Despite being the unlikeliest of places for bibliophiles and literary enthusiasts, Iran is credited with organizing an annual book fair the Tehran International Book Fair. In 2004, the idea to establish the world’s largest book complex as an alternative to the yearly book fair was put forth. After more than a decade later the idea materialized in the form of the world’s largest book and scientific complex that spans over 100, 000 square meters and hosts multiple bookstores, a restaurant, an art gallery and 10 amphitheaters.

The facility that boasts of 400,000 books in 70,000 topics featuring writers from around the world also has quiet reading spaces for focused reading. This project – the first of its kind in the region is unique with respect to its scale and functionality.

The project was formally inaugurated in July marked by a ceremony attended by the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani, and Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.  Speaking at the event the mayor remarked: “The opening of the Book Garden is a big cultural event in the country, so that our children can make better use of this cultural and academic opportunity.”

The Tehran Book Garden is divided into four separate blocks and each is accorded a unique Persian name. Block A, named after a popular Persian prose “Baharestan” houses a permanent book enclosure. Blocks B and C make up the main entrances along with the book gardens amphitheater, a cultural gallery and cultural artifacts that are displayed for sale. This section which features the country’s biggest art gallery covering an area of around 1700 square km has some of the best art installations on display, featuring paintings, ceramics, handmade artifacts and visual displays from different regions. Block D called “Sarvestan” is a more specialized section comprising an entire floor which is dedicated to a hands on and engaging scientific center for kids and young adults. This section is well stocked carrying more than 30,000 books on a host of subjects. The 12,000 square meter science amusement park is a popular sight for kids providing them with an opportunity to experience scientific concepts with the help of scientific models and interactive, inquiry based displays.

Another interesting aspect of the garden is its Robotic Club which offers courses in a range of areas including artificial intelligence[1]. In terms of design the complex with plenty of green spaces on its rooftops is conceptualized around ancient Persian architecture. The complex being hailed as an urban green space intervention has plenty of green spaces inside covering over 20,000 square meters, this is in addition to the massive 25,000-square-metre roof garden.

Sources:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/iran-world-biggest-bookstore/

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Space-to-Read-in-Iran-as-the-Worlds-Biggest-Book-Garden-Opens-20170706-0042.html

Introduction

 Modern science infiltrated the Islamic world in the beginning of the  nineteenth century. But what affected Muslim intellectuals mostly was  not science itself; rather, it was the transfer of various philosophical  currents, entan­gled with science, that had a profound effect on the mind  of Muslim scientists and intellectuals. Schools like posi­tivism and  Darwinism penetrated the Islamic world and dominated its academic      circles and posed some challenges to several Islamic theological doctrines.  Some scholars attempted to reinterpret some of the Islamic theological  issues in the light of modern science. But some Muslim philosophers  differentiated between the findings of modern science and its    philosophical underpinnings. They advocated the discovery of the secrets  of nature through experimentation and theoretical work, but warned against its positivistic interpretations, advertised in the name of science. In the company of the last group, I believe that the source of the claimed conflicts between modern science and religion is to be found mostly in the philosophical attachments to science, rather than science per se. Here, we elaborate on several crucial challenges which are propounded, in the name of science, concerning the existence of God, life, spirit and purpose in nature.

• The Problem of Life and Spirit

 According to the Holy Qur’an, human beings have a physical dimension and a spiritual one. The latter comes into being at a later stage in the development of the human body, and has non-material nature. It is a Divine Grace emanated to every human being:

“When your Lord said to the angels, ‘Indeed I am going to create a human out of a dry clay [drawn] from an aging mud. So when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down in prostration before him’.”  (al-Hijr 29)

The idea that human beings have a dual aspect, i.e. physical and spiritual, is an old one and has been a controversial problem since old times. In our time when empiricist philosophy is dominant, the primacy is attributed to matter, and life is considered as a byproduct of physico-chemical processes, leaving no room for the human soul. Francis Crick, who was one the discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule, says this clearly:

The astonishing Hypothesis is that “you,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (1)

The prevalent outlook restricts reality to what is detectable through physico-chemical processes. But this outlook cannot be derived from science per se; rather, it is rooted in the naturalistic philosophy ruling over contemporary scientific circles? Roger Trigg describes the matter beautifully:

“Why should not a transformed science one day even be able to accept the existence of ‘spiritual’ realities? Only a metaphysical decision now that such things cannot exist would suggest that that is impossible. The question is whether we are concerned with the nature of reality, or with the validity of a scientific method tailored to current human capabilities.” (2)

In response to the position of materialists concerning the problem of life and spirit, Muslim philosophers argue that:

(a) In addition to the material dimension, human beings own a spiritual dimension that appears when the conditions for its appearance is fulfilled. In fact, spirit is a special effusion of Allah to each individual human being. The denial of this spiritual dimension by materialists is not a scientific decision; rather it is a metaphysical decision not rooted in empirical science.

