Let's find out shall we? I am going to start this article with some statistics and I am then going to try and determine in as fair a way as possible how Islamic countries fair in comparison to the rest of the world and what perhaps they can teach us.
First let us identify what countries we are actually talking about by identifying the 'Islamic' countries i.e. the countries declaring themselves Islamic or with a majority of Muslims as a population.
Middle East and North Africa
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Palestine.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, and Comoros.
South Asia
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Maldives.
Southeast Asia
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.
Central Asia
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Europe
Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina have a significant Muslim majority.
Turkey, which straddles Europe and Asia, also has Islam as its predominant religion.
That is a total of 45 majority Muslim countries in the World from a total of 195 recognized countries in the World by the UN, so surprisingly roughly 25% of the World's countries are majority Islamic.
Financial wealth in Islamic countries
Lets continue with some statistics about the financial wealth of those Islamic countries
Muslims are among the poorest of the poor in the world. Around 40% of the Muslim population languishes in abject poverty, with nearly 350 million living under US$1.25 a day (COMCEC, 2014).
More than half of the world’s 57 Muslim countries are listed as low income food deficit countries by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO 2014) and almost half of them ranks in the low category in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index (UNDP, 2014).
Nearly 30% of Muslims cannot read or write; in tribal rural areas, female illiteracy rate can go up to 75% (SESRIC 2013).
Overall, Muslims constitute around 24% of the world population yet produce only 10% of the global GDP (SESRIC, 2012) and exhibit a poor performance on most of the key development indicators.
So its fair to say that outside of those lucky, oil rich autocracies, compared to the rest of the world, the Islamic world is poor, hungry and illiterate.
Personal freedom and liberty of citizens in Islamic Countries
Let us now make an assessment of how free and fair those societies are based on the comprehensive reporting from the Human Freedom Index 2023.
"The Human Freedom Index 2023," provides a comprehensive analysis of the state of personal, civil, and economic freedoms across the globe, focusing on data from 2021. It includes rankings and scores for 165 countries and territories, covering 98.8% of the world's population. The Index is designed to measure the absence of coercive constraint, utilizing 86 distinct indicators across various areas such as rule of law, security and safety, movement, religion, association, assembly and civil society, expression and information, relationships, size of government, legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation.
Regarding Muslim-majority countries and their correlations with freedom, the document provides specific rankings and freedom scores for several notable Muslim-majority nations:
United Arab Emirates: Ranked 126th, showing a lower level of human freedom relative to global standards.
Turkey: Positioned at 128th, indicating significant restrictions in both personal and economic freedoms.
Saudi Arabia: Placed at 157th, amongst the lowest in terms of human freedom, highlighting severe constraints.
Iran: Ranked 161st, near the bottom of the list, reflecting extremely limited freedoms.
Yemen and Syria: At 164th and 165th respectively, they have the lowest scores, indicating the most severe restrictions on freedom.
These rankings suggest a trend where Muslim majority countries score lower on the Human Freedom Index, indicating significant limitations in both personal and economic freedoms. Factors contributing to these lower scores include political regimes, legal and societal restrictions on freedom of expression and association, economic controls, and conflicts that impact security and safety.
Conclusion: it would be fair to say that compared to the world as a whole the Islamic countries are less free and less willing to allow their citizens the freedom to choose their own destiny.
Technology, science and academia
Perhaps a clumsy attempt to identify these kind of contributions to human knowledge but I think valid none-the-less. I am using the Patents granted by Country information here to determine how much these nations contribute to human understanding, scientific knowledge and technological advancement.
Here is a list of patents granted from the Islamic majority countries
Saudi Arabia: 1,746 patents
Malaysia: 6,876 patents
Algeria: 770 patents
Morocco: 745 patents
Kazakhstan: 651 patents
United Arab Emirates: 655 patents
Indonesia: 6,850 patents
Egypt: 508 patents
Bangladesh: 240 patents
Uzbekistan: 298 patents
Pakistan: 234 patents
Jordan: 166 patents
Qatar: 83 patents
Bahrain: 67 patents
Azerbaijan: 119 patents
Kyrgyzstan: 39 patents
Brunei: 31 patents
Yemen: 4 patents
The total comes to 20,082, however the total number of patents granted worldwide in 2024 so far is 1,628,008. The Islamic World figure therefore contributed just 1.2% of the world total even though they represent almost 25% of the total counties of the World.
It is important to note however that even this small amount of patents granted from the Islamic World as it were does not mean they emanated there. For example, if a company based in Germany files for and is granted a patent in Indonesia, this would be counted under non-resident patent grants in Indonesia's patent statistics. This would further reduce the actual amount of patents originating from the Islamic countries significantly. However, this does occur to a smaller degree in all countries so let's leave this where it is and err on the generous side of things. Please see examples of that below.
Indonesia:
Total Patent Grants: 6,850
Total Patent Applications 2021: 8,800
Non-Resident Patent Applications 2021: 7,403
Resident Patent Applications 2021: 1,397
Resident Patent Grants: 736
Non-Resident Patent Grants: 6,114
Pakistan:
Total Patent Grants: 234
Total Patent Applications 2021: 993
Non-Resident Patent Applications 2021: 567
Resident Patent Applications 2021: 426
Resident Patent Grants: 46
Non-Resident Patent Grants: 188
Crime statistics in the Islamic World
I have used data from this site to collate and draw conclusions here. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/groups/Muslim-countries/Crime
Here the Islamic countries seem to do rather well in the more minor crimes compared to the rest of the planet but worse on a few of the more serious ones - not including rape obviously which is I would consider serious crime;
Assault rate 82% less than average
Burglaries 6 times less than average
Kidnappings 56% more than average
Murders per 100,000 people 3 times more than average
Rape rate 3 times less than average
Robberies are 3 times less than average
Total crimes per 1000 are 4 times less than average
This may have a lot to do with Sharia law and the consequences for breaking it within those countries and also the definition of rape for example which may not be reported as often or in the same way as other countries but lets take this data at face value to give the Islamic World a fair suck of the sauce bottle as it were.
