October 12, 2007

Science: More Muslims, Less Freedom

The sad reality. Let the "Islamophobe" and "Muslim bashing" name-calling begin!

Frederic L. Pryor in Middle East Quarterly's ME Forum:

The statistical results ... show that in all but very poor countries, Islam has a significantly negative impact on political rights.....

This conclusion is reflected in the fact that, with the exception of the regression in column four, the greater the percentage of Muslims in the population, the lower are the political rights in the country. This Muslim variable is not, however, statistically significant when the very poor nations in the sample are examined separately. Such a result makes sense. Citizens of very poor nations often enjoy few rights to begin with, and so Islam does not have much room to create a downward impact. For the entire sample, the countries with an Arab culture also have lower political rights than other Muslim nations although in the other results with different sub-samples, there is not an indication of such a relationship.....

Other concrete examples illustrate the statistical results. Among pairs of oil exporting states with roughly the same per capita GDP, one predominantly Muslim, the other not, the Muslim country compares unfavorably with the non-Muslim state. For instance, Algeria is less democratic than Gabon; Syria has fewer political freedoms than Sri Lanka, and even Iran does not compare well to Venezuela. Of the 58 nations classified as having medium or high per capita GDP, only the 6 Gulf Cooperation Council states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates—are Muslim. These 6 countries have an average political freedom score roughly one third that of the remaining 52 nations in this group.....

There are some exceptions to the general conclusion that Islam has a negative impact on political rights. In the sample of 39 predominantly Muslim countries, Bangladesh, Mali, Senegal, and Turkey have political freedom scores in the middle range....

Nevertheless, in statistical experiments not reported here that use smaller samples of nations having more reliable data, the major conclusion about the negative relationship between Islam and political rights does not change. Similarly, experiments using other explanatory variables such as population heterogeneity did not change the general conclusions....