Mutahhari , a contemporary Muslim philosopher, describes the Qur’anic position concerning this matter:

“The Qur’an’s logic concerning life is that an effusion [of Allah], at a higher level than the sensible body horizon… This logic is based [on the fact that] sensible matter, by itself, lacks life and that life is an effusion and a light from a higher source” (3)

It is interesting that John Eccles, a Nobel Laureate in Medicine, says the same thing:

Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced uniqueness, I am constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the Self or Soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. To give the explanation in theological terms: each Soul is a new Divine creation which is implanted into the growing foetus at some time between conception and birth. (4)

Neville Mott, a Nobel Laureate in physics, concurs:

“I believe, too, that neither physical science nor psychology can ever ‘explain’ human consciousness … To me, then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.” (5)

Furthermore, a number of eminent contemporary physicists, without any reference to metaphysics, believe that consciousness, which is a manifestation of spirit, is not explainable in terms of physics. For example, Schrödinger says:

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” (6)

Even Richard Dawkins, who believes that science can ultimately explain everything, admits that consciousness is one of the most difficult problems. In an interview from October 2009, he says:

“Consciousness is the biggest puzzle facing biology, facing neurobiology, facing evolutionary biology.  It is a very, very big problem.” (7)

Popper, however, believed that the origin of life will probably remain untestable for ever and that even if scientists create life in a laboratory, they can never be sure that life actually began in the same way. (8)

(b) Physico-chemical processes prepare the ground for life, i.e. they are necessary conditions for the emergence of life. But they are not sufficient conditions. Muslim philosophers do not deny the material ground for life, but they believe that at a certain stage of the physical development of a body, it is through God’s effusion that life is developed in human beings. In Mutahhari’s words:

“The synthesis, addition, subtraction and combination of the parts of matter are necessary conditions for the appearance of life effects, but they are not sufficient.” (9)

Materialists only see part of the problem, but they claim that they are seeing the whole. A radio is necessary to broadcast the signals sent by a transmitter, but it is not sufficient. There has to be a transmitter.

(c) Even if one day human beings bring about living organisms, theists’ claim for the existence of a spiritual element is not disproved. Because they can claim that when the material ground of life is ready, Allah will effuse life to it, as He is the owner of infinite effusion. As Mutahhari put it:

“If some day human beings discovered the law of creation of living beings … and discovered all conditions and material parts of a living creature … does that creature become a living one or not? The answer is that it certainly becomes a living one, as it is not possible that the conditions for the diffusion becomes available but it is not realized…

If some day human beings get this opportunity, what is essentially done is the preparation for the appearance of life, not the creation of life.” (10)

Mulla Sadra, an eminent Muslim philosopher of the 17^th century, believed that the soul appears at a certain stage of transubstantial motion of the body.  However, the body is not the cause of the soul, but it  provides the ground for the emergence of the soul:

 “In truth, the human spirit is material in creation and action, but it is  immaterial in subsistence and intellection.” (11)   

 After emergence, however, the soul does not depend on the body and survives  the body’s death, i.e. it is immortal. In short, soul has a corporeal ground, but  a spiritual subsistence.

 (2) Creation of the Universe

 Modern cosmology started with Einstein’s 1917 article entitled, “Cosmological  Considerations about General Relativity.” Einstein applied his theory of general relativity (GR) to the whole universe. Einstein’s equations have different solutions, but GR cannot choose a solution by itself. In 1929, Hubble noticed that the spectra of light reaching us from galaxies is red-shifted and this shift is proportional to the distance of that galaxy from ours. This was interpreted in terms of the expansion of the universe, and led to the big bang model of the universe that implies an initial time for the creation of the universe.

In the 1940’s, Fred Hoyle and his collaborators presented the steady-state model of the universe, which claimed that there was no temporal beginning to our universe. The steady-state theory had appeal for some physicists, because they thought that with this theory they can dispense with the idea of a Creator for the universe. Weinberg is very clear about this:

“The idea that universe had no start appeals to many physicists philosophically, because it avoids a supernatural act of creation.” (12)

Similarly, Stephen Hawking:

 “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.” (13)

The discovery of the microwave background radiation in 1965 gave an impetus to the big bang model of the universe.

In the last three decades, atheist physicists have been after the elimination of the initial moment of time, as they considered this as an indication of the creation of the universe by an external agent. In Hawking’s words,

“So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” (14)

 But the assumption of no beginning in time, does not make the universe self-explanatory, as Paul Davies explains:

“The fact that the universe might have no origin in time does not explain its existence, or why it  has the form it has. Certainly, it does not explain why nature possesses the relevant fields (such as  the creation field) and physical principles that  establish the steady—state condition.” (15)

Furthermore, as some Muslim and Christian scholars have indicated, creation does not mean creation in time. Rather, it means dependence on God. As Arthur Peacocke put it:

“The principal stress in the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation … is on the dependence and contingency of all entities, and events, other than God himself: it is about a perennial relationship between God and the world and not about the beginning of the Earth, or the whole universe at a point in time.” (16)

Furthermore, in Philip Hefner’s view:

“Creation for Christian theology is by no means limited to protology. It is not limited by what happened at the beginning when time was first created. Creation also refers to God’s ongoing sustaining of the world. Every movement of the world’s existence depends on the ongoing grace of God.” (17)

This is similar to the view of Mulla Sadra, an eminent 17^th-century Muslim philosopher, who believed that our world is recreated at every instant. Mulla Sadra, however, considered no beginning for the creation. In his view, the belief in the uninterrupted effusion of Allah requires eternality of creation. The argument, in Mutahhari’s words, goes as follows:

“They have thought that the theory of eternity of matter is inconsistent with the belief in God. But there is no inherent connection between this theory and the denial of God; rather, theist philosophers believe that belief in God requires belief in the eternity and continuation of His grace and creativeness , which requires the eternity of creation.” (18)

On this basis, Mutahhari concludes that there could have been other worlds before our world:

“On the basis of monotheistic principles we should say that there is no beginning for the universe. If [it turns out] that this universe has a beginning, there should have been another world, [possibly]in different form… In order for the world to have a God, who is inherently all-emanating and eternally graceful, there should have been always creatures  existent”. (19)

Arthur Eddington was hesitant about the Big Bang theory on the same grounds:

“ As a scienti,st I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang; unscientifically, I feel equally unwilling to accept the implied discontinuity in the divine nature.” (20)

• Does the universe have a purpose?

