Correlation between backwardness and advancement of islamism?
Reader comment on item: Muslims "Lagging Behind"

Submitted by Archimedes2 (Canada), Jan 12, 2007 at 18:27

Despite the lack of detail in this brief article, Daniel, I can't help noting an apparent relationship between the backwardness of the Islamic community and various countries and the state of advancement of the Islamist agenda. If we ignore the historically and officially muslim countries for the moment, consider that the islamist agenda is further advanced in Europe than in North America.

From all I know, it is further advanced in France than in England, and the social situation for muslims there is worse. But the situation for Muslims in North America is better, though the Islamist agenda is not as well advanced. Even more so, in both cases, in Australia, from the impression I have. Seems as the Islamist agenda advances, ironically, Muslims fare poorer.

Of course one might argue that, in spite of economic and social empowerment they are "faring poorly" in the strictly muslim countries because of backward ideological and political systems and extreme suppression of basic human rights, but to make this argument one must use a different scale. Also, the distinct situation in North America is probably singular, as muslim migration to North America is driven principally by educational and professional considerations.

Thus the majority of muslims coming here are already either highly skilled or educated, or in the process of becoming so. The migration to Europe has been driven largely by patterns of movement by migrant laborers, and so is analogous to, say, the situation of hispanics in the southwest USA. So it's hard to argue for some sort of natural continuum. Nevertheless, I think it would be interesting to develop some sort of "backwardness" scale and some sort of "Islamicization" scale, the first measuring indicators of poor educational, economic or lifestyle health among "average" members of a subclass of a society, and the second measuring the point to which a society has advanced in accordance with the contemporary Islamist agenda, and then plotting one against the other, across all countries for which reliable data can be obtained.

The first datum sounds to me very much like the scale used by the U.N. to rank the standard of living in various countries, and the same data might be mined and reprocessed to obtain the right data, except that I doubt the U.N. data separates cultural/religious subgroups within nations. The second datum requires the development of an appropriate scale, something like a numerical rendering of the "steps taken by non-Muslims to accommodate Islamists:" found at IslamistWatch.

As much information pertaining to these items are probably available through the internet a dedicated data-miner could compile these into numerical information of the sort needed. Of course there are other ways to read the data. In India, for example, would an Islamist not say that the Ummah is faring poorly because muslims are suppressed, and argue for Jihad on this basis? Does Islamism cause poor outlook for muslims, or does poor standard of living cause Islamism?

I think the answer lies in observing the difference between the Islamist/Jihadist reaction and the reaction of poor and oppressed groups of other religious backgrounds. Only the Islamists appear to respond to oppression by trying to take over the world (though some, as in the "freedom fighters" of South America, have fought local battles; there is a clear qualitative difference between the two...) Also, one must deal with the fact that there are two different sorts of "backwardness": there is the lack of advance to the 21st century, the "primitiveness" of societies, as observed in many Islamic nations today, even those with great wealth or technological capabilities; and there is the social, educational, and health prospects of a group. They would seem to be different things, though connected, and perhaps should correspond to distinct measures, although a composite variable could be built out of them to form a generalized indicator of abstract "backwardness". However the numbers are generated, diced and sliced, I would bet on a fairly direct relationship appearing from the data.

The point? It would suggest that islamists are Islam's worst enemies, that Muslims fare more poorly when the Islamists are given free reign. Faced with such data, could this possibly motivate the larger Muslim community in the west to actively oppose Islamists, radicals and Jihadists in their midst who are stirring up strife, dissent and disenfranchisement?

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