[a different tim]

Tim the Enchanter wrote

"Today two out of every three Ph.D.s earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic studies. Doctorates are only very rarely granted in computer sciences, engineering, and other worldly vocations. Younger Saudis are being educated to take part in a world that will exist only if the Wahhabi jihadists succeed in turning back the clock not just a few decades but a few centuries."


http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200305/baer/2

Hmmmm. I wonder how much value their expertise in Islam will bring them when the oil money runs out.

On the other hand, Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, awarded about 34,000 natural science, social science and engineering degrees in the most recent year statistics were gathered. This is low for an asian country as percentage of population (compare neighbouring Malaysia for example) but so is percentage with degrees in general (including, presumably, Islamic studies). A look at 24 year olds seems to show it's up on the previous years as a percentage of degrees awarded and as a percentage of population.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind9...c2/at02-01.xls

So maybe it's a cultural as well as a religious thing. I accept the two are intertwined, but they are not identical. For example, most of us have been brought up in a western culture that is heavily influenced by Christianity, but we are not Christians. The Arab states have this problem, while the Indonesians do not, and indeed seem to be boosting the number of science/engineering grads they turn out.

In general I suspect that one factor is that people turn to religion in the kind of way that fundies do when they are missing out on some promise of secular society. For example, the appeal of fundamentalism in poor areas of the US is well known, and most of those arabs never see the oil money, though they are aware that their alleged govenors have it. Crudely put, as far as these people can see science and/or secular democracy have not helped them, and indeed they have missed out on its benefits, so they turn to religion. So I postulate that the religious revival in Arab states is a result of the general corruption and incompetence that seems to prevail there, not the cause of it. If your leaders are corrupt, dictatorial, and rolling in cash, while you are poor, a religion that promises a return to some kind of moral purity has powerful appeal.

And reading that Atlantic article, the Saudi situation is down to special political circumstances affecting the house of Saud. This is the context of the quote:
"But because in recent years the Saudi education system has been largely entrusted to Wahhabi fundamentalists, as a form of appeasement that many in the royal family hope will direct the fundamentalists' animus at foreign targets, its products are generally ill prepared to compete in a technological age or a global economy. Today two out of three PhDs...."
The article in general is about the corruption of the Saudi royal house and Prince Abdullah's atempts to reform it. It puts the blame squarely on political institutions. The tone of it is that if the Saudi royal house was less corrupt, they wouldn't have these issues, or would be able to control them.