A lot of our time is spent online and on social media these days. The pictures, visuals, posts, memes and stories we interact with leave an impact on our worldview. The future discourses of Muslims are heavily contingent on what and how they consume all the information online and in the non-virtual world. Social media has made it much easier or worse that we can share both fake elements and true ones with the instance of a click.

Talking about the virtual space, googling Muslim scientists brings up a list of old, turbanned bearded men from the times of 1001 stories and hundreds of years ago. Distinguished names such as those of Al Jazari, Ibn al-Haytham, Al Khawarizmi, Ibn Sina and many others and their associated works on ingenious devices, optics, math, and medicine, respectively, will pop up. While we proudly look back at these scientists and their works, we also fall back into nostalgia as having some deficit among Muslims. Hence, the combination of Muslim and scientist (or academic in modern terms) brings up pictures of old, bearded turban men from a time we have no relation to in time and space.

As Muslim Scientists Europe, we feel not represented by those hits Google spills out when searching for us. As such, not only do we miss a fair representation, but there is also a lack of visual representation of role models from our times for those that will follow our footsteps.

Also, the absence of a fair amount of visual representation makes Muslim communities create a worldview as if Muslims were creating new knowledge only in the golden times and NOTHING has been done since hundreds of years by any Muslim at all. It is not just misrepresentation of hundreds of Muslim scholars but a false gloomy perception of the world.

So who are the Muslim Scientists of our time living in Europe? Eager and curious to know? Stay tuned! We are very much alive and kicking!