"We don't live in an environment where we value science," says Heggy, a Muslim astronomer who left his native Libya and is working in Houston on NASA's Mars exploration program. "Science and intellectual presence have been seen as a real threat to governments that have no serious plans for democratic rule."
Why the dearth of scientific achievement in the modern Muslim world? Like Heggy, many critics blame authoritarian regimes that stifle independent thinking and limit contacts with the outside world. Most schools and universities in Muslim countries emphasize rote learning over debate and analysis. Defense budgets -- especially in the bellicose Middle East -- consume billions of dollars that might otherwise go to research.
And just as Christian conservatism in America has led to curbs on genetic research and pressure to teach alternatives to evolution, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has turned many Muslims away from science and toward religion as a way to view and explain the world.
"Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science," Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani Muslim physicist, recently wrote in an article on Islam and science for Physics Today.
"Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought."