NASA Administrator Charles Bolden caused a furor when he revealed that President Obama had directed him “to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering,” Rich Lowry writes in today’s New York Post.
This shouldn’t be hard to do, he says, so long as Bolden is well-versed in accomplishments rising out of the Middle East many centuries ago. It gave us what we know as Arabic numerals, although they originated in India. It gave us algebra and the rudiments of trigonometry. It gave us medical pioneers in the 10th and 11th centuries. (A significant proportion of these scientists and physicians were Christians and Jews, Lewis notes — a fact Bolden had best keep to himself.)
The Muslim world would be better served by a frank discussion of how so much of it came to be sunk in backwardness and ignorance, although NASA’s administrator is not the natural person to lead it…