Why are so many Muslim countries so backward economically? Six hundred million Muslims, one out of two, live in grinding poverty, 230 million in Islamic countries suffer from hunger.
Take away the oil wealth of some Middle East nations, and the situation gets exponentially worse. We’re talking about probably hundreds of millions more who would be living in squalor.
I have written in previous blogs the theory that Islam has wrecked culture and learning in the Middle East. Now, Mike Schuman, the outstanding economics correspondent at Time Magazine, has written an excellent piece about the roots of Muslim economic misery in The Curious Capitalist blog.
One conclusion is that the stricture of Islamic law strangles economic growth and business innovation.
I was reminded of what Gamal al-Banna, the brother of the Muslim Brotherhood founder, told Norwegian journalist Walid al-Kubaisi:
“The Muslim mind is rusty. It has done nothing for the last 1,000 years. One thousand years ago the innovation ended. What does that mean? It means that you act without thinking. Muslims have become like monkeys, only imitating others. This has lasted 1,000 years.”
The crux of the Muslim deficiency, from economics to culture to the scarcity of Nobel Prize winners, is modern Islam’s hostility toward human liberty. Al-Banna, known as a reformer within Islam, says, “There is no Islamic authority that respects freedom or democracy."
Some experts say Islam needs its own reformation, as Christianity experienced. But to bring Islam from the medieval period where it now squats and into the modern era would finish it as a major force in world affairs. Modernity and freedom are the enemy of modern Islam, eating away at its moral authority.
The great Islamic expert Bernard Lewis at Princeton told me that this is precisely why the Ayatollah Khomeini used the term the great tempter to describe America. Islam draws its considerable spiritual power through the use of fear and oppression, and from the control of women and young people.
Islam loses when it comes up against a vigorous and attractive Western culture. Birth rates fall. Views moderate. Islam can only dominate where Western culture is weak, and where there is a religious or cultural vacuum.