Posted on 12/06/2005 8:59:16 AM PST by elfman2
Muslims make up 22% of the Worlds population, according to the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report: "Half of Arab women cannot read; One in five Arabs live on less than $2 per day; Only 1 percent of the Arab population has a personal computer, and only half of 1 percent use the Internet; Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed; 60% of Muslims are illiterate. Only two Muslims have won the Nobel prize in a scientific field - Dr. Abdus Salam, in 1979 for Physics and Dr. Ahmed Zewail, in 1992 for Chemistry. Dr Salam a native of Pakistan , is not considered to be a Muslim in his home country as he follows the Ahmadiyyas sect of Islam.
Only 600 universities service a Muslim population of 1.2 billion in 57 countries. Half the universities concentrate on teaching Islamic education and science. India has 8,407 universities for 1 billion people and the United States has 5,758 for 280 million people. The combined annual GDP (purchasing power parity basis) of the 57 Muslim countries is under $2 trillion. The US produces goods and services worth $10.4 trillion; China $5.7 trillion, Japan $3.5 trillion, India $3 trillion and Germany $2.1 trillion. The oil rich states Saudi Arabia , United Arab Emirates , Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods and services worth $430 billion; Thailand alone produces goods and services worth $429 billion.
Underachievement by Muslims was not always the case claim Muslims and point to a glorious and illustrious time when the Arab Muslim empire was the most advanced and enlightened in the world. Many discoveries were made in the period 750 1250 AD according to Muslims. Critical analysis of this period shows that many of the advancements and discoveries we falsely attribute to Muslims were actually made by the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean area, or by the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
Muslims believe, that glass mirrors, were first developed by Muslim Spain in the 11th century. Around 1290 Venetians learned how to produce glass from the Spanish Muslims. The Romans invented the glass mirror around the 1st century. Research by Reinuad and Fave, indicates that Muslims chemists were the first to develop the formula for gunpowder and later produced firearms. The Chinese knew the formula for gunpowder and used it for military purposes during the Sung dynasty of the 12th century. Muslims boast that they laid the foundations for modern mathematics and two of its main branches, geometry and trigonometry. The Muslim contribution was merely to collect and combine the work done by the Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Persians and Romans. The Indian civilisation gave us the concept of zero and modern numbers. Brahmagupta, an Indian mathematician, (598 665 AD) can be accredited with the initial work on algebra and negative numbers. The trigonometry terms sine and cosine have there origin in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India .
The underachievement and underperformance by Muslims is acute in the 57 Islamic countries. Muslims claim that they are recovering from a long period of colonisation and de colonisation and the effects of the removal of the Palestinian people from Arab lands. How about the achievements of Muslims who live and work in the West? Well the truth is not that much better than their cousins in Muslim countries.
The United Kingdom census of 2001 for the first time looked at the nations religious background. The findings showed that Muslims make up 2.8% of the UK population. Hindus 1%, Sikhs 0.6, Buddhists and Jews both make up 0.5% of the UK population. 31% of Muslims of working age have no qualifications, the highest of any religious group. As in many countries owing your own home is a major achievement and financial responsibility. 82% of Sikhs followed by 78% of Jews own their own home in the UK . Only 52% of Muslims own their own home, the lowest of any religious group. 14% of Muslims are unemployed, compared to 8% of Sikhs and 6% of Hindus. The underachievement of Muslims is even more bleak when you examine where most Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhist in the UK come from. 75% of Muslims, 97% of Hindus, 98 % of Sikhs and 69% of Buddhists in the UK are from or have ancestral links to South Asia . Therefore any cultural factors can be largely ruled out when comparing the achievement of Muslims with people from other religious groups. Muslims complain that they have to overcome language difficulties and face discrimination in the UK and state this as a factor in there poor performance. Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs face the same language and discrimination issues as Muslims, yet their achievements and performance is much better than Muslims.
The underachievement of Muslims should come as no surprise to those of us who understand the true nature of Islam. Everything a Muslim needs to know is in the Koran, Hadith or Sunnah. Muslims are not encouraged to seek knowledge and better themselves. Muslims are against progress, modernity and science. Those that control Islam do not want to see Muslims educated as an educated Muslim will apply commonsense and logic to the Koran and see it for what its is, a collection of distorted Bible and Torah stories and in print the mind of a 7th century Bedouin bandit leader.
