Quote:
Originally Posted by Webstral
The real danger, as always, is that a nation with a distinctly non-Western culture will learn to combine Western economic, industrial, and scientific tools with its own culture and produce something that causes us to question our assumptions about how things go. Oh, yes--that's been happening, hasn't it? It just hasn't happend with a Muslim country yet--not really. The Persian Gulf States have plenty of oil wealth and all the trappings of Western society, but representative government has eluded them thus far. One never knows, though. What if a Westernized Muslim state emerged that learned to make peace between Islam and modernism? This is not hard to imagine when one converses with moderate Muslims or reads their work.
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I personally think that in almost all cases when Islam is dominate in a nation it stifles innovation. That is going to hold those nations back and I am not sure that the works of moderate Muslims can undo what seems to me to be a deep cultural resistance to moving forward.
If you look at US Patents by country
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/...af/cst_utl.htm
you will see that most European and Asian countries (including Denmark and Singapore) have had more patents granted than all Muslim nations combined. Even Lichtenstein (with a GDP about 1.5% as large) holds it own with Saudi Arabia .
Some might say that hostility to the US is suppressing these numbers, but even longtime ally Turkey's comes very close to the bottom of the list as far as European democracies go. Generally it is out shined by the former Eastern Bloc countries who have a shorter history of both democracy and capitalism. In trying to see if there might be geographical (as opposed to cultural) reasons for such low numbers, I saw that neighbor Greece has more than double the patents granted as Turkey, with about 1/6th of the population.
Perhaps one day Islam will again become more supportive of an innovative process, but at the moment it looks like they have a long way to go.
Edit:
Added "again" to the last sentence to reflect that Islamic culture was once the one of the greatest motivators for innovation.