Posted on 12/06/2005 8:59:16 AM PST by elfman2
Muslims make up 22% of the World’s 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 nation’s 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/
Bump for later reading.
This may be a false premise. I suspect that only the dumbest of the dumb sub 50 IQ types believe in is-SLIME. Take the left side of the bell curve from any group and keep them locked in this death cycle cult and very soon you will have an entire sub specie that are dumb enough for is-SLIME.
"Muslims claim that they are recovering from a long period of colonisation and de colonisation"
The US is still recovering too.
"and the effects of the removal of the Palestinian people from Arab lands"
I though the removal of a cancerous tumor was a good thing?
They consider Jewish and Christian Scriptures to be, to a degree, inspired, though corrupted. This is why you will seldom find a Muslim who has ever picked up a Bible.
That’s still an unsupported assumption. Chinese arriving 150 years ago were predominately laborers. Chinese arriving in the last 50 years were more likely to be professionals. They may have arrived with different genetics and different family values. No telling which is responsible for the latter group’s success.
The fact that genocide occurred in many regions of the world is not in question. The claim that a 600 year old genocide is responsible underperformance of an ethnic group because of lingering genetic inferiority is a wild speculative leap absolutely unsupported by evidence.
They nurtured what was there, helped it advance. Otherwise you'd have seen discoveries go down after the 7th Century instead of up.
If they never made it back how do you know they reached the Americas in the first place?
It is known that Abubakar equipped about 400 long boats, half for provisions to last a very long time, to try to cross the atlantic. One ship came back saying the others had been taken on a fast Western current (Northern Equatorial, Mali was at the Eastern end of it). Abubakar then set out himself with about 2,000 long boats, again half for provisions. Nobody saw him again, making Mansa Musa king. There is a lot of archaeological evidence in the Americas to show they probably made it, stuff with obviously African influences, such as the long boats, carvings and mostly black settlements.
BTW, Mansa Musa is himself famous for causing a gold market crash due to his exhorbitant spending on the way to the Hajj.
"It is known that Abubakar equipped about 400 long boats, half for provisions to last a very long time, to try to cross the atlantic. One ship came back saying the others had been taken on a fast Western current (Northern Equatorial, Mali was at the Eastern end of it). Abubakar then set out himself with about 2,000 long boats, again half for provisions. Nobody saw him again, making Mansa Musa king. There is a lot of archaeological evidence in the Americas to show they probably made it, stuff with obviously African influences, such as the long boats, carvings and mostly black settlements.
BTW, Mansa Musa is himself famous for causing a gold market crash due to his exhorbitant spending on the way to the Hajj."
Discoveries with Muslim names on them generally fall between the 8th and 13th Centuries. They conquered Persia in the mid 7th Century. They Also owned much of India by the 11th Century. Your timeline is off.
Even one of Islam's bloodiest conquerers in India, Mahmud, paid large amounts of gold as a patron of scholars during his invasion, while at the same time destroying temples and murdering infidels. Barbarians with a lust for knowledge, or at least the trappings of it. I still think they were trying to make up for being a backwater culture.
Had the Muslims barbarians not come to rule over India perhaps India's history would have been very different.
A lot of history would have been different if not for religious wars and persecution.
Most Americans aren't very knowledgeable about pre-colonial North Africa. Let me lay it out: these people were friggin' rich because they had huge amounts of gold as a natural resource and traded extensively around the Mediterranean and through Africa. Yes, kingdoms and trade routes existed long before the European explorers. Muslims at this time had boats to ply the trade routes, and not just coast hugging, but hundreds of miles into open water.
If you want to deny history just because it's Muslim, fine, live in ignorance. Or maybe you could pick up a non-Muslim textbook and read the same stuff for yourself. Mansa Musa is about the most famous African Muslim.
"Lingering genetic inferiority"?!! What are you writing about? There is no lingering anything. The leadership lines of descent were wiped out! Your implication--i.e. that eliminated genes can somehow be replaced over time--is what is speculative. Beyond speculative, mere fantasy.
This does not mean that other people of the region, by practicing selective mating for intelligence (i.e., following eugenic principles) will not develop a new class of leaders. But the dead are not going to be replaced. Nor, friend, do you develop tailess mice by cutting off the tails of several generations of mice. You have bought a Lamarckian pig in a poke, if there ever was one.
