In the first week of January 2006, the American Federation of Muslims of Indian-origin (AFMI) and the Talent Promotion Trust, a Bangalore based NGO, jointly held a panel discussion on “Emerging India and Development of Muslims” in Bangalore. Farooque Shaikh, a renowned film star, while addressing the gathering of Muslim intellectuals, said, “Muslims need to introspect as to why their situation has hit the present nadir and should give up blaming others for their dismal educational standard”. He also said that after analyzing the Muslim community he has come to the conclusion that … …religious discrimination, gender bias and other issues are plaguing them”. While commenting on the economic backwardness of the community, he said, “People in the South are lucky that their social and economic conditions are somewhat better than Muslims in the North. Take a trip to the remote regions in the North and the living conditions of the Muslims there are appalling”. “The ritualistic zakat doled out by the rich towards the poor is not enough to elevate the pathetic living standards of the Muslims”, Mr. Shaikh added (Islamic Voice: February, 2006).

On the new role Muslims have to play in the new emerging India, Sadaqath Peeran, chairman of the Al-Ameen Education Society, said, “If Muslims had to be equal partners in emerging India, they had to break the shackle of poverty and illiteracy. English should be introduced in all Urdu schools, if we want to be equipped to face the challenges of this competitive world”. Maqbool Ahmed Siraj, Secretary of the Talent Promotion Trust, said, “The Muslim situation is very bleak all over the world. There is no encouragement and incentive for innovation and creativity in the Muslim world”. Lamenting the low level of economic activity in the Muslim world, Siraj added, “The entire gross domestic product of the Muslim world is just half of what France produces every year”. (Islamic Voice, Feb 2006).

In January 1998, Wasim Sajjad, President of the Islamabad based Ministerial Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (CONSTECH), told a press conference that the countries belonging to the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), considering their share of world population, should have 4 million scientists and engineers, but in reality they had only 200,000, merely 5 percent of the expected figure. He also pointed out that Muslims account for 1.3 billion or nearly 32 per cent of the world population, but scientific research papers they publish is negligible, below one percent of global total. And at the same time, they have little contribution in the high tech-areas like computer software and information technology. Mr. Sajjad, while lamenting over the dearth of creativity and poor performance of Muslims in modern science and technology, complained that, considering the share of world population, Islamic countries should spend $ 4.7 million a year for higher education and research, but in reality they were spending as low as $ 130,000 per Year.

The severe dearth of creativity in the Muslim world has been revealed in another study by Hisamul Islam Siddiqi, the president of the Delhi-based NGO, Indian Islamic Council. In India and elsewhere in the world, Muslims, as a community, are most back-ward and top the list in adult illiteracy, infant mortality and poverty. In addressing a seminar on ‘Islamic Heritage: Indian Dimension’ in Delhi in February, 2000, Siddiqi informed that nearly 36 percent of Indian Muslims were urban and almost all of them were slum-dwellers, living below the poverty line. In pointing out the widespread darkness of ignorance and illiteracy amongst Muslims, the Rahat Welfare Trust, a Mumbai based NGO, said, “This darkness makes a mockery of our freedom. … It is only the light of education that can banish this darkness created by ignorance”. Sadatulla Khan, the  editor of the Bangalore-based monthly Islamic Voice, lamenting intellectual stagnation and the  lack of creativity in the Muslim community, wrote in an editorial entitled ‘Intellectual Stagnation and Its Remedy’ that “Both individually and collectively, Muslims are victims of intellectual stagnation for the past several centuries and are painfully lagging behind in the race of civilization.”

The picture is not different either in the Arab world, the 22 Islamic countries of the Arab League. Though not so poor, people are generally backward in every walk of life. Most of these countries richly endowed with natural resources like natural oil and gas, people do not faced endemic poverty or ethnic conflicts. Moreover, they shook off their foreign bondage, colonial or neo-colonial legacy, quite a long ago. So the question naturally arises: What went wrong? What made them so stuck behind time?

The answer to these questions comes from a 2001 study by a committee of Arab intellectuals and scholars under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The committee, led by Egyptian scholar Nader Fergani, carried out a year-long investigation and thoroughly analyzed the Arab world’s strength and failings. The findings of the study, entitled “Arab Human Development Report 2002”, was published  in the first week of July, 2002.

To estimate the performance of a country, the UN, for the past 10 or so years, is using the ‘Human Development Index’ (HDI) that includes life expectancy at birth, adult literacy rate, school enrolment as well as per capita income. Another index called ‘Alternative Human Development Index’ (AHDI) is also used that drops the per capita income from HDI, but includes additional factors like freedom of speech and similar fundamental rights enjoyed by the people, use of Internet, emissions of carbon dioxide and so on. In both indices, the Arab countries scored lower than almost all other countries in the world.

On the dark side, investigators have identified three major shortcomings. First, one in five Arabs lives on less than $2 a day. Second, their per capita income increased at a rate of 0.5 percent over the past 20 years, lower than anywhere in the world except the sub-Saharan Islamic countries. Third, laments the report that it would take 140 years for an average Arab  to double his income at this rate, while many countries set such a target to be achieved within less than a decade.

