A few days ago, an email from Zahra Takhshid (granddaughter of Mohammad Yazdi, former head of the Islamic Republic's judiciary) was sent to some people, and I was one of the recipients.  In this e-mail, a plan for the Islamization of information technologies in the field of law, especially sharia, was proposed.  This is apparently the research project of Takhshid as one of the lecturers at Harvard Law School.  Harvard University, which once trained members of the U.S. Supreme Court, is at one of its lowest points today, where the Islamicization of the internet and information technology has been promoted by the granddaughter of one of the founders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Harvard University has an Islamic law program at its law school that spends millions of dollars a year rereading and trying to modernize sharia.  It is within this framework that people like Zahra Takhshid are hired — not to reinvent the wheel (it could be useful and teach them something), but to invent something that is supposed to work like the wheel but is not a wheel.  The ideologues want to reinvent sharia as a system of law to legitimize their totalitarian power and wealth.  Basically, the plan to Islamize science has been a political plan from the beginning to gain power by eliminating the empiricist and rationalist approaches to science.

During its work, Harvard Law School's Islamic Law Program has not provided a single report on the inconsistency of sharia or its interpretations with human rights; the brutality enshrined in Islamic sharia rulings in the judicial realm; and the record of the Taliban, ISIS, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in judicial affairs, as if these phenomena do not exist.  Despite the New Left (Adorno, Foucault, and Gramsci) claiming a critical approach to society and politics, this approach has been completely ignored in the humanities and social sciences, as any criticism would ultimately offend a group and disrupt the political coalition of the left.  The thin-skinned ruling Islamists in Iran would also be hurt.  The record of such centers, which work on the basis of identity politics, shows what a failure this ideology has delivered in the field of research and education.

The idea of a quantum internet project focuses solely on injecting Islamic teachings into it.  The advertisement for student recruitment for this delusional project speaks of "Islamic digital humanities/data science space" that exists only in a fantasy world unless we study the filtering, censorship, and hacking of Islamists in this category.  The author, like the students of Shi'i seminaries, calls "use of a data science/digital humanities tool, method, or a data set to answer novel questions in the fields of Islamic law or history" (in fact, using digital tools to search for Islamic legal texts, jurists' fatwas, and religious books) and cataloguing them as "Islamic digital humanities."  This naming happened after buying thousands of computers for seminaries in Iran.

Another discussion of this educational project is "principles of Artificial Intelligence in Islam," which should probably be found in the works of Shi'ite imams (1100 to 1300 years ago) by digging in religious texts.  Since the 1950s, Islamists have sought to find all the achievements of modern civilization in Islam.  This effort has not only not pushed religion and knowledge forward, but has sparked a wave of religious totalitarianism around the world.  Islamists have extracted all the principles of the world of technology, art, literature, and science from Islam in the last sixty years and have increased their power and wealth.  When you believe that in one book, all the knowledge of the world is hidden, you start digging and digging to extract everything from it, and the Harvard donors and the oil revenues of the Iranian people will provide for it.

The author of the plan for this class claims she wants to extract the moral and legal principles of artificial intelligence from Islam, as Munir al-Din Hosseini did at the Academy of Islamic Sciences and Mesbah Yazdi at Baqir al-Uloom Institute in Iran (they both failed).  The Islamists' preconceived notion is that Islam is a moral school (assuming that religion and morality are the same) and human intellect and experience are unable to regulate these areas.  If this is taken seriously, eventually, Takhshid and her comrades will set up an Ifta Council and later a Guardian Council in Harvard to extract all principles and policies from the Quran and hadith, because the non-jurist has no authority to work in these areas and cannot attach the terms of Islam to his interpretations.

In the last six decades, Islamists have not proposed any educational or research program without Islamization at the core.  They think this is an alternative plan, the importance and fruitfulness of which Western societies and educational environments have not realized.  The research project that has been a waste of resources in universities in Iran has been brought to Western universities today and has found a place to be presented under the ideology of identity politics.  Today's generation in these universities is oblivious to the fact that this plan was copied from the Marxist (ideological) plan of science, which itself has caused scandals for a hundred years.

Islamists have been successful in packaging and promoting their snake oil.  Munir al-Din Hosseini, who wanted to create Islamic electronics and chemistry in addition to Islamic sociology and psychology, named his institute "the Academy."  This name does not fit much in the Islamists' anti-Westernism and avoidance of Western concepts, but it gives legitimacy to his institution in the eyes of the Muslim masses.  Mesbah called the activity of Islamization of sciences under his supervision "cooperation between the seminary and the university," which no one has a problem with, but the type of activity had no legitimacy.  Zahra Takhshid at Harvard also calls her activity the "Islamic Law Lab."  In fact, there is no laboratory, but the classroom is called a laboratory to gain more attention and give it experimental value.

Before the domination of the ideology and discourse of identity politics in the academic space (modernist discourse), Muslims, like other religious scholars, followed the scientific method and had positive achievements, such as Abd ul-Salam (a Pakistani scientist) in the field of physics.  Identity-oriented science has seriously damaged both Western universities and Muslim participation in the world's educational and research institutions.

For forty-two years, the Iranian people have been paying the price for Islamicizing everything from politics, art, science, and academia to architecture, family, city squares, and even mountains and deserts by daily suppressing their rights and wasting their financial and institutional resources.  Harvard executives still do not have a grasp of it.  They have not been commanded that science cannot be ideologized or mixed with religion or identity.

The whole Islamization project has been a big business for devouring Muslims' wealth and prestige in the Middle East.  Unfortunately, today, Harvard financiers and executives have fallen to a level of followers and imitators of the Shi'ite clergy in Iran who sell Islam for their own interests.

Image via Max Pixel.