Are today's Muslims fratricidal low-achievers? Are Muslims unique in their lack of achievement and propensity for fratricidal violence? Are there other religious and racial groups which share these traits with Muslims?
It has become fashionable among Muslims and non-Muslims alike to bash followers of the Islamic faith for their lack of achievement and propensity for fratricidal violence. Some criticize Muslims for having won only 10 Nobel prizes since the prize was launched in 1901. Others lambaste Muslims for killing each other. Let's examine both of these charges in some detail below:
Muslims as Low Achievers:
Renowned atheist scholar Richard Dawkins has recently disparaged Muslims by pointing out that the entire Muslim world has had fewer Nobels (10) than Cambridge University's Trinity College (32). He is not alone in attacking Muslims for their lack of achievements; I have heard this from many Muslim critics for many years.
A second theorem found in Copernican system, called Urdi lemma, was developed by another Muslim scientist Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Urdi, in 1250. Again, Copernicus neither offered proof nor gave credit to al-Urdi. Columbia University's George Saliba believes Copernicus didn't credit him because Muslims were not popular in 16th century Europe, not unlike the situation today."
Fratricidal Tendencies Among Muslims:
Muslims are killing Muslims, say the critics. This begs the question: Is this something unique among Muslims? Who kills 30,000 Americans each year? Is it not Americans? Who is responsible for the 40,000 reported homicides in India (actuals are likely much higher) every year? Is it not fellow Indians? Mostly Hindus?
Who killed Gandhi? Was it not Nathuram Godse, a fellow Hindu? Who killed Yitzhak Rabin? Was it not Yigal Amir, a fellow Jew? Who killed Abraham Lincoln? Was it not John Wilkes Booth, a fellow American?
The fact is that almost every nation-state has had periods of excessive violence such as civil wars. Fratricidal deaths have accounted for the great bulk of deaths in almost every nation since the beginning of time. Such deaths have occurred in great numbers in almost every society since Adam and Eve's son Cain is alleged to have killed his brother Abel. Every period of great change in human history has been almost always been accompanied by massive violence that Muslims are experiencing now.
Anti-Muslim Bigotry:
Dawkins' comments appear to be motivated by growing anti-Muslim bigotry in the West, especially because he prefaced them by saying "Who the hell do these Muslims think they are?" But the fact that he singled out Muslims for criticism and ignored other groups who have achieved even less seems to indicate that he holds Muslims to a higher standard than others, including Blacks, Chinese and Indians who are almost as numerous. I'd prefer that Muslims see as a challenge rather than be offended by it. At the very least, it signals that Muslims are not being subjected to what George W. Bush once described as "soft bigotry of low expectation".
The Challenge for Muslims:
Are Muslims taking the challenge thrown by Dawkins seriously? The answer is a qualified yes. They are beginning to do it.
Pakistan has had an impressive 50 per cent increase in the number of research publications during just the last two years, going up from 3939 to 6200.
This has been the second highest increase worldwide. SCimago, the world's leading research database, is forecasting that if this research trend from Pakistan continues, then by 2018, Pakistan will move ahead 16 notches in world ranking, from 43 to 27, and for the first time ever, will cross Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand in Asia, according to a report in The Nation newspaper. Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Malaysia are other Muslim nations which figure prominently on SCimago rankings.
As to the violence, it is likely to continue for a while longer as vast swaths of the Muslim world sort out their differences on fundamental questions of the role of religion in society and government and settle on a model that delivers what the Muslim world needs most: good clean and responsive governance. Fortunately, there are successful models within the Muslim world in countries like Turkey and Malaysia.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Obama, Islam and Science
Educational Attainment in India and Pakistan
Biotech and Genomics Advances in Pakistan
Pakistani Students Studying Abroad
Pakistan Manufacturing Tablet PCs
Military's Role in Pakistan's Industrialization
Pakistan's Demographic Dividend
Pakistan's Defense Industry Goes High-Tech
Pakistan Launches UAV Production Line at Kamra
Pakistan Going Mainstream in IT Products
Pakistan Launches 100 Mbps FTTH Access
Pakistan's $2.8 Billion IT Industry
Pakistan's Software Prodigy
Developing Pakistan's Intellectual Capital
Pakistan Graduation Rates Higher Than India's
Pakistan Conducting Research in Antarctica
Pakistani Scientists at CERN
Higher Education Reforms in Pakistan
Riaz Haq
Via email from Virginia Raine:
How 'Pepe the Frog' went from harmless to hate symbol
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-pepe-the-frog-hate-symbo...
Oct 11, 2016 — The darker corners of the Internet turned a cartoon frog into a hate symbol.
Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/05/how-the-new-atheists-merged-with-t...
Jun 5, 2021 — I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," ...
What happened to Richard Dawkins? - Overland literary journal
https://overland.org.au/2020/02/what-happened-to-richard-dawkins/
Feb 18, 2020 — What happened to Richard Dawkins? How did an acclaimed scientist and public intellectual transform himself into the dreary boor regularly popping up in your social media feed with yet another drunken uncle tweet about gender or race?