 In the Qur’anic view, God is the Creator and the Sustainer of the universe. He has created everything in measure and has decreed for it a telos. The creation is in truth, not for sport or vanity, and everything has a definite term:

We did not create them, save in truth. (44:38)

 We have not created the heavens and the earth and whatsoever is between them, save in truth and for a definite term. (46:3)

 We did not create the heaven and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, as play … (21:16)

 We have not created the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, for vanity … (38:27)

The above verses imply the creation of the universe by God as well as its guidance by Him. In fact, the Qur’an talks of a universal notion of purpose and a direction to the created universe:

[Moses] said: “Our Lord is He Who gave everything its creation, then guided it.” (20:50)

 Imam Fakhr al-Din Razi, in his celebrated commentary on the Holy Qur’an, has elaborated on the distinction between the creation of a thing and its sense of direction. (21) This sense of direction is a mysterious dimension present in everything, directing it toward its proper God-assigned role.

Following the Qur’an, Muslim theologians have never ignored teleological considerations, and the silence of modern science about this point has not affected their view, though it has had a silencing effect on Muslim scientists.

Teleology played an important role in medieval science. For the scientists of that era, every created thing had its especial place in the hierarchy of the created world, because it was created by a God who had designed a telos to the universe. The founders of modern science, who were devoted theists, did not deny the presence of telos to the universe, but they did not consider the job of science to deal with teleological considerations. But the negligence of teleological considerations by the scientists of the last few centuries is partly   due to their heavy involvement with mathematical manipulations and the predictive aspects of science, and partly due to the false assumption that questions of teleological nature hinder further development of science.

With further development of modern science and the dominance of empiricist outlook, teleology was considered as an avenue for theism. Therefore, atheists have been insisting on denying any kind of teleological considerations. In Atkins’ words:

A gross contamination of the reductionist ethic is the concept of purpose. Science has no need of purpose. All events at the molecular level that lies beneath all our actions, activities, and reflections are purposeless, and are accounted for by the collapse of energy and matter into ever-increasing disorder. (22)

 Similarly, Steven Weinberg sees no visible purpose in the universe:

“The present universe had evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” (23)

 But can one, on the basis of data obtained from chemistry or molecular biology at the level of atoms and molecules, claim that there is no telos to the nature? The answer is no, because this conclusion is not drawn directly from science; rather, it is rooted in the metaphysical prejudices of the scientists involved. It is, in fact, a jump from an epistemological statement to an ontological one, and is a direct result of restricting the whole of existence to the material world and the sources of our knowledge to sense impressions.

In response to Weinberg who denies any purpose in the universe, Paul Davies mentions two important points: if the universe has no purpose, then there would be two problems: (i) scientific effort would be meaningless, and (ii) the more we search nature, the more it seems incomprehensible:

“If [the universe] isn’t about anything, there would be no good reason to embark on the scientific quest in the first place, because we would have no rational basis for believing that we could thereby uncover additional coherent and meaningful facts about the world. So, we might justifiably invert Weinberg’s dictum and say that the more the universe seems pointless, the more it also seems incomprehensible.” (24)

Later on, Weinberg himself qualified his earlier statement about a pointless universe by saying that:

“I believe that there is no point in the universe that can be discovered by the methods of science.” (25)

 But, contrary to what Weinberg says, some scientists and philosophers (both in the Islamic world and in the West) think that there are some clues to the teleological aspects of our universe in modern science. One has to be perceptive to discover such clues. For example the notions of purpose and design of the created universe has recently attracted much attention to the so-called anthropic principle, according to which the physical constants of nature are so-finely tuned that if they were slightly different, carbon-based life could not have developed and we would not be here. Anthropic coincidences call for an explanation, and there have been several explanations. In the monotheistic religions, one can take them as an indication that God planned the universe with human beings in mind. Other explanations carry heavy loads of metaphysical assumptions which, in my view, are much more involved than the explanation in terms of an a priori plan by an intelligent designer. For example, the most serious alternative to the design hypothesis, is the many-worlds hypothesis, in which one postulates infinite universes to explain the fine tuning of fundamental constants. In Stephen Hawking’s words:

“The multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit.” (26)

 But, as Paul Davies says, this carries too much baggage and the existence of many worlds is not scientifically disprovable:

“Not everybody is happy with the many-universes theory. To postulate an infinity of unseen and unseeable universes just to explain the one we do see seems like a case of excess baggage carried to the extreme. It is simpler to postulate one unseen God …

Scientifically, the many-universes theory is unsatisfactory because it could never be falsified: what discoveries could lead a many-worlder to change her/his mind?” (27)

It is interesting that the idea of the multiverse, which is used by atheists for denouncing God’s existence implied by the entropic principle, is used by both Muslim and Christian scientists and philosophers to secure the idea of everlastingness of God’s grace. In Mutahhari’s words:

