A few weeks ago an article by the renowned Pakistani Physicist, Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, talked about a growing trend among Pakistani scientists and academics of fostering anti-science and anti-intellectual environment in universities. Dr Hoodbhoy referred to an email that was sent to the entire science faculty of the most eminent and prestigious university of Pakistan by the chairperson of its Biology department. In his email the professor had claimed that listening to certain Quranic verses (Surah Rahman to be precise) "can control genes and metabolites". He also suggested that listening to these verses could cure terminally ill patients, including cancer patients.

This article caused quite a stir in Pakistani academic circles and social media. The people who questioned the ‘scientific credibility’ of these claims of miraculous healing powers of Holy Scriptures were not only labelled as heretics but also (ironically) as pseudoscientists. But the most disturbing fact was the support for these claims that came from Pakistani doctors and Biologists. The university officially responded to Hoodbhoy’s article.

In order to ‘contextualise’ the statement of the Biology professor, they quoted from an internal email, which had been sent by their Dean of Sciences. In his email, the Dean mentioned some scientific studies according to which the visualisation of happy and sad images influences the brain but in opposite ways. Based on this, he commented, one wonders whether visualisation or recitation of religious script could have a similar impact on human brain. This is clearly a false analogy to make as the Biology professor was not referring to visual images but to listening of recitation and impact of its sound waves. Secondly, unlike the Dean, he did not leave to conjecture the idea of healing through spiritual means. He had made a definite statement about its efficacy. So the Dean’s claim that replacing Surah Rahman with Beethoven’s symphony would have elicited a wow comment from Dr. Hoodbhoy, is simply an attempt to invoke religion as a shut-up call rather than an honest academic engagement in a debate over this issue.

Hoodbhoy’s problem is not with the source but the scientific framework employed to explain the link between the disease and its cure. As he outlined in his response to the University, if spiritual healing worked in the way the Biology professor confidently claimed (and the dean conjectured it could), it would make hospitals redundant and future research on cancer useless.

The ultra science of sound effect

Heated arguments on social media indicated that some doctors are working on these lines of research and have obtained huge amount of "scientific data" that support these theories. These debates also revealed that some doctors are already prescribing holy verses to their patients. In Services Hospital’s intensive care unit -- one of the major public health facilities in Lahore -- patients are made to listen to Surah Rahman three times every day in addition to their regular medication. One of the practitioners of this treatment argued that as they have already obtained significant results on human subjects, they do not need to conduct any animal or cell culture based studies that are prerequisites for therapeutic studies in humans.

In these debates the effects of the holy verses on human brain were also equated with the recently developed technique of sonogenetics. In this technique, the researchers stimulate the neurons (nerve cells) of certain roundworms with ultrasound waves. They control the movement of these roundworms by bombarding them with ultrasound waves. This procedure is very sophisticated and still somewhat primitive, and experiments have not yet been carried out on higher animals.

Ultrasounds are high frequency sounds, inaudible to human ear, but can easily travel through tissues. In this study the scientists amplified the ultrasound waves through a complicated procedure and only then were they capable of activating the nerve cells. Hence, equating this work with the effect of holy verses on human brain is like claiming that by reciting these verses one can look through the human body just like in an Ultrasound scan of human body! Perhaps what these practitioners of spiritual healing want to imply is that science has only been able to discover so much in terms of a link between sound (or its vibrations) and its impact on brain cells, since it is constrained by the limit on human rationality.

As science progresses, they seem to argue, it will eventually discover that sound waves could activate brain cells directly, thus generating a positive energy overall to have the desired impact on human body. In either of these cases, it is a mere conjecture and to say that given research in peer reviewed journals is indicating a trend in this direction is, in most polite terms, highly unscientific.