Health in the Islamic world
Again we go to Nationmaster for these excellent statistics which show us that they don't perform too badly here but still less than the rest of the world in general https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/groups/Muslim-countries/Health
Birthrate is 22% higher than the global average but infant mortality is 45% higher.
There are 14% less hospital beds and 8% less physicians but happily 18% less obesity although life expectancy for all sexes is 67 years which is 5% less than the rest of the world and considerably less than the West.
Intelligence in the Islamic World
This one really surprised me and it is a fascinating read, the comparison of mean IQ in Muslim and non-Muslim countries.
The upshot is (and I will use the wording in the report);
'The present research found that the Muslim country mean IQ of 81 is half a standard deviation below the mean IQ of non-Muslim nations and is not related to strength of Muslim culture as defined by the percentage of Muslims in the country. The mean IQ of 84 in Arab countries is not associated with per capita income and is incompatible with the intellectual achievements of the golden age of the Muslim Empire. Possible explanations for this decline include hybridization with sub-Saharan Africans, dysgenic decrease in the more educated Muslims employing birth control as suggested by Meisenberg, the Muslim religion not fostering critical thinking, and the intellectual contributions being both exaggerated and made by non-Muslims.'
the Muslim religion not fostering critical thinking. This is a statement that deserves an article all on its own and some investigation as to whether this correlates with all religions.
Happiness and life satisfaction in the Islamic World
A terrific piece here from the World Happiness Report 2024, which is an ongoing attempt to measure, quantify, and compare happiness levels around the world, sourcing data from Gallup.
The Gallup World Poll surveys approximately 1,000 respondents in nearly every country on a variety of issues, one of which is to evaluate their current life on a scale from 0–10.
The World Happiness Report then averages the score from life evaluations per country over a three-year period (2021–2023 for this year’s edition) and ranks from highest to lowest. For a full breakdown of how this works, please find the article here and look at their lovely graphics.
I have also provided a downloadable list of the rankings in an ods format.
The global average happiness is 5.52 and the average for those countries in the Islamic world is 4.83 and significantly below the mean average.
Islamic terrorism
This is a fascinating website on the subject and deserves a thorough read when you have the time https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/islamist-terrorist-attacks-in-the-world-1979-2021/ and in fact Wikipedia has an excellent and very informative article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_terrorism
It is quite difficult to determine an exact amount of terrorism in the World is due to Islamic Extremism. There is a good report here from the EU on the breakdown of terrorism of all types within the member states: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/terrorism-eu-facts-figures/ . It shows us that Islamic terrorism is the most prolific, followed by Non-specified terrorism, separatist movements and then surprisingly Left wing and anarchists (they put them in the same category, not me!) which would appear to be significantly larger than Right wing terrorism, which surprised me given the general narrative.
Terrorism according to Global terrorism database https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism is not only a much rarer cause of death than non-communicable or infectious diseases; it is also a rare cause of violent death: more than 4 times as many people die in armed conflicts, and more than ten times as many die from homicides.
And it mostly occurs in Africa, the middle east and the western Asia and the majority in Islamic Countries in the Sahel. Source: https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-terrorism-index-2023
The deadliest terrorist groups in the world in 2022 were Islamic State (IS) (who committed another atrocity in Moscow this weekend) and its affiliates, followed by al-Shabaab, Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), 2 of these being Jihad groups.
I think it is fair to say that the extreme Islam is associated with terrorist organizations and acts , the statistics from these websites bears this out, 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks that killed at least 210,13819 people took place between 1979 and May 2021.
Conclusions
Firstly, in the interest of a fair fight I selected a comparison of the Islamic World v the rest of the World because the reality is, after spending the day looking at these stats, Islam v the West looks like USA v UK in the Ryder cup. We needed all the other countries just to make this anywhere near a fair or even interesting comparison.
If you live in an Islamic majority country then of course you will have your own experience of all this, but this article has been written to give an objective comparison between the Islamic World and the rest of the world using statistics from multiple sources on a range of life factors.
This article is based on statistics and facts, it doesn't take into account individual human experiences, that's it's not the purpose. It won't accommodate dogma or the reader's determination not to take facts as the basis for universal truth. After all Muslim countries are dominated buy the religion. But lets put this into the perspective of what it means for the children of these countries. This alone will give us an insight into why so many people from Islamic countries try to find their way to the West.
My conclusion on what the statistics tell us that at a macro level is that if you live in a Muslim country then your children;
will be significantly poorer than living in a non-Muslim country
will be less literate
will have less freedom
will be less happy
will be less intelligent
will be unlikely to invent anything of use to humanity
will die sooner
will be more likely to be kidnapped
will more likely to be murdered
will be more likely to be involved in terrorism (both contributor and victim)
However, on the bright side your children will be;
less likely to be obese
less likely to burgled
less likely to be raped (at least by a stranger)
If this was a school report then I think a 'D' is a fair grade here. 'Massive room for improvement'. What can Islamic countries teach us in the rest of the World? In all fairness, I think that they are a beacon. I mean that in the sense of a lighthouse warning civilizations from destroying themselves on the rocks of backwardness and un-enlightment.
I shall follow this in another article about my thoughts on why the Islamic World fails to deliver for so many of it's citizens.
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