“Maybe they are right that if we go back so many years, the world did not have the present order. But how do we know that there had not been another world before ours with a different order?” (28)

In addition, some theists have asserted that an all-powerful God could have created many worlds, rather than just one world. In the words of George Ellis:

“Does the idea of a multiverse preclude the monotheistic idea of a creator God?… I argue that the answer is no … the ideas can exist together. God could have chosen to operate via creation of multiverses. The multiverse proposal says nothing about ultimate causation (chance, probability, design): All the same anthropic issues arise as for a single universe: Why this multiverse and not another one?” (29)

References

1. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1994),p. 3

2. Roger Trigg, https://www.faraday.st-https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/CIS/trigg_lecture.pdf

3. Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works, Vol. 13 (Tehran: Sadra Publications, 1975), p. 56

4. John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005), p. 249

5. Neville Mott, Can Scientists Believe? (London: James & James Science Publishers Ltd., 1991) ,p.8

6. Erwin Schrodinger, “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1984), p. 334

7. http://ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-steve-paulson-reports-consciousness

8. John Horgan, The End of Science (Great Britain: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), p. 38

9. Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works, Vol. 13 (in Persian), p. 38

10. Mortaza Mutahhari, Ibid., pp. 58-59

11. Mulla-Sadra (Ṣadr ad-Din Muḥammad Shirazi), al-Hikmat al-Muta’aliyah fi al-Asfar al-Aqliyyah al-Arba’ah (Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-Arabi, 1981), Vol. 9, p. 347

12. Steven Weinberg, The New Yorker, 12 June,1997, p. 20

13. Stephen Hawking, ABrief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988), p. 46

14. Ibid., p. 141

15. Paul Davies, The Mind of God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 56

16. Arthur R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton Lectures, 1978 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p.78

17. Philip Hefner, “The Evolution of the Created Co-Creator” in Cosmos as Creation, ed. by Ted Peters (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), p. 227

18. Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Tehran: Sadra Publications, 1995), p. 524

19. Ibid., p. 524

20. David Layzer, Cosmogenesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.137

21. Fakhr al-Din Razi, al-Tafsīr al-Kabīr, Vol. 31 (Beirut: Dar’Ihya’ al-Turath al-Arabi), pp. 138-140

22. John Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 127

23. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 154

24. Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (Great Britain: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 16

25. http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html

26. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), 165

27. Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Touchstone, 1993), p. 190
28. Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works (in Persian), Vol. 10 (Tehran, Sadra Publications, 1976), p. 405

29. George Ellis, “The Multiverse, Ultimate Causation and God”, https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/resources/George%20Ellis%20Lecture/Ellis-Faraday.pdf

Mehdi Golshani is a contemporary Iranian theoretical physicist and philosopher and Professor of physics at Sharif University of Technology.

Legend has it that that the seeds of what we know today as the Silicon Valley were laid at the Stanford University and the Stanford University Industrial Park when a Stanford Professor Frederick Terman who loaned a thousand dollars to two of his students – William Hewlett and David Packard – who ended up creating Hewlett and Packard Company. (1) Then came Fairchild Electronics and the rest is history.

Ever since, the Silicon Valley has been a part and parcel of the folklore of entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation. Governments and locations, from both developed and developing world, have tried to create Silicon Valley clones and the results have been rather mixed. Yet the dream of creating a technology cluster lives on, sometimes in the most unlikely-est of the places.

The world’s best kept secret

The newest aspirants to this global trend is none other than Tehran, the capital of Iran – a country that can easily be described the ‘world’s best kept secret’. Dr. Fereidoun Ghasemzadeh, CEO of Afranet and a professor of management and economics at Sharif University, recently described Iran as ‘the largest unconquered market in the world.’ (2) Not only is it home to potential immense wealth – the second largest discovered oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and the second largest gas reserves after Russia – but also a large and multi-talented population of over 130 million people.

With the promise that easily pales many of its neighbours, Iran is only undermined by its the traditional and archaic socio-economic structures, large (and inefficient) government, the oil-based economy and the dampening of economic incentive to venture that it creates, a lack of maturity of the market economy, and crippling sanctions by the West.

The latter has been both a challenge for entrepreneurs and businessmen since it significantly enhances the cost of doing business in Iran. But it also creates an opportunity for it has shielded them from intense international competition thus allowing them to develop basic technical capabilities. Though sometimes, if not always, only to be hampered again in the efforts to capitalize on this opportunity because of restricted market opportunities.

Entrepreneurs: people are the key

Nevertheless, Iran’s entrepreneurs are brimming with talent and energy to make a difference for their country and, in the process, money for themselves. They also feel that there is a narrow window of opportunity to use technology to transform Iranian society and this ultimately shall open doors to many more possibilities. Several demographic statistics are worth noting here:

40% of the Iran’s population – around 80 million people – are between the ages of 20-40 years. This generation of baby boomers – the generation that was born after the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war – is both young and restless and pushing for rapid changes within the society.

60% of the university graduates are women. 40% of the students study engineering at the bachelors level, though up to 40% of university graduates are unemployed. This makes for perfect conditions for an entrepreneurship revolution in Iran. And there are already signs that this is beginning to happen. Many of these young people will, in the process, create the future for Iran, and for the World.

