Muslims Should Thank Richard Dawkins
August 12th, 2013
The distinguished atheist and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins recently tweeted:
“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”
Dawkins invoked the Muslim analogy because Muslim apologists often brag that Islam is numerically the fastest growing religion in the world with 1.6 billion adherents and that Islamic science deserves enormous respect. One merely has to look at the textbooks influenced by Muslim apologists and aimed at middle school children in the USA to realize that Islam is credited with ushering in scientific advancement in the Middle Ages. So, even though the tweet is provocative, it is perfectly reasonable to evaluate the accomplishments of Muslims vis-à-vis these oft-touted claims.
Over the last 100 years, the Nobel Prize has been a barometer of the intellectual accomplishments of a society. A Nobel Prize in science is often a culmination of a society’s investments in basic research, founding of scientific institutions and the building of a critical mass of intellectuals that would invest decades into pursuing the deepest challenges of science.
Conversely, societies that produce Nobel laureates also possess the mechanism to raise the threshold of knowledge at all levels. One need not be a Nobel laureate to figure out that it is usually those societies that produce Nobel Prize winners which also make innovations in computing, finance, life sciences, applied technology, etc. All of these intellectual advancements rely upon raising the threshold of knowledge and freedom across society and generating a critical mass of free-thinking intellectuals. This is why Dawkins’ choice of the Nobel Prize is apt and well thought out.
In the early centuries following the birth of Islam, some Muslims made impressive intellectual contributions. They often borrowed mathematical, scientific and philosophical ideas from the Greeks and the Indians, embellished those ideas and transmitted them to Europe. This contribution becomes all the more important considering that Christianity had plunged Europe into the Dark Ages in that period. But why did this intellectual movement subside?
Is it because those Muslim contributors were erstwhile pagans who possessed an intellectual pedigree and were merely pursuing their pre-Islamic ways? Did Islam actually extinguish the extant intellectual spirit? These are reasonable questions to ask.
Instead, Dawkins’ critics chose to call him “an old white racist.” Dawkins teasingly retorted:
“Muslims aren’t a race. What they have in common is a religion. Rather than Trinity, would you prefer the comparison with Jews? Google it.”
It is this thorough reasonableness that sets Dawkins apart from his irrational critics. Jews are just 3% of America’s population but have won 27% of the Nobel Prizes in science. Should one rather pretend that this phenomenon does not exist than investigate it to learn something precious to benefit other communities too? There are indications that the higher intelligence of Jews correlates with such diseases as Tay-Sachs and hence could be an outcome of biological natural selection processes that enhance brain power. Is it genetics that contributed to the superior Jewish accomplishment? Or, is it a combination of genes and memes that valued the pursuit of knowledge? Interestingly, many of these high-achieving Jews are of European Ashkenazi extraction. Did the diversification of the Jewish gene pool in the Middle Ages after they migrated to Europe contribute to their higher intelligence?
Nesrine Malik, a Muslim apologist, instead of pursuing this reasonable line of thinking, unjustly called Dawkins “irrational and dishonest.” She conceded that fewer Muslims than Trinity College members have won Nobel Prizes but lamented that replace ‘Muslims’ with ‘Indians’ or ‘Chinese’ and the result would be the same.
On this point, I would agree with Malik. It is certainly true that Indians, Chinese, or for that reason, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, etc, have won fewer Nobel Prizes than the members of Trinity College. However, unlike Malik, I would like to find out why. Atheists, agnostics and non-observant Jews are a miniscule minority of the world’s population yet virtually every Nobel Prize-winning scientist has hailed from their ranks. Do these devotees of reason outperform their religious brethren because they have freed themselves from the shackles of stifling, irrational faith? It is a reasonable question to ask.
Two factors, in addition to the genetic component, seem to play a crucial role in a society’s intellectual accomplishments:
A strong military-economic foundation that allows a society to invest in its intellectual institutions.
A social milieu that privileges reason and free-thinking which in turn enables the innovation and progress of ideas.
Historically, almost every society that progressed intellectually has been guided by these two factors. Ancient Greece was a military-economic superpower which invested in its gymnasiums, where many of its philosophical and scientific foundations were laid. Greek laypeople might have been ignorant but society privileged its rational philosophers as the guiding force.
Ancient India was also a military-economic superpower which invested in the very first universities of the world: Takṣaśilāand Nāḻanda. The brightest Hindu children devoted their entire lives to the pursuit of knowledge and society treasured them. India’s towering accomplishments in urban planning, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy were a result of such investments.
Lay Hindus might have been ignorant folks but ignorance was not portrayed as virtuous. Instead, such rationalistic, non-theistic Hindu philosophies as Sāṅkhya, Vaiśeṣika, Lökāyata, Yöga, Nyāya, etc. were the privileged schools of thought.
The Greek intellectual decline was triggered by the collapse of their military-economic might and forced replacement of Hellene philosophy by harmful Christian superstition.
The Indian intellectual decline was triggered by waves of Islamic and Christian invasions that lasted well over a millennium and destroyed her military might as well as institutions of learning.
The intellectual dominance that the modern West enjoys has been accompanied by its military-economic might, a rebellion against Christian ignorance and a conscious effort to privilege institutions of research.
Only two communities have been an exception to this norm: Jews and Muslims. If one were to believe The Bible, the Jewish domination of Israel in ancient times was characterized by brute force and exterminations of rival people and not by any intellectual accomplishments. Irrational, superstitious and harmful religious beliefs shackled Jewish thinking. It was only when the Jews started to break away from these shackles in the Middle Ages did they begin to attain intellectual glory even though they lacked military-economic might.
Muslims too have been the ruling force for nearly 1,300 years but they achieved their domination through brute force, intolerance of free-speech and subjugation of non-Muslims.Islamic contributions to science happened only in the early centuries of Islam before that religion took deep roots in society. Once Islam became entrenched, all intellectual pursuits were systematically extinguished.
These examples tell us that Abrahamic religious worldviews kill reason and hence are lethal to intellectual progress. This is best exemplified by the case of Muslims. In the pre-Islamic era, the ancestors of today’s Muslims made significant intellectual contributions. The disciplines of linguistics and philology were founded in Afghanistan. The urban planning architecture of the Indus Valley Civilization in Pakistan and the pyramids of Egypt are unparalleled. These illustrate that it is not genetics but Islam that has crippled the intellectual spirit in Muslims. Every day, over 6,000 Muslim girls are subject to genital mutilations in Europe alone. Millions Muslim women lead a wasteful existence beneath a veil and are married off to a cousin to run a womb factory rather than reasonably pursue invigorating knowledge.
Dawkins has shone the spotlight on the plight of Muslims, who would do well to wake up to the reality, abandon suffocating Islam and regain the glory which their ancestors had attained in the pre-Islamic era.
Muslim apologists like Malik who are comfortably settled in the West are doing an immense disservice to their fellow Muslims by irrationally denouncing Dawkins and relinquishing reason. A Muslim who cares about the well-being of his or her progeny should thank Dawkins for saying the unpleasant truth because the journey to intellectual glory begins with recognizing one’s own plight.
Kalavai Venkat is a Silicon Valley-based writer, an atheist, and a practicing orthodox Hindu. He is the author of the forthcoming book 'What Every Hindu Should Know About Christianity'.
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