References
United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002
United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2003
World Book Encyclopaedia
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Chronology of Science and Discovery Isaac Asimov's
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/focuson/religion/
I thought the Chinese invented that.
That quote in your posting in not mine.
Sorry, one post down. It was meant for Cronos.
well, not Arab, but Persian. And in the 700s/800s. More than likely al-Khwarizm was really a Zoroastrian.
Rot -- at worse a one time affair, not one carried out consistently over centuries
Were not communicating. Never mind
Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Musa al-Khwarizmi doesnt sound "Zoroastrian". Persian Zoroastrian never used the word "Muhammad" besides Persia was already under Arab Muslims rule by 800 AD.
Because G-d hates them.
You read that as "I think they are talking about colonisation under Islam."
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I don't see how you reach that conclusion.
But Sikhs don't rock back and forth the way arabs do. I have seen some of those kids on TV and if someone in AMerica made kids do that, they would be arrested for child abuse.
I think the physical environment is often neglected in trying to figure out why bad and undesired behaviours occur. For example, I have long thought that commercial television has been partly responsible epidemic for ADHD in kids. The attention span is forced down to about 7-8 minutes then WHAM a commercial. Do that over and over for years and nobody can concentrate.
parsy, the creative thinker.
and Mohammad Khan, says:
You started forced conversion in the very early church of the 4th Century, through the Huguenots, all the way up to the 1800s with Edgardo Mortara.
Well European weren't the only people to go around colonising and enslaving other nations.
I betcha they are talking about colonisation under Islam. The Islamics were the worst of all the colonists and hence they are still having trouble recovering from under Islamic colonisation.
Thats what I think the article is trying to say. Seriously.
Must read ping!
Question:
Why do Moslems Underachieve?
Answer: Becuz of long periods of colonisation.
Yes, thats right! Colonisation under Islam!
Until him, nobody had made a consistent, practical mathematical framework from the bits of knowledge and ideas available in the various parts on the known world. And he was only the first. In total, while others worked on individual problems, the Muslims were responsible for creating a cohesive system of algebra using those works as a foundation.
Try reading a very old encyclopedia, from before modern Muslims really got out of their own little hell hole and tried to claim all achievements, when the West still pretty much considered them to be ignorant backwater nomads. It still will credit them with the advancement of mathematics, although it's funny to read terms like "Mahomet" and "Moorish" in use.
A muslim is the first victim of islam.
Any wonder muslims underachieve?
My comments were not directed at the Near East as a whole but at the Islamic civilization centered around Baghdad in the 13th and 14th Centuries, until the Mongol genocide around 1400. Any serious historian will admit that it was a great flowering.
But let us look nearer the coast, for a moment, in the earlier period you address. Sir Walter Scott did massive research from original manuscripts in old libraries for his Waverly Novels. He was a practicing Christian and hardly an advocate for conversion to Islam, yet he pictures Saladin as not only a great and noble warrior, but a great physician. I will trust his research over someone today, trying to make a point, in a time of stronger religious antagonisms.
To understand what happened to the competence level in what is now Iraq, and in other areas affected by the slaughter, consider what would happen to American culture if the 20% of the population with the highest IQs, were to be subjected to a massacre by a conquering army? Or look at what happened to Russian agriculture, after Stalin subjected 7,000,000 to 10,000,000 of the best farmers to deliberate starvation.
There is no question but that religious intolerance can set a nation back, both by suppressing creativity and by driving out above average achievers. But the real killer comes when you lower the intelligence level of a population by targetting its brightest for expulsion or destruction. The Near East represents the effect of destruction. France failing to match England in progressing to an industrial revolution represents expulsion--the expulsion of the Huguenots who were dominant in the sort of skills that in England led to industrialization.
What is essential to understand history is to understand that people make their own culture, not the other way around. The culture at any particular time, in any nation, will be largely determined by the proclivities and aptitudes of the people who comprise that nation. Of course, there is the effect of inertia. If you kill off the best and brightest, those brought up in the culture may still maintain the outward forms for a time--although they will gradually become corrupted. But people make their culture.
The great lie of the Socialists is that by artificially altering culture, you can remake people. It did not work in Russia; it was not working in China, when the pragmatists there began to subtly abandon it. It cannot work anywhere.
William Flax
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