12 October 2026

Note

There is a quiet but consequential confusion that appears whenever a cherished certainty seeks the prestige of science without accepting its discipline. In this review, I examine Stefano Bigliardi’s short but precise study, Islam and Pseudoscience, as a case study of that confusion—not as a polemic against faith, but as an inquiry into the temptation to treat scientific language as protective clothing for claims that refuse scientific correction.

I approach Bigliardi’s work both as a careful reader and as a writer concerned with the same underlying problem: what happens when error is shielded from revision. The result is not a simple endorsement or a quarrel, but a conversation about the difference between knowledge that can be tested and knowledge that borrows the appearance of testing while remaining immune to it. That difference, the review suggests, is not limited to any one tradition; it is a recurring human bargain between comfort and vulnerability.

What follows is less a catalogue of examples than an argument about why the distinction matters—for science, for religious life, and for any community that wants the fruits of inquiry without the risks of being corrected by it.

When Sacred Certainty Borrows the Mask of Science

On Stefano Bigliardi’s Islam and Pseudoscience

There are books that announce themselves loudly because they are insecure about what they have to say. Stefano Bigliardi’s Islam and Pseudoscience does the opposite. It moves quietly, carefully, almost modestly. But the modesty is deceptive. Behind the calm tone there is a serious intellectual act.

Bigliardi does not write against Muslims. He does not stage a cheap war between science and religion. He does not use Islam as an exotic container for irrationality. He does something more valuable. He takes a difficult subject, enters it with patience, and asks a set of questions many societies would rather avoid:

When does a religious claim become dressed as a scientific claim?

When does wonder become evidence?

When does reverence begin to protect error?

When does the language of science become a costume worn by something that refuses science’s discipline?

That is why this little book matters.

On the surface, Islam and Pseudoscience is about a specific field: Islam-related pseudoscience. Bigliardi reconstructs Muslim and non-Muslim critics, then studies several recurrent cases: the alleged scientific miracles of the qur’ān, Islamic creationism, and health-related claims involving prophetic medicine, cupping, qur’ānic healing, sacred foods, and other practices presented with scientific-sounding confidence.

But beneath that surface lies a larger problem: what happens when human beings want the prestige of knowledge without accepting the vulnerability that real knowledge requires?

This question brings Bigliardi’s booklet close to my own work in When Parochial Error Goes Global. My concern there is not simply that people believe false things. All human beings do. We inherit errors, love errors, defend errors, and sometimes build institutions around them. The decisive question is different: what happens when an error becomes protected from correction?

Bigliardi enters the same territory from another side. He studies cases in which religious or devotional claims borrow the authority of science while refusing the tests that make science worth respecting. That borrowing may seem harmless at first. It may even appear comforting. A believer hears that the sacred text anticipated modern science, that evolution can be suspended at the crucial point required by doctrine, or that a traditional remedy carries religious and medical authority at the same time. The emotional appeal is obvious. The believer is told: you do not have to choose between inherited certainty and modern knowledge. Your inheritance already contained the answer.

But this comfort is dangerous.

Pseudoscience is not merely false science. It is a counterfeit route to dignity. It offers the emotional reward of scientific confirmation without the risk of scientific correction. It says: you may keep the protected conclusion and still enjoy the prestige of discovery.

That is the false bargain.

Science is not a collection of impressive facts waiting to be matched with verses. It is not a warehouse of prestige. Science is a way of letting claims meet resistance from reality. Its dignity lies not in finality, but in correction. A scientific claim must be exposed to tests, evidence, revision, peer criticism, and possible defeat. When a religious claim takes the language of science but refuses that exposure, it does not strengthen religion. It weakens both religion and science.

This is clearest in the case of iʿjāz ʿilmī, the claim that the qur’ān contains miraculous scientific knowledge unavailable at the time of revelation. I understand why such claims attract believers. In a world where scientific prestige is immense and many Muslim societies have experienced political, military, educational, and technological humiliation, the idea is emotionally powerful. What appeared to be a gap between faith and modern knowledge is suddenly reversed. The sacred text was not behind science; it was ahead of it.

But this reversal creates a trap. If today’s science proves the scripture, what happens when tomorrow’s science revises today’s theory? Does revelation rise and fall with the changing state of cosmology, embryology, geology, or physics? Does faith gain strength from science only by becoming vulnerable to every scientific correction?

The apologetic victory becomes a hidden vulnerability.

Bigliardi is very good at showing this without theatrical aggression. He does not need to mock. He only needs to show the misplaced move. Scripture is asked to perform scientific work. Science is asked to perform devotional work. Both are damaged in the exchange.

The same problem appears in creationist arguments. The issue is not that believers have metaphysical commitments. Everyone brings assumptions to inquiry. The issue is whether those commitments are allowed to decide the scientific conclusion in advance. If the result is already protected before the evidence is examined, inquiry becomes performance. Evidence is no longer allowed to correct the claim. It is invited only when it can serve the claim.

