- Earlier this week, amidst the free hours of a public holiday, I caught up with some episodes from the latest season of Foundation, a TV series on Apple TV which adapted the novels of the late and great science fiction author, Isaac Asimov.
- In short, Foundation tells the story of Hari Seldon, a mathematician who uncovers the laws of “psychohistory”, a statistical science which purports to predict the future of human societies. Using his esoteric calculations, Seldon predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire of his time, and ascertains that human civilisation will undergo 30,000 years of dramatic strife and conflict, before the expected rise of a Second Galactic Empire.
- Seldon also theorised that the establishment of a “Foundation”, to preserve human knowledge and science amidst the ongoing decline of the Empire, could shorten the “Dark Ages” of the Imperial interregnum to only a thousand years.
- If the plot sounds familiar, it is because Isaac Asimov was supposedly deep into his reading of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While many historians today are disputing whether the Dark Ages were indeed a time of intellectual decline and cultural backwardness, there is no doubt that the fall of the Roman Empire led to political fragmentation and a deterioration in the works of high culture, until the rise of Florence in Italy and the flowering of the Renaissance in the 1400s.
- What is interesting, to me, is that for some weeks now, I have been listening to an ongoing lecture series on the Early Middle Ages, where Professor Paul Freedman of Yale underlines that the fall of the Roman Empire led to three successor states or institutions: the Christian Catholic Church, the Byzantine Empire (which styled itself as the Roman Empire throughout its heyday), and the Muslims.
- So, if one takes for granted that the Galactic Empire was modelled after the Roman Empire in the imagination of Isaac Asimov, then the natural thing to conclude, I realised in a moment of epiphany, is that his Foundation is, or were, the Muslims!
- After all, just like the Muslims of Arabia, the Foundation originated from a backwater periphery of known human civilisation, and rapidly grew to become a powerful force that would eventually grow to become a universal empire. And just like the Muslims of the Umayyad and Abbasid period, the Foundation became the repository of “lost” scientific knowledge, and gradually developed a scientific and technological powerhouse that grew to become a superpower.
- Was it just my imagination? I did what every 21st-century person these days would do, and looked it up online (I am a slightly older Gen X person, so I goggled it up, rather than going straight to Chat-GPT!) It turns out that this was observation of mine was not (I suppose obviously) unique.
- In fact, I uncovered a dark fact: not only is this theory of “Foundation = Islam” already floating out there in the online aether, but there are commentators who speculated that the name “Al Qaeda” is actually derived from the Arabic translation of the word “foundation”, and that Osama bin Laden was actually inspired to name his organisation after Asimov’s masterwork. Coincidental?
My take: I somehow doubt that Osama bin Laden has the literary and poetic sense of the dramatic to name his group after Asimov’s Foundation. It just sounds too… neat. But if indeed he was inspired by Asimov, and to a related extent, by Gibbon, it would have been tragic that Asimov’s vision of a scientific and civilisation oasis became transmogrified into a terror organisation that would prey on civilian lives in the name of civilisational revival. And God knows best.
