Today I want to talk about the poverty and illiteracy record of Islamic nations. If we care about the advantages we have in the West, our freedoms and our standard of living, we must stand against Islam because it will destroy everything we hold dear. All we have to do is look at those nations who did not resist Islam to see what happens to those who don’t. All of them have lost their freedom and their religion.

At Fortress of Faith we don’t blame Muslims, we see them as victims of Islam. This will become clear as you read this article. The data we will be looking at is 18 years old, but the reality of this data has not changed over this time.
According to the Pew Forum, the Muslim population in the world is between 1.6 and 1.7 billion. When the data was compiled in 2000, the Muslim population was about 1.4 billion. This gives us an idea of how fast the Muslim population is growing. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. It is not growing because of conversions to Islam, but because of the birthrate among Muslims.

The article I am pulling this information from was written by Dr Farrukh Saleem, an Islamabad-based freelance columnist. He is a Muslim in a Muslim country so he can’t insult Islam and had to be careful how he worded things.
Dr. Saleem mentioned that there are more than 800 million Muslims who are illiterate. This means that in the year 2000, six out of ten Muslims could not read. I recently read that 42% of Muslims in India are illiterate.

One of the reason there is so much illiteracy among Muslims is that Muhammad, himself, could not read or write. This does not mean that he was dumb or ignorant, it is just that there were no books in Arabic, and there was no need to read or write. The first book ever written in Arabia was the Qur’an.
The Jewish community, which is also a Middle Eastern community, has flourished as Dr. Saleem points out. It was largely because they had a high literacy rate.

The first subject Dr. Saleem deals with is the GDP.

The combined annual GDP of 57 Muslim countries remains under $2 trillion. America, just by herself, produces goods and services worth $10.4 trillion; China $5.7 trillion, Japan $3.5 trillion and Germany $2.1 trillion. Even India’s GDP is estimated at over $3 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).

Remember, these numbers are from they year 2000.

Oil rich Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods and services (mostly oil) worth $430 billion; Netherlands alone has a higher annual GDP while Buddhist Thailand produces goods and services worth $429 billion.
When you put the richest Muslim nations together, Just one nation, a Buddhist nation, matches their wealth.

Muslims are 22 percent of the world population and produce less than five percent of global GDP. Even more worrying is that the Muslim countries’ GDP as a percent of the global GDP is going down over time. The Arabs, it seems, are particularly worse off. According to the United Nations’ Arab Development Report: “Half of Arab women cannot read; One in five Arabs live on less than $2 per day; Only 1 percent of the Arab population has a personal computer, and only half of 1 percent use the Internet; Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed, and this number could double by 2010; The average growth rate of the per capita income during the preceding 20 years in the Arab world was only one-half of 1 percent per annum, worse than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa.”

He points out who are the poorest nations in the world:

The planet’s poorest countries include Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Mozambique. At least six of the poorest of the poor are countries with a Muslim majority.

Muslims of the world are among the poorest of the poor.

He then looks at the universities:

Fifty-seven Muslim majority countries have an average of ten universities each for a total of less than 600 universities for 1.4 billion people; India has 8,407 universities, the U.S. has 5,758. From within 1.4 billion Muslims Abdus Salam and Ahmed Zewail are the only two Muslim men who won a Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry (Salam pursued his scientific work in Italy and the UK, Zewail at California Institute of Technology). Dr Salam in his home country is not even considered a Muslim.

One of the reasons that the economies of the Muslim world is doing so poorly is, they are not educating their people.

Consider where Muslims rate concerning Nobel prizes:

Over the past 105 years, 1.4 billion Muslims have produced eight Nobel Laureates while a mere 14 million Jews have produced 167 Nobel Laureates.

At the time, Muslims were 22% of the world population and produced less that 1% of the Nobel Laureates, while the Jews, which are less that 1% of the world population produced 23% of the Nobel Laureates.
Where does Islam rate in science?

Of the 1.4 billion Muslims less than 300,000 qualify as ‘scientists’, and that converts to a ratio of 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The United States of America has 1.1 million scientists (4,099 per million); Japan has 700,000 (5,095 per million).

Dr. Saleem asked the following Question:

What really went wrong? Why are Muslims poor, illiterate and weak?

He gives two potential reasons for the condition of Muslim countries.

Diagnosis 1: Muslims are poor, illiterate and weak because they have ‘abandoned the divine heritage of Islam’.Prescription: We must return to our real or imagined past.

Diagnosis 2: Muslims are poor, illiterate and weak because we have refused to change with time.

The suggestion is that Islam must return to its roots, or it needs to change with the times. On his Facebook page he says the following:

This really says it all. It is interesting because it shows us what Islam produces. It also explains why Muslims are trying to flee Islamic countries. If I lived in the kind of society found in Islamic nations I would do all I could to get away from it. Remember, eight out of ten Muslims who have come to the West are doing so to get away from Islam’s tyranny. About two out of ten Muslims who come to the West are dangerous because they love their God and have come here to destroy our way of life.

We can’t get the Gospel into their countries because of Islamic law. God has brought them to us, and we should do all we can to reach them for Christ. Muslims are the most neglected people group when it comes to evangelism. We must take advantage of the opportunity that God has given us. Statistics tell us that if a Muslim doesn’t get converted withing the first two years after coming to the West, there is little chance that they ever will be reached.

I pray that what you have learned today will break your hearts, and that you will start praying for their salvation. I pray that when the opportunity presents itself, you will do all you can to bring them to the truth and peace that is only found in Jesus Christ.