Science and Islam

Muslims claim that the Koran itself is the miracle of Islam and this book presents god given revelations about scientific phenomena. Unless you believe that “the setting place of the sun is a muddy spring” as ‘revealed’ in Koran 18-086, the truth is that science reveals far more about Islam than the other way around. Those of us living in the West and exposed to the principles of science should easily see through the hollow claims of Islam and recognize the threat that this ideology poses to civilization. We have a tradition of using the powers of observation to make sense of phenomena around us. Through a disciplined process of thought, scientists gather empirical, measurable evidence to formulate and test theses. It is natural to apply this process of thought to understand why it is that every Islamic society today is dysfunctional, backward and violent. A reasonable hypothesis given the mountain of evidence is one of cause and effect - namely that Islamic ideology leads directly to the squalor, violence and ignorance rampant in societies dominated by Islam. There is no shortage of statistics available to detail the sordid reality of Islamic societies. Even the richest and most progressive ones have a low quality of life and abysmal records on human rights. Review data like that found in the Human Development Index rankings for the world’s nations (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/) and you’ll note that Islamic nations are lumped at the bottom of the pack of the league of nations. Aside from city states, the highest ranked Muslim nation is oil rich Libya ranked at # 52 – just below Cuba and Mexico. The core of the 1 billion plus adherents of Mohammed’s creed are ranked solidly in the bottom half of the world in terms of quality of life. Islamic streets have far more in common with Haiti, Mongolia and Zimbabwe than the Western world they criticize so vehemently. When it comes to human rights, Islamic societies are among the worst of the worst. Look to Mohammed’s homeland, where 100 lashes are meted out in cases of rape – administered to the female victims. Year after year, Amnesty International reports a plague of honour killings afflict Jordan and Pakistan and that these go unpunished by their courts. Female genital mutilation is widespread in Somalia, Egypt and Sudan where this brutal procedure is inflicted upon the majority of young girls in these nations. This brutality is carried out with the tacit support of overbearing Islamic society that regulates everything in life from acceptable food, clothing and extends even to suitable names for teddy bears. It is clear that Islamic states lag the rest of the world in terms of development, quality of life and innovation. There is no reason to believe that this sorry state is a temporary blip on a trend line that otherwise is headed toward enlightened utopia. In many areas of the globe, people have lived for centuries with Islam as the only way of life. These states are fully evolved and homogeneous in composition. There has been ample time to demonstrate the peace and harmony that Islam affords but all the Ummah has to show is the Kafkaesque horror of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Modern states provide no more reason for hope than the original Islamic societies. Muslims in India broke away with great expectation 60 years ago to form a ‘pure’ Islamic state. Today, India prospers and is set to become a world economic power. Pakistan and Bangladesh on the other hand are among the world’s most dysfunctional states and these republics, now overwhelmingly Islamic in composition, are pure only in the sense that life there is pure hell. All over the world, whether people have been answering the call to prayer for decades or centuries, the fruits of Islamic society are consistently bitter if not outright toxic. If indeed grapes are not gathered from thorns nor figs from thistles, can this mean that Islamic states are merely victims of fate, climate or external factors in their lands? Consider that Islam has an overwhelming influence over people in Islamic majority states and nothing is accepted in this culture unless Mohammed did it, said it or prescribed it. Muslim men beat women with impunity because Koran permits this in verse 4-034. Muslim men marry girls as young as 9 years of age because Mohammed set the precedent with Aisha. Muslims accept and practise the custom of female genital mutilation because Mohammed gave his blessing as recorded in Hadith (Abu Dawud ) book 41, number 5251. Islamic society is shaped by the underpinning belief system and this permeates every aspect of society. The dysfunctional reality of Islamic states cannot be said to be a temporary setback in evolution, the result of external influences or malicious minorities but rather a direct consequence of the ideology; Islam is as Islam does. Science can further help us distinguish the wheat from the chafe in Islam. The Pareto probability distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution) a tool used to distinguish the “vital few” from