Ismail Serageldin Quotes
We need a world where the values of science are celebrated: free inquiry, free speech and a healthy skepticism, all coupled with a sense of wonder, a respect for truth and an ability to reason.
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
Ismail Serageldin, Egyptian Director of the Library of Alexandria & Historian, Member of the Egyptian Senate & World Bank Enviornmental VP & World Bank Enviornmental VP & World Bank Enviornmental VP, Cultural Accumulation and Modern Reading, 2007
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Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists. Ironically, the necessary intellectual freedom existed in the Islamic world one thousand years ago and Islamic science and other learning was as advanced as any and superior to most including the Christians.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. Oppenheimer was the great physicist who directed the successful development of the atomic bomb so as to build the weapon before Hitler did in World War II. However, as the technology evolved, he had doubts as to the wisdom of creating even more powerful hydrogen weapons. His viewpoint was hurting the administration’s policy of rapid unlimited nuclear weapons development, and he was the victim of a character assassination whereby his security clearance was withdrawn. The “father” of the atomic bomb was the first American casualty of atomic weapons development.
Note the language used to describe the American government at the time. To the founders, it was an EXPERIMENT. Nothing like that had ever been tried before. And none of them were sure it would work. After defeating the British, they could have chosen for their new independent nation any one of dozens of well-established forms of government. But these were all flawed. So they risked the new nation on a form that had little or no precedent and might or might not survive. Centuries later many national leaders and legislators were fearful to try anything that they were not highly certain would be effective. Experiments were rare until there were crises so great that none of the orthodox solutions would be sufficient, and even then the innovators were criticized such as with Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were candid enough to admit that they were experimenting. FDR in particular announced experimentation as a policy with rapid change for the experiments that did not work out of which there were several.
It is particularly humorous to consider Hanson’s quotation vis a vis Congressional Hearings.
This a particularly important quotation from a religious source. This view was espoused by Spinoza and for it he was excommunicated by the Jews, Christians and the Muslims. Although he was a devout Jew, he was accused of being irreligious because this view undermined the authority of the Rabbis, Priests, and Imams. See {624859}.
Ismail Serageldin (/ˈsɛrəɡɛldɪn/; born 1944 in Giza, Egypt), Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the new Library of Alexandria, inaugurated in 2002, is currently, Emeritus Librarian, and member of the Board of Trustees of the Library of Alexandria. He serves as Chair or Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific and international institutions and civil society efforts, including as co-Chair of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center (NGIC), and serves on the Advisory Committee of the World Social Science Report for 2013 and 2016, as well as the UNESCO-supported World Water Scenarios (2013) and the executive council of the Encyclopedia of Life (2010) and Chairs the Executive Council of the World Digital Library (2010). He also co-chaired the African Union's high level panel for Biotechnology (2006) and again for Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) in 2012–2013, and was a member of the ICANN Panel for the review of the internet future (2013).
