Person: With apologies [IB] statement of the first chapter of Genesis which says God created Adam which is mankind, male and female that’s really very much the same as the, well I think all the children of Abraham tend to share very much a similar view about this.
Interviewer: I’m just making a point that the difference between emphasis on and being created in the image of God which I think runs into some difficulty and particularly contemporary Christian understanding particularly in the United States of the ability to accept Darwinian understanding that man descended from animals as opposed to being created by God in the image of God, by and large in the, at least in my experience in Arabic speaking Muslim countries you’ll have Quran class and then you’ll have science class where evolution will be taught and it’s not seen as a conflict of…they’re two separate realms.
Person: And there is an increasing concern to kind of integrate in all that the religious data which is taught has to also be rethought and presented in the way that has points of contact with our contemporary curriculum of science and math and others and we know that in Islamic experience, how can you understand the way that Islamic art and design was created without having a really good use of math and the thing is that modern Muslims today can’t create those designs except a few artists living London and New York who are doing marvelous work by the way but the point is that when they look at the architecture of the past they don’t ask themselves how did they do that? Can I go home with sketch and measure and get something similar. They just look at it without comprehension that this is an amazing achievement.
Four years ago that article in science journal, maybe science journal about mosque pattern designs in Afghanistan and Iran from the 13th century and then this is Japanese and American mathematics, so did the math on the design and they were amazed they said, the principles, the mathematical principles of this design were discovered 30 years ago in Cambridge. but how did they know it for 800 years ago? Or was it intuitive? There was a theory that they reached the design in a higher rational mode which is not clunky and mechanical than you are adding and subtracting and doing the [promulgations] kind of envisioned they got the design at a higher level, I don’t know but it’s interesting.
And there are probably many other things like that, it has never been really looked that carefully or brought out. Now there’s an interest now in some circles like in [modern] institute where we try to think about, let’s we design a mathematics course but with some Islamic design principles to show modern mathematics students that there is an aspect about Islamic achievement which could be, you should at least be aware of, I mean, may not be able to duplicate, but at least you should understand that hey we weren’t so stupid after all, I mean we did do some things that are quite amazing that’s hard to understand. But I would like to mention about Adam, [IB] who was the great, great, great grandson of the prophet Mohammed who was asked, the Jewish say that Eve was made from the rib of Adam, he said they were lying. God had some left over clay and he made Eve out of it, it’s the same place that he made Adam. Now that’s a very simplistic answer. But on the other hand we have what Rumi said, and this is the Rumi form. Would you allow me to quote? He said: [IB] the form comes from us, not we from it. So it was something, essentially inside the physical human which is really us and it’s not direct from our material [IB] and that’s a very profound insight that really put in his [missionary] anyway.
Person: Well, thank you very, very much and thank you all for your participation and we will, if you’ll join us afterwards for lunch in the reception.
Person: Thank you for listening.
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