A popular question seems to be to ask where are the muslim scientists? followed by much lamenting about the glory days of muslim scientists and how Muslims are not progressing.

Well, I have news - there are still plenty of Muslim scientists, businessmen, pioneers in the world. You just don't hear of them as much because they are working.

There are many Muslim scientists. They just do not have the recognition as muslims because they do not work in the middle east. Instead, many work for multinational corporations such as GLaxoSmithKline, Shell, IBM, intel, AMD and many others, or even have prestigious research positions at universities.

That is a price of globalisation - a scientist is a scientist and will work for whoever funds him or her. These days science is a big buck business and a "mad scientist" working alone in a basement will just not cut it. Most projects need to be handled by a team of people and require expensive equipment. (Besides, how many times can you blow your house up before the police start investigation potentially terrorist activity?)

When you hear about a major breakthrough at GlaxoSmithkline, that does not mean that the actual scientist who made the breakthrough was not a muslim, so the old archaic thinking that muslim scientists only reside in the middle east needs to be dropped.

[This blog post would be a lot stronger if I could drop some names...]