One Billion and Counting: No Quality, No Power
By Dr Ghulam M. Haniff
St. Cloud , Minnesota
Muslims worldwide are said to number in excess of one billion. Estimates from standard sources support that count. In some parts of the world Islamic activists insist that the global Muslim population is more than one and a half billion.
Numbers of course matter. However, for numbers to mean anything in assessing human strength the element of quality is exceedingly important. When qualitative factors are taken into consideration Muslims constitute one of the least powerful communities in the world.
In today’s world education is the key that drives human advancement. The world has rapidly built a knowledge-based economy. That economy has gradually evolved over the past two hundred years through industrial revolution that ultimately became known as industrialization. Unfortunately, Muslims were not a part of that social process and were left behind.
At the moment Muslims are largely a marginalized people in the world community. They lack productive skills and knowledge, two of the most desirable attributes in the twentieth century and beyond. Their level of achievement in every area of advancement places them in the bottom of the global social hierarchy.
Newspapers, talking heads on television, and leaders of various types, are fond of pointing out that Muslim specialty has come to be throwing bombs inside each others’ mosques, killing one another mostly civilians, and destroying valuable property in fits of frenzy. Those who commit these atrocities give the entire global community of Muslims a bad image, and a very bad name. Every Muslim is now seen as a terrorist.
If one were to focus exclusively on the Muslim countries it becomes rapidly apparent that life in those lands is “short, nasty and brutish,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbs’ Leviathan. In those countries rampant poverty rules the day together with ignorance and illiteracy of such an immense magnitude that it boggles one’s imagination.
In his bestseller, Journey Among Believers, V. S. Naipaul pointed out that one can hardly believe that Muslims in the lands in which he traveled are living in the 21 st century.
The leaders of the Muslim world are for the most part thieves, killers and cheats, filling their pockets while oppressing the people over whom they rule. They are often described as authoritarian and tyrannical rulers, hell bent on maximizing their own power through violence on the model of Saddam Hussein.
These leaders have made their subjects unskilled and unproductive through deliberate neglect to the extent that the Muslim countries account for only 1 percent of the global trade. However, Muslims make up 22 percent of the world’s population. No product from the Muslim world commands a premium in the international market.
Muslims have yet to develop productive infrastructure, institutions and laws to regulate civil life. In the contemporary world unilateral shooting or hanging those declared to be guilty, for allegedly committing crime, is no longer going to be acceptable. Look at the criticism leveled at Iran almost daily.
Muslims have yet to build a political state, or for that matter, the paraphernalia of a modern nation-state. The nation-state in the classical sense does exist anywhere from Morocco to Indonesia. They also have to master the rules for conducting politics to overcome tribal, clan, ethnic, regional, linguistic, sectarian, religious and ideological social strife endemic to them. No Muslim country has yet become a model to be emulated. Not even in the practice of Islam.
Education remains a fundamental shortcoming for the Muslims. Reports indicate that less than half of all the Muslims globally are literate. In countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Mali and others, literacy rates are lower than ten percent. Less than 30 percent of the Muslim women globally have had schooling.
Islam is the only religion whose holy scripture, the Holy Qu’an, began its revelation with the word “Iqra,” the commandment “to read.” But a majority of its followers are unable to read one thousand five hundred years later. This is a supreme irony for a community that takes pride in its Holy Book. They simply don’t abide by the teachings of their religion.
Given the lack of knowledge among them it is no wonder that Muslims have not contributed anything of value to the human civilization during the past several centuries. For the most part they have been stagnant as the world has passed them by.
The Muslim world does not even make a blip on the global intellectual radar screen. Developing brainpower will take decades, if not generations. In no area of human achievement are Muslims seen as having even minimal strength.
Muslims constitute one-fifth of the world’s population, over one billion pointed out earlier, though in economic, diplomatic, educational, scientific and other achievements they command less attention and less respects than the tiny states of Israel (5mil), Hong Kong (6mil) and Singapore (4mil).
As for numbers: Did you say one billion? One billion what, fleas?
- haniff@stcloudstate.edu
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