Some time ago Doug Wiken passed along this article to me on science and the Islamic world. I commend it to your attention. The author, Pervez Hoodbhoy, himself a Pakistani scientist, documents the lack of scientific output from Muslim nations and then seeks to explain this phenomenon.
There was a time, granted it was the Middle Ages, when Muslim peoples were at the forefront of scientific achievement. What happened? See Prof. Blanchard's post below for part of the answer. See also Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong. Hootbhoy himself lays some of the blame on a backwards looking Islam that, one might say, seeks to merely protect the past and consolidate gains rather than promote scientific progress:
Science, in the view of fundamentalists, is principally seen as valuable for establishing yet more proofs of God, proving the truth of Islam and the Qur'an, and showing that modern science would have been impossible but for Muslim discoveries. Antiquity alone seems to matter. One gets the impression that history's clock broke down somewhere during the 14th century and that plans for repair are, at best, vague. In that all-too-prevalent view, science is not about critical thought and awareness, creative uncertainties, or ceaseless explorations. Missing are websites or discussion groups dealing with the philosophical implications from the Islamic point of view of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, superstrings, stem cells, and other contemporary science issues.
Hoodbhoy goes further. It isn't just fundamentalist Islam that is at war with science, but religion of all kinds.
Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. (snip)
Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.
Hoodbhoy seems entirely ignorant of the role the Church historically played in developing the university and promoting the preservation and creation of knowledge (Gregor Mendel anyone?). It is the very 
preservation of knowledge that allows scientific knowledge to increase, as Prof. Blanchard notes. Understanding of the natural world necessitates a sequential increase of knowledge that builds over time. Universities founded by the Church played an indispensable role in this mission. On a more contemporary note one may encounter a defense of reason in John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio and in Benedict XVI's controversial Regensburg lecture. What made the latter piece controversial was precisely its critique of fundamentalist Islam's antipathy to human reason.
If there is a problem with Islam in its more vocally radical forms is its violent rejection of modernity. Christianity in its various forms may have critiques of modernity and offer itself at times as an alternative to a thoroughgoing modernism, but even in its fundamentalist forms it is not ultimately or violently at odds with the modern world. Rejection of Darwinism does not necessarily mean the total rejection of science. Even the most medieval of churches, the Catholic Church, has long made its peace, if sometimes an uneasy one, with the modern world. Western Civilization, as it exists today, is produced by the meeting of Christendom and Enlightenment.
While Christianity may have its critiques of modernity, fundamentalist Islam often defines itself in its
opposition to the modern world and the Western Civilization which is defined (to a significant degree) by that modernity. The Islamic fundamentalists do not merely wish to critique modernity or point out the short comings of modern science, they wish to supplant it, by force if necessary, with a particular form of Islam. They believe the material success of the infidel West is an offense to Allah, and therefore they reject all that makes the West successful: its culture, its politics and its science.
Patrick Deneen is on to something when he points to Catholicism as a kind of "middle way." One need not buy Catholic theology to understand the wisdom of what Deneen teaches.
Catholicism represents the "middle way" between these two extremes [of rationalism and deconstructionism], holding that culture, language, history, tradition, law, interpretation, community, discourse, and finally, politics is the medium of human knowing - but holding simultaneously that there is something to be known. We "see through a glass darkly," but there is something to be seen, even if we can't be positive of its precise outlines and exact dimensions. Mediation is the means to truth and knowledge, not its obstacle, on the one hand, or all that there is, on the other. It is, finally, a sacramental vision, holding that through earthly and corporeal media we gain an access - if indirectly and still imperfectly - of the Divine. This indirectness and imperfection does not result in the call to deconstruct, but to ascend. Ritual and liturgy are ways we enact that ascent in our daily lives.
There is no reason why science, as an "earthly and corporeal media," cannot play a role in the understanding of the world. I have yet to meet the Christian who thinks otherwise, although I am sure they exist. Yet, as I continue to argue, science has its limits. Science can teach me how things work, but it cannot teach me what it good. Science can tell me what I am made out of, but it cannot tell me who I am. For these answers I will go to the philosophers, the poets and the theologians.
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