The Economics of Islam: A Legacy of Failure

January 23, 2024

The religion of Islam and Muslims have captured the attention of the world to a degree not seen since that horrible day in 2001 when we learned that the World Trade Center towers were gone. Thousands of Americans died a horrible death at the hands of advocates of the “religion of peace”. October 7th was a stark reminder that those of us who feel part of the civilized world and the true believers in the Muslim world have little in common. We are, in truth enemies, whether we in the West choose to believe that reality or not. The Islamists believe we are the “Great Satan”. They seek our destruction and a one world caliphate. The Islamists know we are at war but understand they are not powerful enough to destroy us and play the long game. They seek to emigrate to the West, outpopulate us and eventually take over power and implement Sharia law. Those non-Muslims who do not convert will be subjugated and pay an extra tax called the Jizya which is placed on the “kafir”. In places like Israel and parts of Africa, they seek to exterminate the Jews, Christians and others.

The Islamists have formed an alliance with Western progressives/wokesters/cultural Marxists/Antifa or whatever one chooses to call these maladapted and obtuse leftists. Essentially this alliance is a two-headed serpent of destruction. If by some miracle, they win this struggle, they will turn on each other. Given the ruthlessness and brutality of the Islamists, the woke left will be annihilated as they are seen as depraved subhumans and be quickly eliminated. Islamic imperialism has a history of temporary alliances to effect conquest. This has always been an effective strategy of Muslim conquerors from Muhammad to the Iranian regime. There is a relatively recent example of in Iran. During the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Islamists and Marxists joined together to bring down the Shah. Once victory was achieved, Marxists either saw the “truth” of the Koran or they will be eliminated. There is a third leg to this anti-Western alliance which are the pathologically Jew hating pseudo-libertarian right. However, they are insignificant.

What many are missing about the current situation is that almost nowhere are the economics of Islam and Muslim majority nations discussed. The emphasis by the media and other commentators have been on the political and to some extent theological aspects of the issue. If anything, the mainstream media treat the current situation with contemptible simplicity.

Examining the current situation in the Islamic world and its interaction with the rest of humanity is almost pointless without any economic context. If one seeks to truly understand what is happening one must realize that Islamic nations are economic basket cases and have been for centuries. They will continue to struggle for many generations into the future without a complete reformation and revolution. If anything, things are getting worse and current tensions in Gaza, the Pakistan/Iran border, Houthi piracy and Islamic extremists calling for the murder, rape, torture and mutilation of millions of Jews, and Christians being slaughtered in Africa, is only the beginning. This explosion of Muslim havoc is mostly a result of overpopulation in Muslim nations and economic growth slowing in the West, China and other developed nations which account for most of global GDP. These nations are in precipitous decline from already poor positions.

The relentless persecution of Christian minorities in Muslim countries is getting worse and may soon metastasize into outright ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide while Christian majority nations in North America and Europe ignore this abomination much in the same way they ignored the gathering storm in the early 1930's.

There are 1.8 Muslims in total which is somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the global population. There are forty-nine Muslim majority nations and significant and growing minorities in many other countries. Germany, in contrast has a population of just over 80 million. Muslims outnumber Germans by over twenty to one. Yet, astonishingly, the combined G.D.P. of Muslim majority countries is roughly the same as Germany’s. The oil and gas wealth in the Middle East does not seem to matter. Islamic nations in Northern Africa are far poorer then European nations just across the Mediterranean. Despite the proximity of nations like Malaysia and Indonesia to Asian markets like China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and others, these economies remain relatively poor.

Islamists and their Western apologists on the left use the laughable excuse the current economic travails are a result of “colonialism”. This of course ignores the fact that the Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East for seven centuries. North Africa and the Middle East were hardly economic and cultural dynamos that were destroyed by thirty years of British and French control after World War I.

Nor can the “bad luck with geography” argument be blamed which was popularized in the 1990's by sociologists like Jared Diamond in books like Guns, Germs, and Steel. Marrakesh Morocco and Jakarta Indonesia are almost eight thousand miles apart and represent the expanse of the Islamic world. That is a greater distance than New York City is to New Delhi. Islam is clearly the underlying issue. Poverty seems to be endemic to Muslim nations.

The enigmatic behavior of Egypt during the Hamas-Israel War is less opaque when one looks at the dire economic state of the Land of Pharoahs. The land that once enslaved the ancestors of today's Israelis and was the world greatest economic superpower is now enslaved by the debts owed to the world's current economic superpower, the West. Egypt had a GDP per capita of $3,700 US in 2021. It is almost certainly lower today. It, until recently, had a life expectancy of seventy-one years compared to eighty-three years for Israel. Almost 90% of Egyptian women have been the victim of genital mutilation. The average IQ in Egypt is 76 according to Google. To put that into context, only one in eighteen Egyptians has an IQ of over 100, which is considered average intelligence in the West. Regardless of criticisms of IQ analysis, national IQ correlates with average G.D.P. There is little doubt that the government of Egypt is trying to balance two issues. One, it will soon need to beg for debt relief from the West and two, it must manage its rabidly anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic population.

The Islamic world is also faced with a rapidly growing population that is unsustainable. Lebanon, Iraq and Syria are already failed states. This collapse may reduce the Islamic threat or may make it even more dangerous as nations collapse and blame the West. They will never admit their own failings nor will they abandon their Feudalist kleptocratic economic systems because it is inherent in Islam and the Koran is considered the final word of Allah. The coming implosion of the Islamic world will be an important theme over the next fifty years. Islam has a lot of problems and Israel isn't one of them.