Pervez Hoodbhoy December 28, 1999

Tags: Weapons , Nuclear

Dr. Hoodbhoy nominates five personalities of the millennium - people who shaped the course of human history.

href="/tag/European">European
Reformation and Renaissance centuries later. Arguing that
revelation must be guided by reason, Averroes passionately
rebutted Imam Al-Ghazzali's lengthy tirades against
mathematics and philosophy. His elaborate scheme of Quranic
exegesis inspired Muslim modernists from Syed Ahmad Khan and
Rashid Rida to Ghulam Mohammed Pervez. In his extensive
commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, Averroes regrets the
position of women in Islam compared with their civic
equality in Plato's Republic. Europe still remembers him,
but his own civilization, locked into a state of frozen
medievalism, has few memories. His writings exist only in
Hebrew and Latin translations, the original Arabic ones were
lost centuries ago.

2. Martin Luther

Born in 1483, Germany. Died in 1546.

This German priest and scholar spearheaded the attack on the
depraved, profligate, witch-burning emperor popes of Rome.
His ultimate success, after much blood was shed, led to the
Protestant Reformation, the precursor to the European
Renaissance and the most brilliant period of human history.
Luther refuted the infallibility of the Pope, denied his
claim to jurisdiction over purgatory, focussed upon the
Church's extortion from the poor, ridiculed the sale of holy
relics, and called the cult of saints a mindless
superstition. Without Luther's revolt, the Christian Church
would probably still be mired in the Dark Ages.

3. Rene Descartes

Born in 1596, Sweden. Died in 1650.

The father of modern philosophy, and leading mathematician
and physicist, Descartes put humans at the centre of the
universe with his famous dictum "I think, therefore I am".
Whereas his contemporary, Blaise Pascal, trembled when he
looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness
and misery of man, Descartes rejected the view that human
beings are essentially miserable and sinful. Instead he
exulted in the power of human reason to understand the
cosmos and promote human happiness. It was impertinent to
pray to God to change things, he said. The Cartesian method
- reduction of a problem into its simplest parts -- remains
the foundation of scientific inquiry today. Descartes
formulated a new conception of nature as an intricate,
impersonal machine run by mechanical principles. The human
body too was a machine, a view that has since been
vindicated. In 1667 the Roman Catholic Church put his works
on the Index of Forbidden Books.

4. Isaac Newton

Born in 1643, England. Died in 1727.

A self-obsessed, secretive, and intensely jealous man by the
accounts of his contemporaries, Newton's influence on
science is nevertheless more profound than that of any
individual scientist at any point in history. His grand
synthesis of the laws of mechanical motion and gravity, and
his invention of the calculus, firmly established the
universe as a mechanical system, and mathematics as the
language of nature. Though a fervent Protestant, his
discoveries unwittingly set into motion a tidal wave that
ultimately swept away the power of the Christian Church.
Appointed Master of the Mint, he became the terror of London
counterfeiters, sending a goodly number to the gallows.
Presumably he found in them a socially acceptable target on
which to vent his rage at other Fellows of the Royal
Society, who he despised as rivals.

5. Albert Einstein

Born in 1879, Germany. Died in 1955.

Politics are for the moment but an equation is for eternity.
Probably the most creative intellect in human history,
Einstein changed forever our concepts of space and time. The
creation of the universe with a Big Bang is but one
consequence of his General Theory of Relativity. His famous
postulation of an energy-mass equation, which states that a
particle of matter can be converted into an enormous
quantity of energy, had its spectacular proof in the
creation of the atomic bomb. Horrified by the use to which
his theory had been put to, he spent the remainder of his
life fighting nuclear weapons together with searching for
the Unified Field Theory. He was unsuccessful in both. The
most celebrated scientist in history, he championed the
cause of pacifism and liberalism, and rejected an offer to
become president of Israel. Judaism had played little part
in his life, but he insisted that, as a snail can shed his
shell and still be a snail, so a Jew can shed his faith and
still be a Jew.