Why do Moslems Underachieve?

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.

Here's a related article that I've always liked, thought I don't think it gives enough credit to Christ's promotion of the individual:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1375
ALLAH ATTACKS ARISTOTLE: The Philosophical Roots of 9-11
by George F. Smith (January 25, 2002)

Summary: How do you get young Middle Eastern men to fly a jet full of Americans into the side of a skyscraper? You tell them their creator will love them for it and reward them beyond their wildest dreams. But they have to believe in such a creator first

[www.CapMag.com] How do you get young Middle Eastern men to fly a jet full of Americans into the side of a skyscraper? You tell them their creator will love them for it and reward them beyond their wildest dreams. But they have to believe in such a creator first.

To instill this belief you educate them from a very young age. You tell them things like: in death, the true believer lives. In life, the true believer, when directed by god, kills unbelievers. In both death and life, a true believer's happiness is fulfilled by a grateful and all-powerful god. You keep these thoughts alive by training them to pray five times a day.

To make sure they don't stray you give them a book of Absolute Truth and provide interpretation along with it. Since all men by nature desire to know, as Aristotle claimed, a book with all the answers will be a lifelong treasure.

Of course, when Aristotle wrote those words in ancient Greece he had something a bit different in mind. He sought to understand the world we live in through reason -- the practice of non-contradictory identification. Reality, for Aristotle, was the here and now, not some otherworldly realm ruled by a moral dictator. Aristotle's corpus became a kind of unmoved mover in itself, setting in motion a chain of events that, in later centuries, freed men from intellectual prohibitions and eventually sparked the American Revolution.

But we narrowly missed disaster. His most important works were lost for centuries, and only rediscovered when, ironically, the followers of Mohammed came upon them during a military campaign in Syria.

The Lights Go Out

In the years following Aristotle's death in 322 B. C., the independent Greek city-states fell victim to Rome's imperium. By 146 B.C. Greece had become a Roman province and was eventually rolled up into the Empire.

When the small city-state was sovereign, men generally had the feeling of being able to work out their own fate. But "in a large-scale organization like the Empire," philosophy historian W. T. Jones notes, "it was obvious one did not control one's own destiny." People became passive and withdrawn. Over time, their focus shifted from this life to the one they believed would follow.

Mystery cults flourished in ancient Rome, one of them forming the seeds of Christianity. How different were Jesus and Aristotle? Aristotle's focus was man, his tool reason; Jesus' focus was god, his tool revelation. Aristotle saw man as a responsible adult, Jesus saw him as a child. The good life for Aristotle was realizing one's potential; for Jesus, it was pleasing god. Aristotle spoke of the importance of courage, a virtue about which Jesus had nothing to say. For Aristotle pride was the greatest virtue, while Jesus taught it was a grievous sin. (To be precise, Aristotle encouraged "proper pride," a mean between "empty vanity" and "undue humility.")

When the Empire collapsed in 410, only Aristotle's early works survived, and those in poor translation. Philosophers in the centuries that followed became little more than religious scholars who studied and debated fine points of scripture, always fearful of straying outside the bounds of orthodoxy under threat of eternal damnation.

Early Christians believed the end of the world was imminent and thus focused their efforts on their relationship with god. As the centuries passed and the sun still shined, and as men gradually rebuilt culture and civilization, an interest in the things of this world began to grow. The thinkers of this era asked: how do you resolve the conflicting claims of faith and reason? A fortuitous discovery provided a possible answer.

Aristotle's Return

During the 12th century Arabic armies swept into Syria and other parts of Asia Minor, a predominantly Greek culture emanating from the conquests of Alexander the Great. There they found the works of the Classical philosophers, which they translated from Syriac or Hebraic into Arabic and took with them as they continued their march into North Africa and Spain.

As the Christians arrived in Spain, especially in Toledo, the two cultures met, and Christian scholars began translating the Arabic works into Latin to make them accessible to the West. Included were Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima -- three major treatises.

"Men began to feel the temper of Aristotle's mind," Jones writes. "Here was a method radically different from the authoritarian debates of earlier medieval scholarship. It was sensationally empirical compared with anything the West then knew."

Borrowing Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, generally regarded as the era's greatest intellect, attempted to reconcile faith and reason, dressing Christian dogma in the respectability of rational argument. Duns Scotus, in trying to improve Thomas, ended up achieving what he wanted to avoid: the further isolation of faith from reason. William of Occam, whose famous razor still guides scientific thought ("What can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlessly by more"), completed the separation of faith and reason and released Aristotle's thought unencumbered by religion into a world starving for knowledge.

Many commentators play down Aristotle's role in leading the West into the Renaissance, but in fact the assimilation of his thoughts was a watershed in mankind's history. In stark contrast to Christian doctrine of the Middle Ages, Aristotle did not believe in a personal god, he did not threaten man (in the name of love) with eternal torture for disagreeing with him, he did not see people as "crooked, sordid, bespotted, and ulcerous," as Augustine and his followers did. Though his philosophy was incomplete and not without flaws, Aristotle became man's liberator, showing him how to use reason to live the best possible life.

Both East and West held the "bomb" of Aristotle's philosophy, but only in the West did it detonate. While Arabic culture flourished in many fields, Greek learning never found a secure institutional home under Islam. For true believers, nothing is more important than salvation. Fundamentalists came to rule Islamic society and have never lost their grip.

In revolutionary America, when Aristotle's ethics were dominant politically, we had the moral courage to fight for our independence. As Christian ethics intervened in the years that followed, our freedom bowed out to the welfare state and a suicidal foreign policy.

Mix a repudiation of Western values on one side with a proud display of such on the other, and getting fundamentalists to fly planes into our heart is surprisingly easy.

If only the Arabs had still embraced Aristotle as we did, what kind of world would we have today?

References:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii..html - Nicomachean Ethics, Book II
W. T. Jones, Classical Mind (History of Western Philosophy), Vol. I, (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1952)

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