As for the Chinese. Of course the more recent arrivals have come from a higher class than the mid 19th Century rail workers. That is the whole point. Class differences do not usually arise from exploitation--as the Marxists and other Socialists hypothecate--but through different traits and different levels of ability. What you are buying here, is the underpinning of the far left--an idea that people are interchangeable, if you change their environment. That again is beyond speculative. It is pure fantasy, promoted by those with an axe to grind against the realities of human existence.
William Flax
You have zero evidence behind your little racial superiority to Arabs theory, just speculation to support speculation, and you’re too emotionally committed to it to process anything that puts it in doubt. I’m sure there’s a story behind that, but I don’t have time or interest to dig. Regards.
Since Arabs are Caucasians, just as are mainstream Americans, it is not about "racial superiority." Nor is IQ level the only measure of a people. However, a major drop in IQ level certainly explains why a people in the forefront of the world in astronomy, math, medicine and science in 1300 have to import European technology with their oil revenues, to even suggest that they are a threat in 1990-2003.
Your ex cathedra pronouncements, as to a cultural determinant, are no answer to the facts, to which I have referred throughout this discussion.
Not for the benefit of your head in the sands mindset of denial, which is apparently to no point, but for any lingering lurkers, let me point out another relevant historic fact. Even long after the collapse of the great Arab culture, following the genocide cited, above, Moslem Turkey was on the verge of conquering Central Europe, when finally stopped at the gates to Vienna. That is well known. But what is less known, is that following the battle of Lepanto, when the Venetians and their allies defeated the Turkish fleet in one of the great epic naval battles of history, the Turks had the capacity to rebuild their fleets in a shorter period than anyone expected.
Had it not been for Spanish control of the States of Gibralter, the Turks would have been able to put a greater armada than that which Spain sent against England, into the Atlantic.
Whether their sailors were a match for the English or not, we will of course never know. But there is nothing inherent in the religion which stultifies. And promoting the idea that there is, by a highly selective choice of materials, is intellectually as foolish as it is dishonest.
I neglected to respond to this wisecrack, yesterday. What you are doing here is sometimes called "projection," projecting your own failing onto others. I would not hesitate to "process" any point, you might choose to make. But you simply label history "speculative," much after the fashion of some of the Viet Nam War protestors--that was a favorite approach in the early 1970s. But when are you going to "process" some of the specific points which I made to demonstrate a genetic based decline?
Don't get me wrong. While you have apparently embraced a Leftwing explanation for observable differences in definable populations, I do not think you are a Leftwinger. You just haven't gotten around to questioning the dogma being taught in some of our institutions of "Higher Education." I would suggest that you read Myths & Myth Makers In American "Higher" Education.
William Flax
Whoa! That's pretty big trash talk. I believe Mohammed was an opportunist thug who used belief in the moon god as a mechanism to build an army and pursue an empire. What does that say about earlier religions? I don't know, but I'll listen.
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.
O.K.. And your point is just what? The Renaissance, correctly hailed as a new flowering of civilization in the Western World, following the Islamic period, your essay refers to, flowed from a rediscovery, outside the monastic depositories of ancient materials, of some of the greatness of Greek and Roman acievement. It was also, partly, stimulated by contact with the Islamic civilization in the Near East, from the Crusades, etc..
Neither what your essay asserts, nor the facts of the Renaissance, detract in any way from either flowering of civilization.
Secondly, you should consider what is involved in the whole discovery/invention process. All invention is based upon discovery and finding new applications for what already exists. Even something as unheard of, until the last century, as atomic fusion, was simply based upon disovering the always existing properties of radioactive materials, and rearranging and processing them for new uses. It is very true, what a wise man wrote many generations ago: "Man can invent nothing in science or religion but falsehood." The quest is to discover what is true--whether the pursuit be science or religion--and better apply it. The Moslems did real good in pre-Mongol Baghdad. The Northern Italians did real good in the Renaissance. The leaders of all that "real good," were very bright people.
That is enough processing of individual trees in the forest for right now.
Cheers!
What you fail to process is that “history” is not in question, only your speculative claim that Arabs are genetically inferior to European Americans because of genocide 600 years ago. Find a historical site that makes that same claim. Find anything, any site, any where on the net the echoes the theory that Arabs are “genetically inferior” to European Americans. You can’t. It’s just your wild speculation from whatever personal issues you have that I have no interest in digging up.
