Alright, since both of you have decided to have a war of shared anecdotes, I'm going to provide a counterbalance to your little dispute and bring in raw data.
Firstly, as Karnal points out, "Muslims" are a highly heterogeneous population group. You could say that they do tend to have some core values that are shared across the entire breadth of their group, but evidently as we see those values tend to attenuate (or intensify) according to the population group. One could not say that Turkish Muslims in Istanbul practice the same brand of Islam as Wahabbist zealots in the Arabic desert. The faith and values of Islam will have influence where-ever it is found, but it will always pale in comparison to how a population group that espouses Islam chooses to practice it. The factors that determine the nature of the faith, from group to group (and within groups, as well) will be the same factors that determine all human behavior; environmental influences not under the direct control of biological differences, and human biological differences.
So what do we know about the possible differences of those that embrace the Islamic faith? The answer of course will vary from group to group. Looking at say, the Middle Eastern / North African region (the core of Islam), and placing general intelligence under the microscope as the trait examined in question (and using the research of Lynn, Vanhanen and various other scholars as our source) we do know that the entire region seems to be quite homogenous in the average distribution of this trait, and that on the global scale, the average of the region is securely positioned on the average. It may be surprising, but Middle Eastern populations are more or less average for the world on this measure, being neither outstanding nor subnormal. Of course, being globally average puts them at 1 standard deviation below Europeans (and about 1.2-3 standard deviations below Northern Asians), but this is not our present focus.
It is important at this point to clarify that I am not interested within this discussion to talk about the causes of these differences. Anybody can draw the inference from this post on the basis of my previous posts what I might think could be causing a large percentage of this gap, but for the purposes of this discussion it frankly doesn't matter. Even if the studies
are off by whatever fraction of a standard deviation, I'll still bet my bottom dollar that the means generated by them have considerable acccuracy and definitely real world validity. Regardless of the cause, the ramifications of such a disparity are there for the Middle Eastern world; lagging in academic environments, lower global economic competitiveness, a harder to control population, etc. Helian already put it quite well about our lovable Lebanese minority population.
The only group that outcompetes the Lebanese when it comes to criminality are the dregs of South East Asia, the Vietnamese. The
Muslim Lebanese as a population group,
even here, are boneheads (see Fat Pizza). The Druze behave quite differently; biologically, they seem to be quite different from other Lebanese, and culturally as well.
And this is just general intelligence. Unfortunately I can't get into discussing all the other ways that Middle Eastern populations could be different from us according to other psychometric variables; I doubt there has been much research regarding this question, and secondly, these other psychometric variables are not as throughly understood as general intelligence and are much more problematic. Does this mean however that I don't believe (for whatever cause) that there are major personality differences here? No way! They're certainly there and most definitely have considerable effects on the nature of Islam from population group to population group.
You point out of course, your examples of highly educated Arabs etc. who arrive from the Middle East to work. If you really think that products of selective migration actually provide a representative sample of an entire population group, you are sadly mistaken. This reminds me of those individuals that praise Indians for having one of the highest average incomes (I think the highest) in the United States and for being a race of computer whizzes and engineering geniuses. What you're really looking at is the creme of their respective population (and it is a smacking large population!). The Indians and Arabs who tend to 'stay home' (or go to Europe) tell the whole story. Of course, even we're provided with a broader sample in the form of our Lebanese migrants. Even then though, as I have said before, I don't really want these 'highly educated' immigrants here either, but that's not the point of this discussion.
Still, your point is a good one. The nature of Islam is varied. Very varied. It varies like many things, between groups and within groups. But as Soren would definitely agree, its influences are still there and these influences are most likely highly inappropriate within a Western context. I'm not overtly hostile to Islam (In fact, I sort of like it in many ways), but I still slam the door on it.
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