No doubt a lot of research is being done on the curative or palliative effects of spiritual healing. But this kind of research is usually classified as the so called soft sciences research. In the scientific community, this refers to the research carried out in fields that are difficult to measure. In other words, the data is too qualitative. Every now and then I come across medical doctors who are eager to do a collaborative research project on the healing powers of Kalonji seeds. It is because Kalonji has been mentioned in one of the sayings of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to be a cure for every disease except death. The problem is that while these doctors and Biologists are trained in an entirely different tradition of scientific methodology, they try to bring in science in the service of faith and to configure it to the needs of the faith than the other way around.

An Oncologist once shared with me the data that he obtained by giving Kalonji to hematological cancer patients as a complementary medicine. When you talk to these people` you soon realise that they are often very selective in their compilation of the data. They only look for evidence that supports their theories. In this case, they would refer to those who, according to them, responded to Kalonji. The problem with this kind of ‘data’ is that if, for example, a patient gets cured in the Services Hospital from some terminal illness, it will be difficult to find out if it is the result of medication or listening to the daily dose of Holy verses. If it is the result of latter, then there has to be an explanatory framework to help understand the mechanism whereby the cure took place. The doctor at Services hospital said in an earlier TV interview that the sound vibrations of these verses ‘somehow’ increased oxygenation at the cellular level by healing the mitochondrial damage. But this is clearly a vague statement.

If an explanation of the scientific phenomena at work is not possible because of the limits of our current scientific knowledge, these doctors should at least try establishing definite causality between a disease and its cure through holy verses. This would require addressing such questions as how important is the role of medication in this entire process? Were there any control experiments as well in which patients listening to verses were better or worse off in recovering from disease as compared to those who were on medication alone (the ethics of control experiments where no medication will be given requires separate discussion)? How have the doctors arrived at the dosage (3 times a day) and number of days (up to 7 days) for which the patient should listen to holy verses? Did the doctors observe the impact of holy verses on such basic things as pulse rate etc -- especially on those patients who were in coma? If not, then the doctors claiming that they have data to prove the therapeutic effects of holy verses on human health, neither have the data nor methodology that meets the basic requirements of even the soft sciences, let alone natural sciences.

The ‘data’ which I have come across does not meet this criterion. It mainly comprises medical reports showing that the patient suffering a particular disease had recovered from it after being treated with holy verses.

The Galileo fallacy and the colonial complex

The practitioners of spiritual healing try to circumvent criticism by arguing that the scientific tradition of requiring explanation of observed facts or hypothesis is too old fashioned, and that science is now receptive to any new idea no matter how bizarre it might sound. As a scientist, I am trained to keep an open mind about observations, hypothesis and then submit them to rigorous scientific testing. Still, in order to mock their opponents, the proponents of these theories make use of something similar to what is called the Galileo fallacy. It goes like this: "They laughed at Galileo, and he was proved right centuries later. They laugh at me now; therefore, I must be right as well and this will also be proved centuries later." These people believe that they are talking to the future generations of scientists and their ideas are too novel for the current breed of scientists to understand.

The idea that mainstream science persecutes nonconformists is not entirely correct. Yes, the scientific community does not easily give up well-established theories and some scientists may defend them sternly. However, if the new ideas are supported by evidence, and provide better explanations or solutions, they eventually prevail. But no idea can simply be considered novel or groundbreaking just because it is new and flies in the face of well-established scientific theories and principles.

In a way the need for a sense of superiority of spirituality over science stems from our colonial history as well. As famous postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee puts it, colonised Indians perceived British/Western superiority in material terms leading to advancements in sciences while championing their own superiority in the spiritual realm. This helped project an essentialised binary between "materialistic West" and "spiritual East". But it seems it was not enough to simply establish the superiority of spiritual East over materialist West. There was an implicit fascination with the materialist West and its sciences which had led to its political supremacy.

