Failure Of Muslim Countries — Is It Muslims, Muslim Rulers or Islamic Teachings?

First, some background on Islamicity Indices for those of you who are not familiar with this endeavor.

The inspiration for the Islamicity Index came from a lecture in my seminar around 1998–2000 at George Washington University. My goal was to assess the validity of the popular criticism that the failure of Muslim majority countries — such as the absence of freedom and the lack of economic and social progress — was a result of Islam and its teachings.

With this goal in mind, I assessed the important teachings of Islam and invited a colleague, to gather the data and calculate the index values for Muslim countries. I felt that the indices would be more meaningful as indicators of success or failure if the same calculation was done for non-Muslim countries in order to provide a benchmark, but to provide a valid comparison I had to exclude personal or automatic behavior such as daily prayers.

This effort resulted in the publication of two articles — “Economic Islamicity Index” and “How Islamic Are Islamic Countries?” — in the Global Economy Journal in 2010. After a couple of years, I was joined by a colleague from Malaysia and two others from Washington DC to further refine the indices and to write two short books (Islamicity Indices, the Seed For Change and Reformation and Development in the Muslim World: Islamicity Indices as Benchmark, Palgrave Macmillan) containing a more detailed explanation of the work. We formed a…