Why do Moslems Underachieve?

Faith Freedom.org ^ | 2005/11/24 | Thierry Gattuso

[PerConPat]

Muslim society underachieves because, as a result of the many factors pointed out by the insightful posts on this thread, there has not been freedom in the Middle East.

[Ohioan]

The author's Attribution of the statistics, he reports, to a religious cause is a good example of tunnel vision, which ignores all inconvenient factors, to sustain a hypothesis. Whether invention or rediscovery fueled the great Islamic civilizations in the Middle Ages, there is no question that they reflected a much higher level of mental awareness than is now witnessed in many of the same countries. However, the religion is the same.

What is not the same is the fact that the Mongol conquests resulted in one of the greatest brain drains in history. The leadership group was simply massacred. Those left are the descendants--in many cases--of the lower classes. The Moslems of today may, on average, compare poorly with the upper classes of the West, just as they would compare poorly with the upper classes of their own history. On the other hand, there are many non Moslems, right here in America, who while exposed to formal education for generations, would perform on the same low level as the writer records.

I also think that if you tested the new immigrants--both legal and illegal--from South of the border, you would find similar sad results among the "Hispanic" Catholics. While the Cuban Catholics in Miami--many of whom come from middle and upper class backgrounds--would statistically fall within the same norms as mainstream rooted Americans.

William Flax

[BooksForTheRight.com]

Underachieving is the ticket to minority status, special privileges, the ability to accuse anyone of a hate crime and win!

[steveyp]

Thomas Sowell published a comparable article several years ago examining industrial patent applications across the muslim world in comparison with the world generally.

It was eye opening.

[babygene]

"And Islam does a whole lot of that, more than any Christian sect I can think of"

Stupid is as stupid does...

[Dazedcat]

Moslem, muslim.........I say tomato, you say tomato.......

I agree with a poster up above; it's genetic. Hate, misery, fantaticism, lack of education........it's genetic.

........let's call the whole thing off.........

[Kenton]

They're just natural-born losers, that's why.

[sure_fine]

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





but when one of their leaders is needing serious medical help, they go to UK

[ashtanga]

Arabs are Semites, and so one would expect them to, er, have achieved something beyond a shame/honor view of the cosmos. I scratch my head over this phenomenon every day. Perhaps the concept of the future, or even the present, is alien and repulsive to them.

[The_Reader_David]

Actually, they don't think about what to pray about. The prayers are fixed and memorized.

[The_Reader_David]

Actually you have it backwards. Muslims underachieve because they have too much self-esteem: they fancy they have the true religion so they can rest on their imagined laurels.

Self-esteem is a vice which leads one to complacency (among other bad effects).

[elfman2]

"Whether invention or rediscovery fueled the great Islamic civilizations in the Middle Ages, there is no question that they reflected a much higher level of mental awareness than is now witnessed in many of the same countries. However, the religion is the same. "

As I understand this, the religion is “not” the same, and that’s the foundation for the author’s claim that culture/religion is the cause of the decline. The vast majority of great Arab achievements preceded Islam, with others coming immediately after its introduction or were actually creations brought to Arab nations.

"the fact that the Mongol conquests resulted in one of the greatest brain drains in history"

That looks like wild speculation rather than fact to me. Probably half the races have undergone similar invasions, and I’m not aware of any respected studies that claim a “brain drain” generally results from conquest. The only exception that I'm aware of is the Khmer Rouge (which my wife survived BTW).

The author is attributing the Muslims poor performance to culture rather than genetics. For instance Jews have arguably achieved the most in the US, along with Asians, and both cultures press their children into deferred gratification and higher education . The author’s belief is not “tunnel vision”. It’s just that he favors an environmental/cultural explanation over an unsupported hypothesis that Arabs lost the contribution of smart people to their gene pool in war a millennium ago and never recovered.

[PsyOp]

Mohammed, The Mad Poet Quoted....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1003415/posts

[CaliGirlGodHelpMe]

"Wow!! Excellent article that says it all."

Well, not quite all. It left out the egregious and notorious repression of women as fourth-class citizens - after men, children and camels.

Now, if I lived in an abysmal hell hole of a country, I wouldn't want to repress and ignore the abilities, ambitions and talents of one-half of its population. But maybe they have a better plan than I do.

[caver]

You're absolutely right! The repression of women is one of the most serious faults of Islam, but the way they have their "society" set up, even with women's help, they wouldn't get anywhere. The mad mullahs wouldn't let the women achieve any more than they do the men now. What an absolute waste of mankind, over 20% of the earth's population.

[Cronos]

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.

Wikipedia "Ahmadiya" -- very interesting. Do the same for Shia, Sunni, Sufi, Ismaili, Bori, Dervish, etc. all sub-sects of ISllam.

[Cronos]

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.

Ishmael's followers are condemned.

[Cronos]

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.

This bears repeating over and over again

[Cronos]

Muslims boast that they laid the foundations for modern mathematics and two of its main branches, geometry and trigonometry.
Lies, lies and more d****** lies

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 .

"Arabic" numerals are really "Indian" numerals -- they came up with the decimal and also (I think, need to verify) the binary system.

[Cronos]

Muslims claim that they are recovering from a long period of colonisation and de colonisation

Woo-hooo. What about places like South Korea or Singapore or Malta? What about the rapid growth in China, India, etc.?

and the effects of the removal of the Palestinian people from Arab lands

booo hooo, you mean the fact that Israel's area is little more than 1% of total Muzzie land and it's richer than ALL Muzzie lands is a problem? The FACT that the Jews took a barren piece of desert and created wonderfully productive farms and factories and a marvellous service and technological industry is something that seems to escape them.