This trend of seeking legitimacy for one’s beliefs from ‘Western sciences’ dates back to the colonial period. The idea is to establish East as the predecessor of West and hence claim a dominant share in the advancements made in the field of knowledge. So when Narendra Modi says that plastic surgery was invented in ancient India (as ‘proved’ by the mythical account of Ramayan in which Hanuman has a human body with a monkey face) and Aamir Liaqat Husain claims that Surah al-Fil contains the coded formula for atomic bomb, they are both trying to achieve the same objective, i.e. establishing the superiority of their own respective faith, ideology or civilisation in setting the precedence for the work done by ‘Western scientists’.

If the Biology professor and the doctor at Services Hospital were to say that cure of cancer patients through Surah Rahman is purely a spiritual thing which cannot be scientifically explained, it would be the end of discussion. But they insist on making it science because they want to prove the authenticity of their religion and spirituality through science.

It is a curious love-hate relationship in which these people value the procedure and explanatory framework of science and scientific inquiry and yet remain opposed to the very spirit of science and scientific inquiry. This may be because they think it creates a materialistic society and saps the individual and the society of spiritual values. On one hand they emphasise the superiority of spiritual experience and insist that it is incommunicable, on the other hand they want it to be communicated and seek the language of science to do so.

I am not at all trying to suggest that science is superior to religion or the universality of its method and logic. These questions need much greater philosophical reflection. All I am suggesting that such attempts at bringing science and religion into conversation with each other helps neither religion nor science.

Looking for an alternative: The Munna Bhai hypothesis

I must mention that search for alternative medicine is not something specific to Pakistan. People all over the world -- even in most advanced industrial societies -- have shown skepticism towards modern medicine which is considered by some to be causing more harm than good. This explains the increasing turn to a variety of such practices as acupuncture, homeopathy and ayurvedic among many other forms of alternative medicine catering to a specific market. It is a multibillion dollar industry itself. This growing anti-science trend can also be read as a revolt against modernity.

The modern world, as Max Weber called it, is a disenchanted world. The uber-rationalisation of knowledge has provided answers to many of universe’s mysteries and undermined the fallacies built upon religio-spiritual beliefs. This has had an unsettling impact on human mind which has lost connection with beliefs and rituals which helped to understand the world and gave meaning to questions of existence. But in a third world country like Pakistan, where people are reluctant to use iodised salt or -- even worse -- polio vaccination fearing that it is a "Western plot" to control the growth of Pakistani population, the implications of this anti-science sentiment are more alarming. It is especially worrisome when a Biologist trained in a prestigious foreign university, or a medical doctor, makes such a statement and derives his or her authority for the claim from such high ranking journals as Nature and Science.

But of all the branches of science, it seems people have more problems with medicine. For a South Asian audience, this reaction to modern medicine is summed up in a Bollywood blockbuster Munna Bhai MBBS. It shows the practice of modern science which approaches human body simply as a subject seeking treatment for sickness. The alternative which Munna Bhai -- a gangster who gets enlisted in the college using fake documents -- offers is to make this medical practice more humane and personal by hugging the patients. A patient can surely be healed through drugs, injections and surgeries but a warm, loving hug makes the process more humane and bearable. A cancer patient may or may not be healed so easily.

In such a scenario, listening to Surah Rahman or any other source of spirituality will certainly help. Even the National Cancer Institute -- the principal agency for cancer research and training in US -- has on its website, an entire section dealing with "Spirituality in Cancer Care" which shows the importance attached to spirituality in the treatment of cancer but in an entirely different way. Cancer, as the title of Siddharta Mukherjee’s book suggest, is the emperor of all maladies. It can strike silently and reduce a human being to a state of misery in no time. It is a feeling of helplessness which is difficult to describe in words. But one must remember that amulets, hymns and Holy Scriptures were the main sources of healing for thousands of years. Had it been effective, cancer would have been cured by now.

Spirituality helps bear the pain and grief for the patient as well as his loved ones, but it does not help cure the disease the way some of our doctors and professors think it does. As for ‘data’, hundreds of years of cancer patients being treated with such spiritual doses and still dying, is more credible than the one presented by ideologically motivated doctors and Biologists.