Dawkins, you might say, has aged like milk, except that’s not exactly true. As a matter of fact, he’s always been like that. He’s not the one who has changed – the world has.
The New Atheism Dawkins helped forge related to philosophy rather as Nu Metal pertained to music. In retrospect, they’re preposterous and embarrassing but, in their day, both presented themselves as cutting edge, even progressive.
How the toxic went mainstream - Pursuit
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-the-toxic-went-mainstream
Aug 21, 2019 — By adept use of social media, including memes, far-right and white supremacist ideologies are gaining currency and making extremist and divisive language part of everyday life.
The White Meme's Burden - jstor
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/reception.10.1.0050
by L Jeffries · 2018 — alt-right, white supremacists, Internet memes, Ben Tillman ... biologist Richard Dawkins created the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene,.
The “Great Meme War:” the Alt-Right and its Multifarious Enemies
https://journals.openedition.org/angles/369
by M Dafaure · 2020 — In this essay, I discuss how the alt-right has brought back into fashion traditional tenets of the reactionary, xenophobic, and often racist far-right, as demonstrated by George Hawley, and how it has managed to make these tenets appear as novel, provocative, and updated to the 21st century U.S. society and digital environment. I argue that to do so, alt-righters relied heavily on the creation, and sometimes reappropriation, of enemy images, with the ultimate goals of provoking outrage, instilling fear and/or hatred towards specific groups, reinforcing a sense of belonging within their own community, or more broadly manipulating collective perceptions and representations, first online then in real life. Indeed, the election of Donald Trump was hailed by the online alt-right as one of their major successes. With the help of irony, subversion, and often carefully engineered propaganda-like messages and images, the alt-right, it boasts, “meme’d into office” the Republican candidate. This paper consequently leads to an analysis of real-life repercussions of such adversarial rhetoric, notably through examples of recent far-right domestic terrorism in the US, and to a reflection on their place in an age of post-truth, fake news, and alternative facts.
The Alt-Right: The Rise of Internet Demagogues
https://thecolgatemaroonnews.com/2093/commentary/the-alt-right-the-...
Dec 5, 2022
Riaz Haq
Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? - The Guardian
The Atheist Movement Needs to Disown Richard Dawkins
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jmbayk/the-atheist-movement-needs-t...
Sep 17, 2014 — Atheist author, biologist, pioneer of the term "meme," and noted sexist curmudgeon Richard Dawkins let fly a firestorm of tweets about rape this past Friday. Those, along with his statements from the past couple of years about this and other issues, make for pretty strong evidence that Dawkins is no longer the figuredhead the atheist movement needs or deserves.
Richard Dawkins has become a overrated cultural ... - Reddit
Dec 5, 2022
Riaz Haq
The Atheist Movement Needs to Disown Richard Dawkins
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jmbayk/the-atheist-movement-needs-t...
Followers of Dawkins’s antics may remember the 2011 scandal wherein Rebecca Watson, founder of female-focused atheist site Skepchick, asked men to refrain from hitting on her while in an elevator because it made her uncomfortable. Her request, tragically, caused Dawkins to lose his mind. He posted a sarcastic letter to “Muslima,” a fictional Muslim woman, telling her to “stop whining” about how hard she has it as a Muslim woman. Dawkins later apologized, albeit snidely.
The “Muslima” incident wasn't his only brush with Islamophobia. Dawkins arguably dislikes Islam even more than he dislikes false accusations of rape. (Let’s just hope he never catches wind of a Muslim person pursuing a rape allegation.) Dawkins tweets about his disdain for Islam—excuse me, the objectively correct “fact” that Islam is wrong—several times a day. On Twitter, he’s taken potshots at Muslims for not having enough Nobel Prizes (take that!), and compared Islam to Nazism.Outside of Twitter, Dawkins has stated that he “[regards] Islam as one of the great evils of the world.” Once again, this is not the provocative, fresh opinion Dawkins obviously thinks it is. It’s a boring, conservative opinion espoused by millions of people who want an easy answer to the question of why bad things happen in the world. “Islam is bad” is the opinion of a cable-news pundit whose videos your conservative dad constantly forwards you in emails with the subject line "FWD: FWD: fwd: FINALLY SOMEONE IS NOT AFRAID TO SAY IT!!!"
Dawkins appears to have adopted the sexism and other forms of narrow-mindeness he purports to hate in religion (plus bonus defenses of pedophilia), proving his own mantras wrong with every new opinion he posts. Read Dawkins’s Twitter at any time for tweets about “objective reality” interspersed with paranoid tweets about Islam, and of course his regularly scheduled uninformed opinions on rape culture. Although he is gradually losing sympathizers, the so-called “new atheist” movement still holds him in too heroic a light. In his time, Dawkins did groundbreaking work in the field of biology, but his relevance—especially in social matters—is fading quickly. If the new atheist movement wants to move beyond outdated idols preaching old-fashioned discrimination, they need to disown Dawkins—or, at the very least, subtract themselves from his more than 1 million Twitter followers.
Dec 5, 2022