Space and options of Arab youth .. Between science and other things

Every summer, millions of Arab students wonder: Which college do they attend after high school? What fate awaits them after graduation? Hence, the advice comes right and left, mostly covering the innate spirit of adventure and dreams in those fateful decisions, to remind them of the harshness of the social, economic and intellectual reality we live, which rejects the adventure and sees that material realism is the "guaranteed" way to work and marriage, and determine All your decision from birth to set your burial place.

I was born and raised in a simple Egyptian family, where my mother collapsed in grief when she refused to join the Faculty of Pharmacy and marry my cousin who would help me to work in a pharmacy after graduation, so that I could join the Faculty of Science, Astronomy Department, Cairo University on a professional trip. Unknown, and in the absence of a real job qualify me to study science in the Arab world. The Soul

Today, after more than 20 years of work at NASA in the United States, and prestigious research centers at the universities of California and Paris, the path of science and knowledge revealed to me that we did not come to this planet to be a copy of our ancestors, and that we are not only here Let us live the reality, but - most importantly - to change it. The Soul

The call for bold experience is not a call for madness or imitation of the West. It is a call for learning. Experience and the courage to fight it are an essential part of it. A wise decision does not stem from a fearful mind. The Soul

Perhaps the roots of fear among our students in the self-determination of knowledge in the Arab world, stem from the culture of seeking professional guarantees of success rather than willingness to take risks and adapt to the changes, which are absent from the educational system, which is dominated by the nature of absolute obedience, rather than Of the ability to question, analyze and persuade. The Soul

Add to that the wrong social legacies of the existence of so-called "top colleges", and the emergence of the rankings of the universities; By choosing what is socially acceptable before what is cognitively desired by the student, the Arab world loses a large number of talented people in many fields.

Many Arab students may not know that Neil Armstrong, who is making his first steps on the moon, was a graduate student at the University of Southern California, where I was honored to work in the same engineering school. He graduated from them. The Soul

The first man to walk on the moon was not only an astronaut, but also a student and earned his degree less than a year after returning to Earth. His era in the late 1960s, in which the Apollo space project successfully landed a man on the moon, was not a prosperous or stable period. On the contrary, it was more like what we are living in our region today.

The United States was at the height of its war loss in Vietnam, its president, John Kennedy, the founder of the Apollo space project, and influential civil society leaders such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. King, Malcolm X, and others who fought racism. The Soul

Further, there was also the accusation of NASA of repeated failure and waste of public money in the early stages of the race with the Russian space project, and was blamed in each crisis on the appointment of leaders and researchers from the German refugees, who were accused of belonging to Nazism and the name " NASA "on the name close to the name of the party" Nazi. " Many nationalists at the time thought that these foreigners were spending the money of the American people with little return.

The success of the Apollo space project - after years of experiments, thanks to the missiles developed by German scientist von Braun and a large team of German scientists who abandoned the war - to establish a new principle in American society is that knowledge is the basis of identity and belonging and not any Something else. The Soul

This is an important lesson for our Arab societies, especially the Gulf states, which, if they can absorb, attract and resettle talented migrants, will build a civilizational renaissance that extends westward to all parts of the Arab world.

Returning to space science, it is defined as the science of the discovery of planets, moons and distant celestial bodies in order to understand the origin and evolution of the universe, including galaxies, the solar system and the planet.

It is thus a basic science for understanding the changes that the planet is going through, without which man is unable to cope with phenomena such as climate change and water scarcity, monitoring natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, meteorites, and those that led to extinction. Dinosaurs. The Soul

The history and development of this science and its roots to the science of astronomy and mathematics founded by Arab civilization, turning the myths of the Greek stars and constellations to science with mathematical foundations describing the movement of planets and moons, and the foundation of modern astronomy for nearly a thousand years, and centuries later Long false beliefs and superstition. The Soul

Arab scientists knew the movement of the moon accurately and understood its regularity, and calculated the lunar months and made them the basis of their calendar, and guided by the moonlight and the locations of stars for navigation and travel in the desert. Surprisingly, the civilization that founded this science is today the most widely disseminated misconception associated with it. The Soul

As the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon, many of us see it as a cinematic lie, while others tell stories that an astronaut heard the call to prayer on the moon and became a Muslim when he returned to Earth.

This is in addition to exaggerations such as that the Arabs determined the first landing on the moon, not to mention the daily news about the Arab astronauts carrying images of their rulers into space, as well as those who see that the Earth is flat or we can leave it at all. The Soul

Add to all that the annual confusion in determining the beginning of the month of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr and the beginning of the pilgrimage season, as if the moon's regular movement has turned into a kind of traffic in our streets, two do not agree in the description.

The question is: Why is the spread of misconceptions more related to space science than the rest of the other sciences? Why has the role of science in Arab societies declined over the past five centuries after a long period of prosperity? We can summarize the answer in three interrelated points:

The first is the succession of the tyrants, which replaced the strong ruler with his weapon with the principle of good governance with his knowledge. This was the reason for the absence of scholars from the strategic decision-making circles that shape the future, thus obliterating the culture of science among the masses. The strong is not fine ruler or else to rule our planet dinosaurs that are stronger than human, but on the contrary extinct because of their inability to adapt to variables.

Second, in the absence of intellectual freedoms and the spread of fundamentalism and ethnicity resulting from the first reason, scientific discoveries are presented as a product of Western intellectual that is not related to the Arab reality, which has transformed the randomness of its scene and the degradation of its values ​​and its delay to a special cultural heritage, It is from the Western cultural invasion! Most of our communities warmly celebrate the success of their children abroad, and remain shy in fighting the wrong legacies that hinder the success industry at home.

Third, a result of the above two reasons, as the masses are reluctant to know and many find a special euphoria in distorting scientific discoveries and skepticism, it suggests that we have not missed any human progress, and that all the questions of Western thought existential questions is "Fun and futility", while in reality nothing changes, history repeats itself, and every progress is a lie. If that were true, the screen on which you read this article now would not exist.

In all of the above I do not see that the Arab nation "absent", it does not deliberately spread ignorance, but left to face it alone after a broad category of scholars are reluctant to fight the battles of enlightenment for fear of leading them to confront with tyranny, and the masses have become palatable Ignorance of widespread misconducts, in which they were drowned into an integral part of national identity.

With the decline of the role of educational institutions and education; If you ask me: Why science has lost its value in the Arab world? I will answer you simply that he has lost his role in changing both the ruler and the ruled decisions.