As is well known, Islam does not encourage independent thought but rather, the habit of mental submission, submission above all to the Qur’an and to Muhammad, the Messenger of God, who is a Model of Conduct (uswa hasana) and the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil).
The Turkish journalist Burak Bekdil has noticed that Erdogan’s systematic effort to undo the secular reforms of Ataturk, and to re-islamise the country, has had consequences for the intellectual level and academic achievement of his country. His report on this is here: “Islamism is stunting Turkish academic achievement,” by Burak Bekdil, JNS, February 7, 2021:
Turkey, with a population of 83 million and two Nobel Prizes won, ranks 62nd on the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita. This score is worse than that of the Palestinian territories [Arafat!], Bulgaria, Guatemala, Azerbaijan, Algeria, Yemen, Ghana, Morocco and Iraq. Israel ranks 12th. Austria, the population of which is about one-tenth that of Turkey, ranks sixth. Turkey ranks 35th on Science Capitals of the World’s scientific progress list. Israel ranks second on that list, right after the United States.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk became the first Turkish laureate when he won the 2006 prize in literature. In 2015, Turkish molecular biologist Aziz Sancar was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry along with Tomas Lindalh and Paul L. Modrich. These days, Turks are taking great pride in the fact that a Turkish couple, Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, along with their team of scientists, developed BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, which has proved more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected.
The international media have likened the Turkish couple to Marie and Pierre Curie, the French couple who won Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry in 1903 and 1911. The Financial Times declared Türeci and Şahin its People of the Year for 2020. They may be the next Turks to become Nobel laureates.
One literary prize and three [sic] in science: do these represent great successes for the Turkish nation? [Bekdil makes a mistake here: there is only one Turkish Nobel in Science, Aziz Sancar. Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin may well be among the next Nobel winners, but they are not there yet].
One Turkish professor friend said, “For decades Turkish scientific progress was underestimated … along with Turkish scientists. There cannot be an ethnic/DNA-based link between nations and scientific success or failure.”
He is both right and wrong.
Who is Turkish Nobel laureate professor Aziz Sancar? He was born into a lower-class, uneducated family in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. (His second cousin, Mithat Sancar, is currently a pro-Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament.) Though he came from a village school in the poorest part of a poor country, Sancar miraculously completed his MD degree at Istanbul University in 1969. He won a scholarship from the Turkish state scientific institute TÜBİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. He completed his PhD degree at the University of Texas at Dallas in the laboratory of Claud Stan Rupert, now professor emeritus. Sancar has pursued his professional career and conducted his research within the American academic system.
In other words, all of Sancar’s advanced scientific training , beyond the Turkish MD, and his entire subsequent career in research, took place in the United States, where he was free to work unhindered by an intrusive state, or by a need to prove political loyalty to a regime, or to a despot. Had he remained in Turkey, it is possible that Aziz Sancar, given his background, without a powerful family or a network of supporters, and possibly suspected of pro-Kurdish sympathies, might not even have been able to obtain an academic post. The Turkish academic system is no longer what it once attempted to be — a meritocracy. Family connections and politically powerful backers help the less deserving to nonetheless be hired and even to be promoted; that is one reason why so many talented Turks now choose to receive graduate training in the US, UK, and Germany, and then remain abroad, if they possibly can, for their professional lives. In 2019, 330,000 Turks, many of them young, talented, and fed up with the system of nepotism, connections, and political constraints, chose to move abroad.
Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin live in Germany. They are the founders of BioNTech, a company that until recently was little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. The original focus of BioNTech was cancer treatment. In 2019, BioNTech went public. In recent months, the company’s market value soared past $21 billion, making the couple among the richest in Germany.
Şahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, a southern Turkish town bordering Syria. When he was four his family moved to Cologne, West Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. Şahin became a physician at the University of Cologne and earned a doctorate from that university in 1993 for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells. His wife, Türeci, 53, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who had immigrated from Istanbul.
What do these success stories tell us? Turks can score spectacular scientific successes—as long as they conduct their academic careers in the free world, not in a country strangled by an increasingly Islamist regime.
In an iron-fist response to a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan purged 15,200 Education Ministry officials along with 21,000 private school teachers. The Council of Higher Education asked the deans of the country’s state and private universities—all 1,577 of them—to resign. A total of 626 educational institutions, mostly private, were shut down. In December 2019, the Erdoğan administration appointed trustees and took over Istanbul Şehir University, an elite school linked to former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and his intellectual entourage. The university, ironically, was inaugurated by Erdoğan in 2010, together with its founder, Davutoğlu, then foreign minister and now Erdoğan’s political rival.
After the fall of Istanbul Şehir University, the government seized another Davutoğlu-linked institution, the Foundation for Sciences and Arts (BISAV in its Turkish acronym). This institution, founded in 1986, was home to thousands of seminars, academic workshops and research programs on politics, history, economics and literature.
The firing of tens of thousands of private school and college teachers, the purge at the Education Ministry of more than 15,000 officials, the forced resignation of every single university dean, all 1,577 of them , the shutting down of 626 academic institutions, all reflect the hysteria and paranoia of Erdogan, who suspected so many of supporting the July 15, 2016 coup simply because they were secularists or, alternatively, supporters of the devout Muslim Fethulleh Gulen; these firings and takeovers dealt a heavy blow to higher education in Turkey. Those who lost their jobs either had to accept other kinds of employment –including menial or service jobs – or managed, if lucky, to find teaching posts abroad. Among the universities that remained open in Turkey, their administrations were taken over by Erdogan loyalists, and such loyalty became the sine qua non for the faculty as well.
In the meantime, Erdoğan keeps bragging that his government has brought the number of imam [Imam Hatip] school students to 1.3 million from only 60,000 in 2002. To borrow Shelby Foote’s famous line, with a minor addition: “A Turkish university is a group of buildings around a library and a mosque.”