the “trivial many” factors within data. Simplified, it is the principle that 20% of something is often responsible for 80% of the results. Consider that 20% of people own 80% of the wealth in a nation or the success of a sports team is due to the efforts of its few key players while the others merely fill out the roster. The value of the Pareto Principle is that it directs us to focus on the essential few factors and identify the elements of greatest significance in a study. In the study of Islam, this principle gives us great insight relative to the phenomena of the elusive “moderate majority” of that ideology. Pareto’s model teaches us that it simply doesn’t matter what the silent majority think, say or do, as it is the vital few who direct society. There is no Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., John F Kennedy, Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa in Islam at this time of Islam’s resurgence. The pre-eminent voices in Islam are the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hassan Nasrallah, uncovered meat sheikh Hilali, and Osama bin Laden. The voices of alleged moderate Islam, even when amplified by useful idiots in the West prove to be irrelevant and anything but moderate. “Moderates” like professor Tariq Ramadan, CAIR alumnus Ahmed Bedier, Bridge’s television producer Muzzammil Hassan and British Lord Ahmed are nothing more than puffed up creations tailored for local Western consumption. Given enough time, the true nature of these men as brainwashed believers is revealed; one after the other, they are exposed as intolerant supremacists, supporters of terror organizations, misogynists if not outright thugs hiding behind smiles and tailored suits. The few in the Ummah who do stand up to radical Islam like Shoaib Choudhury or Tarek Fatah are threatened or run out of office by the vital few in the Islamic community who truly speak for it. The Pareto distribution applied to Islam reveals the essence of the movement. In this creed, a virulent minority navigates the not-so-good ship Islam and the majority unquestioningly sail along towards Allah’s paradise. From chemistry, we can understand the end result to be expected from the social experiment called multiculturalism. As more and more migrants from the Islamic world are added into the mix of Western society, we must learn the significance of the terms “lower explosive limit” and “upper explosive limit”. These are the concentration limits within which a volatile vapour can be ignited and result in a violently exothermic reaction. A minimum concentration of 1.5 % gasoline molecules within the air is required to bring about an explosive reaction. If gasoline vapour does not explode when someone tempts fate with an open flame, it doesn’t mean that gasoline is not explosive nor does this good fortune indicate that a specific brand of gasoline is somehow benign. One is safe only for the time until the gasoline concentration in air remains outside explosive limits. It is crucial to understand this principle when considering the introduction of Islam into Western society. At low concentrations, the introduction of Islamic citizens into society leads to no marked change in society. This proves nothing about the true incendiary nature of the ideology of Islam. Once the concentration of believers in Islam within society exceeds the Lower Explosive Limit, any spark will be sufficient to set them to explode into violent fury. This is seen all along the fault lines on the globe where concentrated enclaves of Muslims interact with people of different religious beliefs. In these unfortunate regions, Muslims consistently demonstrate that they cannot live in peace with others - whether the others are Filipino Christians, Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, Jews in Israel, Orthodox Serbs in Kosovo or animists in Sudan. In affluent Europe, it is believed that Islam is moderated by exposure to prosperity, safe streets, health care, education and Western freedoms. However, the evidence does not support this unfounded belief. Cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Malmo and Bradford - cities formerly at peace for decades, have erupted into riots since Muslim immigrants have concentrated beyond the lower explosive limit in their parallel Islamic societies. While there can be a mixture of gasoline vapour that is too rich to support combustion, no such upper explosive limit exists in Islam. Nations that are 97% Muslim like Pakistan & Somalia or 100% like Saudi Arabia, suffer bombings, riots and terror attacks at the hands of Islamic zealots just as are suffered in nations where only a minority of zealous believers live. Using the principles of science, we can learn much about the ideology of Islam. Using the powers of observation, we see that Islamic culture everywhere leads to dysfunction and that this dysfunction is a direct outcome of the ideology. Irrational hope for inconsequential moderates and wishful but unwarranted expectations of harmony melt way under the focus of thought tempered by scientific reasoning.