printVery little was said about sample size, data-collection methods and other crucial methodological matters during the screening, on PBS, of the documentary “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think.”
“We have the missing answers and statistics, gathered, parsed, and analyzed not by pundits but by professional researchers”: So goes a declamation on the website touting the program. This sounds a lot like advertising. You do learn that these stellar social scientists relied on the interview to collect this definitive information (which concludes that Muslims the world over are moderates). The interview is one of the least reliable tools in the social sciences. The questions asked and showcased, moreover, were most definitely leading questions. The answers people tend to give to loaded questions are usually bogus.
Other than Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, an A-list Islam apologist, “Inside Islam” introduced the viewer to emphatic, invested presenters of a one-sided view of the West as oblivious to Muslim opinion and aspirations.
I guess they had a valid point with respect to American foreign policy. You have to possess Olympian vanity to invade Muslim countries as America has done, with so little knowledge of the history of the people, the region and the outcome of prior such faith-based democratic missionizing.
However, the efforts of Dalia Mogahed, Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies (also an Obama appointee), to sanitize Islam became quite ridiculous when she contended that her faith specifies a series of inalienable rights designed to protect the individual against the state.
Come again? More than a religion, Islam is a fully developed political system.
Mogahed was commandeering the language of the American Bill of Rights to ingratiate Islam on her audience. What has happened to the social sciences? In my days you ruled out activists.
In the same spirit of “scientific” detachment, another self-styled social scientist, who spoke at length on “Inside Islam,” ventured that Israel was a piece of the West left behind in Muslim lands; a sore reminder of this occupation. Our impartial researcher was voicing the radical opinions of the Helen-Thomas School of Thought.
My old Afrikaner lecturers—the ones who drilled me in statistics—would have barred both Mogahed and her colleague from designing or partaking in a study for fear of biasing the results.
There is a good chapter on the death of the social sciences in “WE ARE DOOMED.”
The social sciences are most certainly doomed.
UPDATE I (Jan. 1): Stephen raises an interesting point about pathological sexual repression. Sexual deprivation accounts for the accepted practice of rampant homosexuality among heterosexual Muslims prior to marriage.
UPDATE II: Actually, Mercer (Who Eats Nails For Breakfast) had softened momentarily to the excuse-making, psychologizing, school of thought on Islam. Larry Auster keeps us focused: “It’s because they’re sexually repressed–no, it’s because they lack democracy–no, it’s because they marry their cousins–no, it’s because they were ‘left behind’–no, it’s because of Israeli cruelty–no, it’s because of … Anything But Islam.”
One question about the “Muslim mentality” I’ve wondered about for a while.
Granted not all Muslim countries are dominated by the extreme Wahhabists. I saw a far more easy-going culture in Tunisia than Saudi Arabia for example.
But… it has long been left-liberal orthodoxy that sexual repression makes people crazy. Meaning traditional Christian conservatives mostly.
But strange they never apply this standard to Muslims raised under sexual repression that makes fundamentalist Christians look like libertines.
I had students in the Kingdom who had literally never spoken to, or seen the face of a woman who was not their mother or sister. Or the only unrelated women they’d ever spoken with were prostitutes in Bahrain.
They want to find “root causes” of suicide murderers in “poverty” or “western imperialism”? How about a brutal sexual repression that drives a critical number of them literally psychotic?
“professional researchers” – the standard alias under which the government’s shamans operate.
The American public by in large have become cult followers of the “experts”…instead of applying reason and logic to the original data, they say “a PhD knows more than any of us mere mortals…he must be right”.
Islam is a prepackaged method of gaining and maintaining world domination…it’s not a religion or a faith: it’s a legal system…if you follow the Shari’a law, then you’re a Muslim.
Derbyshire is excellent. I did not know until just reading that he had political opinions as well as his interest in mathematics. I made his Prime Obsession my leisure reading in Iraq when the dust storms had me sidelined.
Happy New Year! I am glad to see that you are writing and doing well.
I am not so pessimistic. It seems to me that government and Islam have one principle in common. As you noted, they (government and by implication Islam) are participants in a zero-sum game. In such games it is easy for causality to be reversed because there is no exogenous input upon which to gain by good predictions. They are like eddies in a river. Ultimately, in the stream of time, they form meanders which cut themselves off and become disconnected backwaters in the tides of history. The dysfunctions of government and the perversities of pseudo religions only exist in stagnation zones.
The pool is becoming less stagnant due to globalization.
Esposito is a disgrace to the profession:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/05/who-speaks-for-islam-how-esposito-and-mogahed-cooked-their-data-to-increase-the-number-of-muslim-mod.html
Cooked books doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I have to admit that I really do not know anything about Islam itself. I tried to read the Koran. After reading the book of the Red Cow, I decided not to punish myself further; however, I’ve found no one writes about the religion’s tenants or rather the worship of Muslim’s god or who he is. All writers (Muslims included) write about Mohammad or Sharia law.
Everyone knows the basics of Christianity, Buddhism, Hindu, belief. I can even tell you the similarities of Christian and Japanese Shinto beliefs; Jewish and Christians similarities; even how Calvin’s Christian Law corresponds to Sharia Law and the Laws of Moses. I know the attributes of different Hindu gods or Buddhist ‘Karma’. Odin, Diana, even Baal; but other than Muslim meaning ‘to submit’ it’s a mystery. I think that if the religion has no real substance, but only consists of oppressive laws and rules with examples of the life of a sixth century prophet; it is like slippery Socialism, an easily manipulated force for evil.
I thought that was the point I made.