The Imam Hatip schools are state schools designed to educate future preachers and imams or, more generally, to raise “pious generations.” But they also provide vocational training for those who do not want, or are not able, to become imams and preachers. Erdogan himself attended one of the first Imam Hatip schools opened in Turkey, more than 50 years ago. Erdogan has built more than a thousand such schools, and promises to build many more, as part of his campaign to re-islamise Turkish society.
The rote-learning in the madrasas and the Imam Hatip schools has leached into the regular state schools, affecting their pedagogy. More memorization, and less critical thought, takes its toll on the talented; they have to endure it. But by the time they are of university age, more young Turks are seeking to study, and then to stay, abroad. This brain drain constitutes a great loss, both economic and cultural, to the country Recep Tayyip Erdogan now controls, and is damaging in every possible way.
jewdog says
In a parallel sense, leftist ideological orthodoxy, a sort of secular religion, is poisoning Western universities in the humanities. The whole four year, brick-and-mortar liberal arts institution in many ways has become as anachronism. It seems very difficult, if not impossible, to preserve its intended function as a place of unfettered free thought and speech, protected from the depredations of an Erdogan or a Chomsky. Now that we have the internet with all its ready information and online classes, along with a multitude of private forums and organizations, we may no longer need many of those colleges for other than technical subjects.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
The whole four year, brick-and-mortar liberal arts institution in many ways has become as anachronism. It seems very difficult, if not impossible, to preserve its intended function as a place of unfettered free thought and speech…
I’m afraid you’re right about our colleges. A mechanical factor in the form of tenure played a big part in this, self-selection and all that, but it goes deeper than that, earlier than that. K-12 long ago became a place of mass population brainwashing with fake histories and anti-freedom theories. This is of course done for money, with complete job security guaranteed by the Democrat Party in exchange for the brainwashing. As education goes up, test scores go down. A perfect garden bed for social activism, and societal decline.
jewdog says
Yes, and the garden needs weeding.
James Lincoln says
jewdog,
Yes, today’s four-year, brick-and-mortar liberal arts institutions are becoming obsolete.
STEM / business-finance, etc., students can still find value; the “soft” liberal arts students not so much…
L R says
Yes, tragic. I love the liberal arts. Had so much fun reading anything, and I remember the one teacher covering Marx, among others for our course in basic philosophy.
We just learned about things, and teachers did not push their own ideals at all. They were true Liberals in that sense. It was about learning, and developing your own critical thought. Young students felt very free to question anything they wanted.
Now, when I read what is going on in the schools, and colleges, it horrifies me.
Some schools are indoctrinating 6 yr. olds about ‘race’, and ‘power’, and having them check their priviledge, and the parents think it’s great.
No, it is sick. I simply do not understand these adults.
gravenimage says
Grimly true.
Vicky says
Erdogan said they will be going to the moon within three years. I laughed.
Sylvia Drummond says
Vicky – It would be nice if he did go to the moon and did’nt come back.
jewdog says
I’m with Sylvia, and I’ll even help pay for his one-way ticket.
gravenimage says
Yes–I’ve read about this, and it sounds *highly* unlikely. My understanding is that Turkey hasn’t made any concrete moves such as setting up a space center or sending up unmanned flights. It’s all likely bs.
Infidel says
They can be a leader of islam, or they can be a modern, advanced country. Not both!
Keith O says
I remember being taught in school that the middle east and Mediterranean areas were the cradle of scientific thought for all of Europe and most of the world. That they had flowing water, advanced mathematics and astronomy using telescopes, all this when the European countries were living in squalor in mud huts.
Then along came Islam. The rest of the world progressed and evolved emotionally, intellectually and scientifically but not Islamic countries.
And now 1700 years later, some nations that clawed their way out of the mental enslavement are being dragged back by despots, desperate to hang onto power.
Brian Hoff says
Going to the moon technologies is easy as it was done pncr. NASA moon craft is being total tededign instead of useing the old fastion light bulbd they will be useong LED bulbs power by battery like AA batteries on earth. Turkey alteady built it own ballistic missles and cruisr missle. It is the cost in money need to go to moon.
Peter WF says
Search “world map average IQ”. From the search the turks have another issue. Might only be 10-11 points less but lets hope for for the best.
James Lincoln says
Brian,
Is there some program that I can use to translate your post into English?
gravenimage says
I think that “Brian Hoff” here–really, “DefenderofIslam”–is exhibit A for how Islam stunts mental functioning…
His idea that rockets are powered by AA batteries is especially hilarious.
somehistory says
“al-insan al-kamil)” In my opinion, that looks like it would mean “the insane camel”.
Archaeologists have found incredible artifacts that show that ancient people had a lot of intelligence and were able to build things that could be used today, if we had them.
islam is from satan. If one just imagines how much that demon gave up when he chose to be his own ‘god’ and leave the Heavenly realm where Wisdom lives, it makes it easier to see why his earthly ‘children’ act in the ways they do; and the intelligence they just don’t have. satan can’t give them the wisdom he does not possess.
gravenimage says
Re-Islamization Is Stunting Turkish Mental Growth
………………
That pretty much says it all…
bewhitebarry says
The few clever moslems might do well but the majority have a lower IQ than normal.
The reason is their custom of marrying their cousins. They have a 13% higher chance of having retarded children. When they migrate they overload the special schools for handicapped children. Unless they abandon this Mohammad practice their economies will never thrive. They will always be dependent on the West and the Far East.
OLD GUY says
Islam brings freedom of thought and speech too and end for all except the chosen few at the top.
Walter Sieruk says
This may wisely be viewed as a terrible omen of a future catastrophe