That is not science. It is confirmation with scientific decoration.

The health-related cases are perhaps the most serious because here the cost is not only intellectual confusion. Sometimes bodies pay. A mistaken claim about cosmology may distort the mind. A mistaken claim about medicine may delay treatment, exploit fear, or lead a suffering person away from what could help. When a practice is marketed not only as traditional or devotional but also as scientifically valid, criticism becomes harder. Doubt may feel like impiety. The patient is not only choosing a remedy; the patient is entering a moral atmosphere.

This is where Bigliardi’s booklet becomes ethically important. He is not merely cataloguing strange ideas. He is asking how bad knowledge becomes socially attractive and morally shielded.

I appreciate especially that Bigliardi does not dehumanize the people who believe these things. This matters. A critique of pseudoscience that humiliates believers may only strengthen the very pattern it wants to correct. It can make bad arguments feel like wounded dignity. Bigliardi avoids that. He writes as a scholar, not as a prosecutor. His tone is firm but not cruel. He wants clearer thinking, not humiliation.

That distinction is central to my own work as well. The person is not the cage. The believer is not the bad argument. The student is not the textbook. The patient is not the false cure. Persons must be protected precisely so that ideas can be criticized.

This is why Islam and Pseudoscience should not be read as an anti-Islamic text. It is better understood as an anti-counterfeit-knowledge text. Its target is not faith. Its target is the misuse of science to protect claims that cannot survive scientific discipline.

A Muslim reader should not have to read Bigliardi defensively. A serious Muslim reader may read him as an ally in a difficult task: protecting faith from bad apologetics. If a religion needs weak science to defend it, it has become more fragile, not stronger. If the qur’ān is reduced to a container of modern facts, its religious, literary, moral, and spiritual meanings are narrowed. If medicine becomes a theater of piety, patients may suffer. If children learn science as if it were another sacred text to memorize, they will not learn science. They will learn the appearance of science.

A secular reader also needs a warning. Do not use this book as a weapon of contempt. Do not imagine that pseudoscience belongs to Muslims because Bigliardi’s examples are Islam-related. The temptation he studies is universal. Christians have done it. Hindus have done it. Western wellness cultures do it. Nationalists do it. Conspiracy movements do it. Ancient-aliens enthusiasts do it. Political ideologies have done it. The temptation is always similar: we want reality to confirm what we already need to be true.

One of the strengths of Bigliardi’s work is that he avoids making Islam-related pseudoscience look like an exotic pathology. He places it in a wider world of pseudoscience, conspiracy thinking, bad pedagogy, weak demarcation, apologetic overreach, and human vulnerability. That makes the critique more precise and more humane.

The booklet is also valuable because it shows that criticism is already present inside Muslim debates. Bigliardi reconstructs a field of critics that includes people such as Ziauddin Sardar, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Nidhal Guessoum, Taner Edis, Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Mohammad Reza Tavakoli Saberi, and others. The result is not the story of secular outsiders attacking Islam from a distance. Many of the most important criticisms come from people who care deeply about Muslim societies, science education, and the intellectual dignity of religious life.

This matters. It means the corrective impulse is not foreign. It is already there. It has names, arguments, histories, and pedagogical experience. It is not anti-Muslim to ask whether a scientific claim is really scientific. It is not anti-Islamic to say that scripture should not be abused as a physics textbook. It is not an attack on faith to ask that medicine be tested before patients are asked to trust it.

If I would push Bigliardi’s booklet further, I would push it in one direction: from classification to social reproduction.

Bigliardi is careful and bounded. He defines, reconstructs, classifies, distinguishes, and gives examples. That is the strength of the Cambridge Element form. But after reading him, I want to ask the next question: why do these claims travel? What rewards them? Who protects them? Who profits from them? Who pays when they are wrong? What kind of school, sermon, television program, social media ecosystem, family expectation, political need, or civilizational wound allows pseudoscience to survive criticism?

In other words: what happens to the error when someone points it out?

If the error becomes a revised claim, we have learning. If it becomes shame, defiance, conspiracy, accusation, or sacred immunity, then we are dealing with something larger than a mistaken argument. We are dealing with a protected pattern.

This is where Bigliardi’s work and mine meet most closely. He gives the anatomy of particular claims. My own work asks how claims become protected, repeated, institutionalized, and exported beyond their original setting. His book offers precision; my concern is the machinery of survival. The two approaches need one another. A broad theory without careful dissection becomes too easy. A careful dissection without a larger account of protection may remain too polite toward the system that keeps reproducing the error.

The test is simple. If a claim about scripture and science were genuinely opened to experiment, peer review, revision, and possible abandonment, it would no longer function as pseudoscience in the dangerous sense. It might become theology. It might become metaphor. It might become history. It might even become a testable scientific claim. But it could no longer enjoy both privileges at once: the prestige of science and the immunity of sacred certainty.

That double privilege is the danger.