Three frontiers for Iranian entrepreneurs

A number of ‘me-too’ startups have used internationally successful business models to fill particular gaps within the local eco-system. Whether these are group buying (Khafifian.com), online ecommerce (Digikala.com), crowdfunding (Hamijoo.com), online video sharing (apparat.com), or online food delivery (mamanpaz.ir), these startups have begun to target gaps in local socio-economic structures as a starting point for a transformation that has to come. (3)

In doing so, they have avoided falling into the trap of expecting the government to catch-up. Techcrunch, the technology industry website, has called Iran the ‘latest country the internet economy is emerging in.” (4) There are also signs that the German Rocket Internet model is beginning to take hold in Iran. (5) This has been, and rightly so, the first frontier in Iran’s quest to use technology within its society.

The second frontier – something that many entrepreneurs have been silently pushing at for several years – is where technology meets the traditional sectors such as transportation, healthcare, logistics, and the like. Here, there are still considerable challenges because of the considerable inertia within the country’s socio-economic infrastructure. This will require going beyond the ‘me-too’ products to create solutions that will address typical Iranian problems.

Here, the government can use its procurement power to make a difference to create market opportunities for the entrepreneurs. But, like most other governments in the developing world, fall short of doing so. One could find entrepreneurs with decent products who would have readily found government support in another (developed) country complaining that there is no market for them within Iran.

The final frontier for Iranian entrepreneurs shall be to target global markets from Iran. There are riches to be had in selling to the world and there is no reason that why creative and entrepreneurial Iranians can’t have a fair share of the pie. However, doing so will require not the removal of Western sanctions – just leveling the playing field for them but also exposing Iranian entrepreneurs to global competition.

While there are some examples such as Parsa Ghaffari’s Artificial Intelligence Startup Ayelien, among others, creating the next Facebook, Google, Microsoft, WhatsApp, or the like does not often happen in a vacuum. It is no accident that a vast majority of these billion dollar companies were created in the free and laissez faire United States rather than the much more regulated Europe, Asia, or a developing country. While exceptions can happen, creating a system of innovation and venturing that repeatedly delivers shall require more than just luck and raw talent.

Incubators –>  Science Parks –> Accelerators –> VCs

Some help is on the way. In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on creating the necessary ingredients of an innovation and startup eco-system. Here is the government seems to have taken the first step.

Just over 20 years ago, the proposal to set up the country’s first technology incubator and science park was put forth before the Governor of the Isfahan Province and this evolved into the Isfahan Science and Technology Town (ISTT). Over the years, Iranians, through government involvement at various levels, have created 34 science and technology parks and more than 150 incubators. These investments, though managed in a semi-private sector fashion, laid the foundations of an emerging entrepreneurial culture within Iran.

Emboldened, the private sector is now jumping in the fray, particular when it comes to information technology startups. Plans are afoot to create Iran’s first private sector STPs. This shall not be encumbered by regulations and restrictions that hamper the usual public sector STPs and will be driven by incentives and flexibility of a true private sector player.

While there was hardly a startup eco-system in Iran in the early 2000s, since 2010-12 it has seen an explosive growth. More than 35 Startup Weekend events have been organized thus far (5). Recently, there have been a number of accelerators and semi-formal incubators that have come in.

Accelerators include DMOND Group (a brand of Plug & Play) and Avatech, though there are several other private sector initiatives in the works. Avatech is most well-known and it recently organized its demo day with 6-8 companies presenting their products. There is considerable angel and VC interest in some of these emerging startups.

Private ambitions, public aspirations

While these exciting developments represent the passion and ambition of private individuals seeking to make a killing at the frontiers of science, technology, and innovation in Iran, there is also patriotism and sense of being at the forefront of history being created for this nation of 130 million people. Young Iranian entrepreneurs believe it is in their grasp to fundamentally change Iran’s standing in the world by showing the tremendous raw talent and energy that this country embodies.

The Government is not very far behind in this for they too have public aspirations – of fully integrating with the rest of the world and – of using the immense power of technology to solve Iran’s (and the World’s) problems, most notably youth unemployment but also increasingly address the country’s economic competitiveness and its transition from an oil-based to a knowledge-based economy.

It is evident from the ongoing negotiations between Iran and P5+1 that Iranians and their Government want the crippling sanctions to be lifted and for Iranians to play a role – according to their weight – in the global eco-system through creation of new technology and knowledge. Many countries of the West, particularly, China and Europe are equally eager to embrace Iran when such a break through happens for they are dazzled and charmed by the raw talent and potential of this 5000+ year old civilization.

One indicator of this was organization of the iBridges Conference in Berlin where Iranians from around the world descended to have a fundamental conversation among themselves and with others from the around world about the opportunity that this country represents.

Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Parsa Ghaffari, an Iranian Entrepreneur described the excitement in the following words:

“Iranians are, just like Israelis, very entrepreneurial. They don’t really like to work for a big company for 30 years. So I think that’s why this whole concept [of startups] became so popular so quickly in Iran.” (5)

If words had between the lines meanings, this sentence would say a lot about how Iranians see themselves and the future potential.

Iran is ready to take on the challenge of technology. Whether the world is willing, yet, to take a step forward is another story.

References:

1) http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley/Fred_Terman_Father_of_Silicon_Valley.html

2) Speech at iBridges Berlin Conference available at: http://www.ibridges.org/conference-2015

3) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/31/amazon-iranian-style-digikala-other-startups-aparat-hamijoo-takhfifan

4) http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/02/the-next-tech-startup-ecosystem-to-emerge-iran/

5) http://www.geektime.com/2015/05/26/the-persian-dream-an-in-depth-look-at-the-iranian-startup-scene/

                                                                            – Terrence Ward, Author of Searching for Hassan

The ‘secret’ only dawned on the leaders at Stanford University as they once realised that a large number of foreign students were beginning to do really well on some very hard PhD qualifying exams. Examining a bit further, they noticed that the disproportionate number of these students came not from one country in Asia but from a single university – The Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

For Sharif University, this has been a culmination of several decades of hard work and the realisation of a dream from 50 years ago.

Creme de la creme

Sharif attracts, literally, the cream of Iranian society each year. Every year, 1.5 million young Iranians take a national university entrance exam, or “concours.” Of the 500,000 who pass and are entitled to free higher education, only the top 800 can attend Sharif – that is just over 5 students out of every 10,000. (1) This is a remarkable level of selectivity. Compare that with MIT, for instance, where the acceptance rate at the undergraduate level is about 8-10% of those who apply and one could begin to get a sense of whats happening here.

“The selection process [gives] universities like Sharif the smartest, most motivated and hardworking students” in the country, says Mohammad Mansouri, a Sharif alum (’97) who is now a professor in New York. (1)

Take into the account the fact that Iran’s education system at the school and college level is already quite competitive and, unlike many other countries, most Iranian parents prefer to send their sons and daughters to study sciences and engineering rather than law or business, for instance, adds all the more rigor to this already airtight process.

One testament of the Iranian schools system’s emphasis on STEM is the fact that Iran has become a major player in the international Science Olympiads taking home trophies in physics, mathematics, chemistry and robotics. As a testament to this newfound success, the Iranian city of Isfahan recently hosted the International Physics and Mathematics Olympiads —an honor no other Middle Eastern country has enjoyed.

No wonder then that Sharif University has produced some remarkably brilliant and prolific alums. Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman ever to have won the Fields Medal of Mathematics – often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, but just an order of magnitude more prestigious – is an alum of Sharif University. Others include Behzad Razavi, Professor of Electronics at UCLA, Mohammad Shahidehpour, the Associate VP of Research at Illinois Institute of Technology, and Mehdi Setareh, the professor of architecture at Virginia Tech. (2)

In addition to those who have excelled in science and technology, Sharif also has been an alma mater to several political, social, and cultural figures such as Ali Akbar Salehi (a former President of the University and a Vice President of Iran), Morteza Alviri, former Mayor of Tehran, Ali Larijani, speaker of Majlis and former presidential candidate, Elshan Moradi (Chess Grandmaster), and Peyman Yazdanian (Music Composer). (2)

Today Sharif University has a student population of more than 9000 – of which 700 are pursuing doctrates – and 500 faculty members in 15 disciplines. It carries out a vast majority of the Industry-funded R&D in the country and is consistently ranked as No. 1 University nationally and among 500 top universities (between 250-350) around the world over the last 5 years.

Times Higher Education also ranked Sharif University 1st in the Middle East, 6th in Asia, and 27th in the world in top 100 universities under 50. (6)

However, Sharif was always not this utopia of scientific and technological prowess. It has had its fair share of ups and downs as well.

Ambitious Beginnings

Established in 1966 by Reza Shah Pahlavi – the West-aligned Shah of Iran – as The Aryamehr University of Technology (AMUT) with an idea and effort to steer the Iranian Higher Education Model towards the US tradition. Formed alongside several other schools established in collaboration with Harvard, Georgetown, and Columbia, AMUT was to become the technological powerhouse to drive Iran’s science and industry much like its inspiration, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had done for America. Much like MIT, it was to provide technical education where interdisciplinary research centers transcended traditional disciplinary departments. (3)

The Shah explained that he wanted an Iranian MIT, not an Iranian Harvard or Princeton, because Iran needed “a problem-solving type of education. (3) The final master plan of the University produced by Arthur D. Little and a number of consultants from the US clearly laid out the vision:

“The main idea in this organization of instruction is to organize the academic activities on the major technological problems of the country instead of the usual disciplines. The reality of the needs of Iranian society and the aspirations for Iran’s accelerated development requires that their educational system should not be a copy of the obsolete aspects of western systems by a lag of twenty years; instead, it must be based on Iranian culture and societal characteristics.”

And, herein lay the important twist.

At the Crossroads of Science and Religion

The Shah appointed Seyyed Hossein Nasr (the first Iranian to graduate from MIT) as AMUT’s chancellor in 1972 with the mandate to create an institution that created and built its own cultural identity within the Persian tradition. Nasr was the ideal man for the job. Having done his undergraduate from MIT in the sciences, he later moved to philosophy and history of science finishing his PhD from Harvard. (5)

As a condition of his acceptance, Nasr asked for the opportunity to develop a vigorous program in Islamic history, philosophy, and culture to complement the engineering training. “What I wanted to do as president of the university,” Nasr explained, “was to create an indigenous technology in Iran, and not simply keep copying from Western technology.” (3)

Nasr’s pioneering effort led Aryamehr to create one of the first graduate programs in the Islamic world in the philosophy of science based upon the Islamic philosophy of science. (5)

In addition, ambitious plans for a collaboration between MIT and AMUT were laid out. Nasr wrote to MIT President Jerome Wiesner (his batch mate from MIT days) and sought formal help and collaboration. (3) Plans were made of creating opportunities for AMUT faculty to take sabbaticals at MIT, for AMUT graduate students to complete their graduate training at MIT, and joint research programs between the two schools.

