UnbreakableMJ

Quarks and the Qur'an

From the page: Mohammad Ali Shomali's clerical robes are immaculate, his manner urbane. Fluent in English, with a Ph.D. from Britain's Manchester University, he spends his days in the holy city of Qum studying advanced stem-cell research and the mapping of the genome. Shomali, at 44, is clearly not your run-of-the-mill mullah, even if he insists that he is. "We live in a religious country with a religious government," says the turbaned Shia cleric, "so we have to know what our religion tells us about modern issues." Along with hundreds of other mullahs in Qum, Shomali is at work trying to define an Islamic context for advanced scientific work from nanos to, yes, nuclear technology.

Those who suspect Iran of clandestine weapons programs might imagine all sorts of disturbing scenarios conjured by the intense interest these mullahs take in science. Doomsday scenarios about Islamic zealots with apocalyptic weapons are an easy sell on American talk radio. But Shomali looks a little puzzled by such propositions. "We want to be at the forefront of scientific and technological advancements in the world, and that includes nuclear technology," he says. But he insists that the ethical constraints imposed by religion are vital, too. "When our Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei says that building, possessing and using nuclear weapons is forbidden," Shomali explains, "you have to be sure that we are not going to do that. Otherwise our Supreme Leader would lose his credibility and we would no longer trust him as a leader."

Shomali's own specialty is bioethics and environmental ethics. He is also the head of the religious department in the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute, which is housed in a large building made with the same yellow bricks that are used to build religious schools in Qum. Verses from the Qur'an written on turquoise tiles adorn the façade. Yet nothing about the place or its history is quite what an outsider would expect. Its founder in 1991 and still its guiding light is the archconservative Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi [known for espousing complete isolation from Western influences and a return to the more unyielding days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution]. Whole treatises have been written in the West about Yazdi as the mystical mentor of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps even the inspiration for an apocalyptic vision tied to the second coming of the lost imam. Yet the institute's primary concerns are not about how the world will end so much as how the Islamic regime can adapt the fast-moving scientific and technological developments of the 21st century to its own needs.

Before the revolution that overthrew them, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his father before him had seen themselves as great modernizers. They treated the religiously devout as retrograde and called the Shia clerics by the pejorative name aakhoonds: flea-infested zealots whose idea of high technology was the abacus. In those days, about 200,000 people lived in Qum. There was only one major seminary here, plus a few small religious schools. Millions of Iranian pilgrims came every year to visit the shrine of Masouma, the sister of the Shia saint Imam Reza, but they rarely lingered. Qum was a dusty, crumbling town that seemed decades, if not centuries, behind the fast-growing, fast-paced capital, Tehran. (continued below..)