Bigliardi also makes us think about science itself. Many societies want the fruits of science: hospitals, phones, satellites, universities, engineering, prestige, weapons, medicine, technology. But fewer societies want the deeper discipline that made science possible: public criticism, correction of authority, patience before evidence, willingness to abandon beautiful claims, and the right of a weaker person to say to a stronger person: this is wrong.

Science is not only instruments. It is a culture of correction.

That is why pseudoscience is so attractive. It offers the prestige of science without the humiliation of being corrected by science. It says: you may have modernity without vulnerability. You may have proof without risk. You may have confirmation without inquiry. You may have the appearance of knowledge while keeping your protected conclusion intact.

And it is not only religious. Every closed worldview wants this bargain. The nationalist wants history to confirm the nation. The ideologue wants economics to confirm the doctrine. The conspiracist wants every absence of evidence to become evidence of concealment. The technocrat wants the model to replace judgment. The religious apologist wants science to bow before revelation while still praising science for bowing.

The danger is not belief. The danger is immunity.

This is why I admire the discipline of Bigliardi’s booklet. It does not overclaim. It does not solve the entire question of Islam and modernity. It does not pretend to have a full theory of religion, science, education, politics, and civilization. It performs a limited task well: it identifies the confusion, reconstructs the critics, distinguishes strict pseudoscience from neighboring errors, and opens an agenda for further work.

That limited task is valuable because it is limited. It does not shout. It shows.

But a review should not only praise a book for what it does well. It should also ask what the book leaves insufficiently exposed.

My first criticism is that Bigliardi is stronger on classification than on social reproduction. He shows with admirable care which claims qualify as pseudoscientific, which ones border on pseudoscience, and which ones belong to neighboring errors. But after the classification is done, I wanted more pressure on the machinery that keeps these claims alive. Who rewards them? Who repeats them? Who turns them into school habits, sermon material, television content, social media certainty, therapeutic commerce, or civilizational consolation? A bad argument does not travel by logic alone. It travels because someone needs it, sells it, protects it, fears losing it, or benefits from its survival.

My second criticism is that the book’s admirable restraint sometimes makes the consequences feel smaller than they are. In matters of iʿjāz, the cost may be intellectual confusion. In matters of creationism, the cost may be a weakened understanding of biology. But in matters of medicine, healing, nutrition, and illness, the cost may become bodily. A patient who delays treatment because a sacred remedy has been dressed in scientific language is not merely making a theoretical mistake. The body may pay for the confusion. I would have welcomed an even sharper account of this passage from bad explanation to human cost.

My third criticism is that the book may be too polite toward the protective structures around error. I understand why. Bigliardi wants to be fair. He does not want to humiliate believers. He does not want the critique of pseudoscience to become another form of civilizational contempt. This is one of the book’s strengths. But there is a point where politeness toward persons must be joined to severity toward systems. If pseudoscientific claims are socially rewarded, religiously shielded, commercially exploited, or pedagogically repeated, then the critic must not only classify the claim. He must also ask why the claim is allowed to survive correction.

These criticisms do not weaken my admiration for the book. They clarify it. Bigliardi has written a precise and humane Element. My complaint is that I wanted him, at times, to follow his own precision further into the institutions, incentives, and emotional economies that protect the errors he dissects. The booklet gives us the anatomy. I wanted more pathology: how the organism reproduces, defends itself, and returns after refutation.

For someone like me, who writes severe books about anti-rationality, Stefano’s Element is also a useful warning. Severity must remain precise. Large explanations are dangerous when they become lazy. Criticism of systems must not become contempt for persons. The desire to expose a pattern must not excuse us from the duty to distinguish, qualify, classify, and correct.

That is why I wanted to read this book not only as a reviewer, but as someone newly invited into a conversation. I have never met Stefano Bigliardi. My contact with him began when I posted a comment on one of his recent articles in Skeptic. He then contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in writing a review of his booklet. I said yes because the subject matters to me, and because his work enters a problem I have been approaching from another direction.That distance is useful. It means I owe him neither flattery nor hostility. I do not want to use his book merely as raw material for my own theory. Nor do I want to pretend that my own concerns are absent while I read him. I read Islam and Pseudoscience as a work that stands on its own terms: scholarly, modest, careful, and pedagogically serious. But I also read it as part of a larger conversation that matters deeply to me: how human beings can protect one another from bad explanations without humiliating those who once believed them.

At the end, Islam and Pseudoscience teaches a simple lesson.

The conflict is not between Islam and science in any crude sense. The conflict is between knowledge and counterfeit knowledge. Between correction and immunity. Between science as method and science as ornament. Between faith that can live without fake proof and faith made fragile by bad apologetics. Between education that trains the mind to test and education that trains the mind to repeat.

A civilization does not become rational because it praises science.

It becomes rational when its cherished claims can be corrected.

That is why Stefano Bigliardi’s Islam and Pseudoscience matters.