In a pattern that was to be repeated by US Universities many times over in the Persian Gulf later, MIT agreed to set up research centers at MIT that were ‘supported’ by Iran and supposed to engage in joint R&D with AMUT professors. Energy was high on the agenda in the 197os and Iran agreed to pay towards a $50 million Energy Research Center at MIT. (3) Flushed with oil wealth, Shah went on a buying spree. Plans were also discussed to entertain training in nuclear engineering for certain members (30 each year) of the Iranian Atomic Energy Commission.

Events would soon overtake these ambitious plans.

Politics trumps science trumps politics again

Nasr resigned in 1975 shortly before the overthrow of the Shah’s regime. Having opened their minds of philosophy, history, religion, and culture, AMUT’s students had become deeply engaged in the conversations that preceded and followed the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Nasr later reminisced on the dilemma he faced:

“Technology is not value free. It brings with it a kind of culture of its own. And so once you get into it on a high level you can become very easily alienated from your own culture and that creates a breeding ground for the worst kind of political activity. And that was also one of the reasons why the Shah paid so much attention to the new university. He said we must do everything possible to have our own scientists and engineering, to create our own technology, without this social and political explosion.”

After the revolution, a vast majority of the professors left AMUT – many went to the United States. The government of the Islamic Republic renamed the AMUT Sharif University after a Martyr of the revolution. It also separated the campus in Isfahan to create the Isfahan University of Technology. Gradually some of those who had left or were studying abroad at the time of the revolution returned – motivated to serve the revolution. (3)

While politics remained, though in a somewhat mellowed form, Sharif University has gradually become the kind of scientific and technological powerhouse that was the Shah’s vision. But it also became a lot more. As home to Iran’s best and brightest it also became a powerhouse of political ideas and the revolutionary ideology. Today, being a Sharif student is not only ones ticket abroad to the best Universities of Stanford, MIT, and Oxford but also to the corridors of power in Tehran as a substantial number of the student political leaders trained at Sharif gradually make their way to the very top of the echelons of power in Iran.

Iran’s dream of creating an MIT has been redeemed in both intended and unintended ways.

References:

1. http://www.newsweek.com/surprising-success-irans-universities-87853
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharif_University_of_Technology
3. http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~arindamp/files/MIT.pdf
4. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/05/AR2008060503904.html
5. About Nasr: http://www.nasrfoundation.org/bios.html
6. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014/one-hundred-under-fifty

Published online 20 November 2014

In the not-too-distant past, biomedical research was conducted almost exclusively in North America and Western Europe. While Asia and South America have made impressive strides in contributing to scientific output over the past two decades, the Arab world is still lagging.

Ali A. Bazarbachi, Samia J. Khoury and Mohamed H. Sayegh

Populations in the Middle East are generally afflicted with diseases similar to those prevalent in Western countries. These include cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and neurological disorders. However, regional specificities have had an impact.

A high rate of consanguinity has led to various hereditary disorders. There has also been a significant increase in metabolic disorders, specifically in the Gulf region, largely attributed to widespread changes in diet and lifestyle. Furthermore, healthcare systems have been undermined by political instability and strife, resulting in an increase in infectious diseases, malnutrition and disability.

The concept of advanced biomedical research still does not exist in most of the region, with the exception of Turkey and Iran. Recent developments in biomedical research have surfaced in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region as well, with major investment in the creation of research infrastructure and research funding. But the fruits of such effort are yet to appear because of the absence of a critical mass of committed scientists.

Most of the region’s medical schools and universities offer the transmission of ‘second-hand’ knowledge in the absence of a true research culture. A general disinterest in scientific research adversely affects the quality of teaching and cultivates a culture of apathy.

Most active research is championed by a few dynamic individuals, based on their earlier achievements abroad, with little or no institutional incentives. They mostly collaborate with their university of origin in the United States or Europe and there is scant meaningful collaboration between institutions at the national or regional level.

The region’s participation in the advancement of science and medical discovery is important. Breakthroughs will improve quality of life for Middle Eastern people and ensure better patient care. There is also a need to attract internationally renowned investigators to create a nucleus of future scientific leaders.

Scientists should be encouraged toward personal academic growth. We need to involve students in medical research by bringing the latest research findings, including the results of a faculty’s own research activities, into the classrooms. This will generate research productivity and quality publications to increase the success rate in extramural funding, and pave the way to establish PhD and MD-PhD programmes in basic medical science.

Proposed solutions

The culture of research must be nurtured across society. This should start at the most basic level; as part of school curricula. Research is a complex process requiring critical thinking and strategic planning. Teaching students these skills would motivate them to be involved in research and provide them with a solid basis for the future.

The public must also be educated about research. There are many non-governmental organizations in the region, some of which are involved in supporting patients with particular diseases. In collaboration with the local governments and universities, these NGOs could provide education to the public about the importance of proper research and how it should be conducted.

The development of basic biomedical research can be encouraged by building on the strengths of the few areas where a critical mass of high-quality research already exists. This could be achieved by establishing regional collaborative groups for translational and clinical research.

These groups could then be used to launch meaningful investigator-initiated clinical trials and to forge partnership with the pharmaceutical industry. Regional incubators or centres of excellence are also needed to better manage resources and to attract investigators from abroad. They can also generate science-based innovations if partnerships with industry are established.

These centres require solid evaluation, auditing and quality assurance mechanisms. Based on track record, size and relative stability, the American University of Beirut Faculty of Medicine and Medical Center in Lebanon, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Saudi Arabia, and other centers in the Gulf area (such as Kuwait Science Foundation or Qatar Foundation) could spearhead this programme with the goal of integrating others at a later stage. The initial centres can establish a network that allows mobility of researchers, students and technicians.

A vital step in propelling research is establishing a regional, cross-border institute for funding of biomedical research. This should be similar to the National Institute of Health in the US or the European Research Council, and be funded by private donors, governments and foundations. Funding should be merit-based and dependent on the ongoing quality of research.

Research productivity must be scientifically evaluated through a regional watchdog with a special focus on promoting original publications in high impact journals. This body can also determine initial funding of the centres of excellence and regularly evaluate them. As research is now evolving rapidly at a high rate, support mechanisms and government regulations should allow for rapid decisions, quick customs procedures and easy international contacts.

We propose the establishment of a think-tank at the highest regional level (for example the deans of certain medical schools and heads of research institutes in the region) to develop the potential structure for the regional funding agency described above. This group would then become the figurehead for persuading governments, foundations and the private sector to create a regional NIH-like structure for the region.

This is a priority and an essential step to put the region on the map in biomedical research. We believe that we have the resources and the brainpower, but we need the stimulus.

As Seneca said: it is not because things are difficult we do not dare, it is because we do not dare things are difficult.

The authors are all members of the American University in Beirut’s Faculty of Medicine.

doi:10.1038/nmiddleeast.2014.263

This article was originally published on NatureAsia. Read the original article.
Featured Image Credits: Thinkstock

The theme for this month’s issue is ‘Science and the Environment’. The world is currently under a drastic environmental shift, as several factors are coming together and modifying the ecological conditions of the earth. As the weather patterns gradually change, the inherent environmental systems of the Earth are being stirred, resulting in drops in sea levels, deforestation, decrease in crop yields, increase in global warming, melting of glaciers and so on and so forth.

This time round, localhost/muslim brings for you, an exciting infographic on the state of the environment in the Muslim world. We looked at an assortment of the most popular environmental trends in the global arena, such as out of control carbon emissions, deforestation, fossil fuel usage, water scarcity, etc. and find the most striking representation of these within the Islamic World.

The result? An infographic that brings forth some key fronts of the climate change within the Islamic World:

Click on the image for a larger view. Click (here) for a high resolution image.

Sources:

1. CDP ‘Global 500 Climate Change Report 2013’: https://www.cdp.net/CDPResults/CDP-Global-500-Climate-Change-Report-2013.pdf
2. ‘Response to climate change in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’ report: http://www.fao.org/forestry/29157-0d03d7abbb7f341972e8c6ebd2b25a181.pdf
3. ‘Climate Finance for the Middle East and North Africa: Confronting the challenges of climate change’report: www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/7921.pdf
4. ‘Climate change initiatives in Malaysia’ presentation report: http://www.auedm.net/Data/activities/1st%20Workshop/Workshop/Joy%20Pereira/KyotoJul08print.pdf
5. UNEP and WMO report, ‘Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone’ : http://www.unep.org/dewa/Portals/67/pdf/Black_Carbon.pdf
6. ADB’s report on ‘The economics of climate change in Southeast Asia: A regional review’: http://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/publications/reports/pdf/sr004/adb.pdf
7. WWF report on ‘Climate Change and its Realities for Pakistan’ : http://pecongress.org.pk/images/upload/books/6-Climate%20Change%20and%20its%20Realities%20for%20Pakistan%20%286%29.pdf
8. Tableau Public pictorial report on ‘World CO2 Emissions’: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/co2-emissions
9. EPA report on ‘Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data’: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html
10. ‘Everything you need to know about climate change – interactive’ in The Guardian (21 August 2011): http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2011/aug/15/everything-know-climate-change
11. WMO report on ‘A summary on current climate change findings and figures’: http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/factsheet/documents/ClimateChangeInfoSheet2013-03final.pdf
12. IIED report on ‘A burden to share? Addressing unequal climate impacts in the Least Developed Countries’: http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/17181IIED.pdf
13. UNDP-UNEP report on ‘Mainstreaing Climate Change adaptation into development planning: a guide for practitioners’: http://www.unep.org/pdf/mainstreaming-cc-adaptation-web.pdf
14. IPCC report on ‘Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change’: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/
15. WHO report on ‘The social dimensions of climate change’: http://www.who.int/globalchange/mediacentre/events/2011/social-dimensions-of-climate-change.pdf
16. WHO and WMO report on ‘Atlas of health and climate’: http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/atlas/report/en/
17. Water cooperation 2013 infographic
18. World Bank report ‘Turn Down the Heat’: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2013/06/14/000445729_20130614145941/Rendered/PDF/784240WP0Full00D0CONF0to0June19090L.pdf
19. World Resources Institute infographic on ‘Project Potico’: http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/forests-and-landscapes-indonesia
20. IEA report on ‘Key World Energy Statistics 2013’: http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld2013.pdf
21. UN report on ‘Production, trade and consumption of crude petroleum’: http://unstats.un.org/UNSD/energy/yearbook/2010/2010_214.pdf
22. NASA Global Climate Change Statistics: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence
23. Forbes ’25 biggest oil and gas companies’: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45glfe/not-just-the-usual-suspects-2/