Lack of freedom, says the report, is the root cause of many evils in the Arab world, such as extremely autocratic governments, holding of bogus elections, confusion between executive and judiciary and constraints on the media and civil society. “This lack of personal freedom leads to patriarchal, intolerant, and in many cases, suffocating social environments”, the report asserts. The great wave of democratization that has opened up so much of the world over past two decades seems to have left the Arab world untouched. “Sometimes democracy is offered as a concession, not as a right. Transfer of power through ballot box is not a common phenomenon in the Arab world”, says the report. Freedom of expression and freedom of association are extremely limited and no Arab country has a genuinely free media. “Civil societies in the Arab world are shackled and the NGOs are hobbled by legal and administrative obstacles”, the report continues.

Although Arabs spend a greater share of their GDP for education than in most other developing regions, the money does not seem to be well spent. Quality of education is pitiably low and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Nearly 10 million children have no schooling at all and “for this poor education system, Arabs are falling further behind in scientific as well as in technological studies and research”, the report says. “Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6 percent Arabs uses the Internet and 1.2 per cent have personal computers. All these add to the severe dearth of creativity”, says the report.

One thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its womenfolk as full citizens and this suppression of women is another vital reason that makes the Arab world backward. The report rightly considers it as a awful wastage. “How can a community prosper if it stifles half of its production potential”, the report asks. Though women’s literacy has trebled in past 30 years, more than 50 percent of Arab women still cannot read and write. Their participation in social, economic and political fields is negligible in comparison to women of other parts of the world.

In this context, it would be pertinent to say a few words about the Muslim women's affair in India. In a message to the special edition Naree Sakti of the ‘Seva Surabhi 2002’, published from Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, former President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam wrote, “As we all know, birds have two wings. Unless both the wings grow equally, the bird cannot fly. Similarly, the society has two wings: man and woman. Both have to be developed equally. Then the society will fly”. It is important to note here that when in mid-2003, a verdict of the Supreme Court upheld the necessity of enforcing ‘common civil code’, which could liberate Muslim women of this country from shameful gender discrimination like polygamy and oral divorce, President Kalam indirectly supported the fanatic mullahs by keeping silence.

Mr. Clovis Maksoud, an Egyptian scholar involved in preparing the report, blamed no historical event like Western imperialism, devastation caused by the Second World War or any other outside intervention for the present backwardness of the Arab world, and the Islamic world at large. He indirectly raised his finger to the creed of Islam itself for the said backwardness of the Arab world.

“The most delicate issue of all, again carefully skirted by the authors of the report, is the part Islam plays in delaying and impeding the Arab world’s advance towards every receding renaissance that its intellectuals crave”, says a British commentator. Though an article of the report praises Islam and says that the faith supports justice, peace, tolerance, equilibrium and all good things, most of the experts on the Middle East and the Arab world are convinced that pervasive Islamisation of the society has played havoc and is entirely responsible for stifling constructive Arab thought and progress.

“From the schooldays onwards, Arabs are instructed that they should not defy tradition (laid down by Allah through Koran and Hadith), that they should respect the authority (of Allah) and truth should be sought in the text (i.e. Koran and Hadith) and not in experience”, says the British commentator. “The role of thought (among Muslims) is to explain and transmit (what has been ordained by Allah in Koran and Hadith) and not to search or question (those religious dogmas)”, says a Syrian intellectual.

There is no doubt that such tenets are holding sway and impeding creative thought, innovation and progress in the Muslim world. Even an educated Muslim has to believe in Prophet Muhammad’s journey to heaven (meraj) and his splitting of the moon into two halves. Each and every Muslim, whether educated or not, has to believe in the Koranic version of creation that says that Allah has created this world from nothingness within six days, the human race began its journey from a single pair of man and woman, namely Adam (derived from Sanskrit adim) and Hawa and Prophet Muhammad was the 90th descendant of Adam, which leads to the conclusion that Allah created this world only 4,135 years ago (considering 30 years to be the gap between two successive generations).

At the same time, they are not permitted to make a rational estimate of Prophet Muhammad, and his life and deeds. They are permitted to praise him for everything he did, without passing any critical remark. He should always be projected as an apostle of peace by concealing his terribly cruel deeds like massacring the Jews of Kuraiza and Nazir clan and indiscriminate killings of Arab infidels organizing 82 raids and military campaigns during his ten-year stay at Medina. Every Muslims has to discover divinity in his marrying 12 (or more) wives in his declining years, including his marrying 6-year-old Ayesha at the age of 52, and his marrying Zainab, the wife of his adopted son Zeid. What an insult to one’s intellect! What a colossal intellectual slavery!

All the above mentioned comments and opinions of the scholars who prepared the ‘Arab Human Report 2002’ leads one to conclude that, as a community, Muslims around the world are deprived of their right to freethinking and are intellectually enslaved by the creed of Islam. Or, more pointedly, they are a community of shackled people enslaved by the Koran. Can a community of slaves ever prosper? Only time can tell who liberates them from this slavery and how?

It would be relevant to conclude quoting an eminent scholar of Islam, Sir William Muir. In his celebrated work, The Life of Mahomet, he writes, “The sword of Mohammad, and the Koran, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty and Truth which the world has yet known”.