Islam’s Achievement Gap

Islam’s Achievement Gap

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/25/islam%E2%80%99s-achievement-gap/

Posted by Tait Trussell on Aug 25th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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As the holy month of Ramadan has gotten underway, President Obama has intensified his longstanding mission to “remind us” of the progress and human advancement we all enjoy as a result of Islam and its practitioners. Thus, Obama’s Ramadan message and speech at the White House iftar dinner echoed his now-famous lecture on the indispensability of Islamic contributions first put forth in the president’s June 2009 speech to the “Muslim world” in Cairo, Egypt.

All this is really far too charitable. An honest look at the historic contributions Muslims have purportedly given the world contradicts the president’s diplomatic overtures fairly starkly. What’s more, his official lip-service stands to obscure the oppressive atmosphere in predominately Islamic countries, whose theocratic institutions may very well serve to crush the very possibility human advancement.

Muslims represent 25 percent of the plant’s population—more than 1 billion, according to About Encyclopedia.com; some say more. Now, how many Muslims have been Nobel Prize winners for science? Just two: Ahmed Zewail in 1999 for chemistry and Abdus Salam in 1979 for physics. For those keeping score, which apparently does not include the apparently, that’s two prize winners in more than a billion Muslims.

It’s instructive to compare that to the contributions made by Jews. Though representing only 0.2 percent of the world’s population, Jews have won a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences. The Jewish State, in contrast to its Islamic counterparts, is no exception to the legacy of outsize achievement. Relative to its small size, Israel’s academia has been the world’s leading Nobel power for the past decade. Israelis and Jews across the globe consider these awards a source of considerable pride. Some Muslims and Arabs judge the awards a source of shame, considering Western cultural accomplishments as signs of infidel entities in decay.

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