young men and women working in laboratories and international research centers. We would have wanted the world to know about their impressive achievements and discoveries. We did not want the world to know us through a naive person who found it difficult to understand a basic scientific fact. In the middle of a time when science is dwindling, it is no surprise to find people like him among us.
You dear astronomical genius, you have embarrassed us in front of the whole world. You have made headlines across the earth, which you refuse to believe spins. You have achieved a fame that our scientists, elite students, writers and artists failed to achieve.
In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus and other sailors were navigating westward in the ocean, frightened by the idea that their ship would get to the edge of the flat earth and fall off into the dark, unknown abyss. They thought that the earth was flat and static. These geographic discoveries were the catalyst to understand the earth and the universe at a later stage. Thus scientific breakthroughs evolved; the West advanced and Muslims slept in that particular century and they are still in a deep slumber until now.
The world only knows Muslims through Al-Qaeda, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) and some naïve people who serve as grisly entertainment for the masses. Extremism, sorcery and superstitions are the consequences of the degeneration of a region. All that we can do is to laugh at ourselves with the world, hoping that this will perhaps awake the sleepers among us.
In the United States, there are more than 100,000 Saudi students studying in universities in various fields of science.
They have been sent to study there and their tuition is fully paid, along with their living expenses, in order to change things for the better and to make the people get on the train of science and civilization and abandon the coffins of underdevelopment. I will be writing again about the educated community and the education that stimulates thinking, debates and society changes, not the education that refuses to evolve.
