I wouldn't say that modernists could defeat literalists by knockout in an early round in any faith. :-> A war of position in culture takes a lot of time.* From Maimonides (cf. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimonides/>) to Spinoza (cf. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/>) to Jewish thoughts today, many centuries had to pass, but if Jews can change, so can Muslims, Christians, and others, and in my opinion most people of most faiths already have, though all faiths, including those of adherents to the Marxist tradition, are work in progress.
<http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061030/full/444022a.html> Nature Published online: 1 November 2006; | doi:10.1038/444022a Islam and Science: An Islamist revolution
Islamist political parties are taking over from secular ones across the Muslim world. What does this mean for science at home and scientific cooperation with the West? Ehsan Masood investigates.
Ehsan Masood
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For Muslim societies, a literal interpretation of the Koran would present as many barriers to science and to freedom of thought as did the secular governments of the past. But the picture becomes more nuanced the closer one looks at Islamist governments once they are in power. Using Sudan, Pakistan and Iran as examples of countries where Islam is prominent in politics and which may foreshadow what may follow elsewhere, certain trends are clear.
In the case of Iran and Pakistan, there has been a substantial expansion in higher education and more spending on research, measures to improve scientific quality, and some opening up of labs to scientists from overseas. Iran's university population has swelled from 100,000 in 1979 to 2 million today. Pakistan's university population has increased from 276,000 in 2001 to 423,000 in 2004. Sudan's public-sector universities, too, increased from 5 in 1989 to 26 in 1996. In each country, there are equal numbers of women and men entering many faculties. Indeed, in Iran some 70% of science and engineering students are women. This university expansion is, however, creating its own tensions as the economies are not large enough to absorb so many new graduates, particularly women. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>