What Broke the Muslim Mind?
The fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation contain roughly a quarter of the world’s population, about 1.9 billion people across the largest contiguous bloc of nations on earth, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, controlling some of the most strategic geography and most valuable natural resources humanity possesses. The collective economic and demographic weight of the Muslim world should produce a civilization at the forefront of human inquiry, technological development, and intellectual achievement. It does not.
The 57 OIC nations together generate roughly 6 percent of the world’s scientific publications, against their 25 percent share of world population. They generate 1.6 percent of the world’s patents. They spend approximately 0.3 percent of gross national product on research and development, against a global average of 2.4 percent. Across the entire span of the Nobel Prize in the sciences, physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, the 1.9 billion-strong Muslim world has produced two laureates. One of them is the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam won the Nobel in physics in 1979 for his work on electroweak unification, and his own country, Pakistan, subsequently passed legislation declaring his Ahmadi community to be non-Muslim, with the result that the Nobel laureate is no longer claimed by the nation that produced him.
By comparison, the world’s 15 million Jews have produced over two hundred Nobel laureates in the sciences across the same period. The differential is not 2 to 200. It is 2 to 200 on a population base ratio of 130 to 1 in the Muslim direction. The per-capita differential, when you do the arithmetic, is in the tens of thousands.
The late Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg said in his speech: for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. The 2003 United Nations Arab Human Development Report, written by Arab scholars and published under UN auspices, noted that Spain alone translates more books into Spanish in a single year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic in the last thousand years. The technological infrastructure of the Islamic world, the cars its citizens drive, the phones they carry, the medical equipment in their hospitals, the weapons their militaries fire, the software their governments use, the pharmaceuticals that keep their populations alive is imported. The Islamic world consumes. It does not produce.