In a video that began circulating on X Friday, a young hijab-wearing woman, speaking in German, explains just how terrible the Western world would be if there were no Muslims in it. With surpassing confidence and not a little indignation toward those who would dare to doubt what she is saying, or be so benighted as not to take it as axiomatic already, she said:
Islam created the scientific culture, Muslims laid the foundations of the modern world, and Europe benefited from it. This is what the world would be like without Muslims: no technology, no computer science, no AI, high mortality rates, low life expectancy, no medicine, no industry, no seafaring, no globalization, no feedback, no Enlightenment, greater oppression, injustice, disease, chaos, and poverty.
The West stands on the shoulders of Islamic scholars. Without Muslims, there would be no modern world. Science, medicine, and education would be centuries behind.
Today, it is being concealed and kept secret that Muslims developed modern technology.
No matter how confidently they were expressed, every single one of these statements is false. Not only is what this woman spouting nonsense, but it makes most ordinary nonsense look like pure, crystalline common sense. In fact, the opposite of virtually everything she says is much closer to the truth: without the West, there would be no technology, no computer science, no AI, and all the rest of it. Without the West, which gave to the world the idea of representative government and the equality of rights of all people before the law, there would be greater oppression, injustice, disease, chaos and poverty.
The supremacist nonsense this woman is expressing is actually quite common, and Europe’s suicidal leftist internationalist elites have embraced it wholeheartedly, as I show in detail in my forthcoming book The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses.
Europe and North America are awash with ridiculous presentations such as “1001 Inventions” that purport to show that virtually everything under the sun, from cell phones to coffee to chocolate, we owe to Islam. “1001 Inventions” states proudly that it is “an award-winning UK science and cultural heritage organisation” which “has engaged over 500 million people through a network of strategic partnerships including governments, corporates as well as educational, cultural and international organisations such as World Food Programme (WFP), UNESCO and National Geographic.” Other non-Muslim organizations that have given 1001 Inventions a lavish welcome all over the Western world include Google Arts & Culture, the World Bank Global Partnership for Youth in Development, the BBC, the British government’s Home Office, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the publisher Random House.
1001 Inventions is so popular with the Western intelligentsia because it supposedly “leverages on the power of storytelling, interlinking themes of science, history and culture, to disrupt the notion of STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] being exclusive.” That is, the West didn’t develop those things, the Islamic world did. To that end, “1001 Inventions productions uncover fascinating historical contributions of lesser-known pioneers from Arab, Asian and other Eastern cultures. This helps young people understand that each one of them has an equal opportunity to become the scientist of the future. Such inclusive content helps promote harmony, respect and tolerance.”
Who could object to such a noble endeavor? Yet it carries an edge of sadness, for this promise of equal opportunity is based on a clever and complex web of wild exaggerations and outright fictions. It’s all based on fantasy and distortion of the historical record, with a clear political agenda for the present day: rather than enlighten people about forgotten aspects of our shared history, this is all a large-scale attempt to intimidate opponents of mass Muslim migration into embarrassed silence and regret for having dared to oppose this influx of doctors, lawyers, and inventors.
These extravagant claims about how the West owes so much of its knowledge of science, medicine and education to Islam also just leads to the opposite of what it is trying to achieve: instead of making non-Muslims think Islam is wonderful, it only underscores its failure. If Muslims really discovered and invented all these things, why didn’t they do anything with them? Why was it left to infidel Christian Europe to make genuine advances in science and technology, if Muslims really were the ones to make the discoveries that rendered those innovations possible?
Related: Does It Matter Which Book an Official Is Sworn In On?
Why is the West today the place of innovation in all of these fields, while the Islamic world languishes far behind and would be entirely mired in poverty were it not for the geologic accident of the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, a discovery that ultimately fueled (quite literally) the resurgence of Islamic jihad terrorism in our own age?
The real answer to the question of what the world would be like without Islam is actually quite different from all this twaddle that’s being sold to Western schoolchildren. The answer is that there would have been at least 48,820 fewer terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. Innumerable people who were murdered in those attacks would still be alive today. The Twin Towers would still be standing, and there would have been no justification at all for the ill-advised misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. The world, in sum, would be incalculably different, and almost certainly better than what it is.
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