"Class differences do not usually arise from exploitation--as the Marxists and other Socialists hypothecate--but through different traits and different levels of ability."
More thoughtless neo-Nazi consistent babble. In an advanced and free society, there may be a strong correlation between genetically rooted ability and social class. But with few exceptions, Chinese society has been dominated by strict class and clan structures with little or no upward mobility. I wouldn’t want to speculate on how much if any genetic superiority over the population there was among 19th century Chinese leaders.
Islam’s so called golden age was just a step above the dark ages of the West. It was in decline prior to Tamerlane’s conquest. What separates the West’s progress from the stagnation of the Middle East is our reformation. Islam generally solidified into the social and intellectual fundamentalism that it suffers from today, (explained in Allah Attacks Aristotle: The Philosophical Roots of 9-11 ) Many historians believe that ther’s evidence that Islamic stagnation is culturally based, supported by this is from Study Warns of Stagnation in Arab Societies:
The whole Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates," the report said. In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, it concludes, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year… Books are not being translated, in part because of Islamic pressures, said Ms. Abou-Saif, the author of "Middle East Journal: A Woman's Journey Into the Heart of the Arab World" (Scribner, 1990). "A whole gamut of religious literature are best sellers," she said.It’s implausible that your “genetic inferiority” claim is responsible for Islam’s failure to embrace foreign books. Srdja Trifkovic elaborates in The Myth of an Islamic Golden Age
This age was marked by, among other things, intellectual achievement. A number of medieval thinkers and scientists living under Islamic rule, by no means all of them "Moslems" either nominally or substantially, played a useful role of transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic fruits of knowledge to Westerners. They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. But in doing this, they were but transmitting what they themselves had received from non-Moslem sources…"All invention is based upon discovery and finding new applications for what already exists. "The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Beethoven in East Berlin under Walter Ulbricht! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested enquiry, because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge.
…after the brief period of flourishing, first in Baghdad and then in Spain, the history of Islam has been that of a long decline without a fall. What started as a violent creed of the invaders from the desert soon ran out of steam, but the collective memory of earlier successes lingered on. It was still invoked as the proof of the divine approval and superiority. The fact that history was no longer on the side of Islam was for centuries blurred by the success of Turkish arms. It was not until 1683 that the menace to Europe was finally crushed at the gates of Vienna, but for long before that the Islamic world had little interesting to say, or do. Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could supply an antidote to the slow poison of Islamic obscurantism.
Always reliant on the plunder of its neighbors and robbery of its non-Muslim subjects, Islam was unable to create new wealth once the conquerors had run out of steam and reduced the vanquished to utter penury. Pre-Islamic Egypt was the granary of Europe, just like the pre-Bolshevik Ukraine; now both have to import food. Pre-Islamic Syria and Asia Minor suffered a similar fate under Caliph Umar to the highly developed and prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia after 1945. Both Islam and Communism oppose the preconditions for successful economic development in principle as well as in practice. In both cases, attempts to copy Western methods of production failed because they were not accompanied by the essential changes of social, political, and legal structure; the problem of Ottoman experiments with modernization were remarkably similar to the tinkering with various “models of socialism” a hundred years later.
That’s inanely simplistic. Invention constructs entirely new and productive systems, technologies and entities that add value from existing primitives, something that continues to be promoted by the intellectual and political freedoms valued in the West since the Renaissance .
Or France!
It's hard to imagine living in a world without modern conveniences: running water that is safe to drink, electricity, food of all kinds, and the means to keep it fresh, housing that is safe, without animals in them, proper clothing depending on the weather, the list is endless.
I can't imagine living without Velcro, zip-locks, Tupperware, microwaves, or DVD's. The closest living example to the Arabian life style I can think of is the Amish, but even they are early 18th Century, not 7th century.
Arabs divided into nomadic tribes, as did the Jews; however, the Jews settled in cities in Israel centuries ago. The Arabs did not as much settle as they did build their tribes and steal from the cities around their campsites.
Saddam Hussein is the prime example of a loyal tribe member. His tribe is still trying to gain lost power, but I digress.
I think one of the ways to stop the extremist Muslims is to fill their stores with every product available to us along with the advertising we get daily. Billboards, flyer's, radio, newspapers, even TV for those who have them would change the wants and needs of a whole geographic area, not to mention a whole generation.
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