Is low IQ the source of the Muslim menace?

An e-mail I’ve sent to Steve Sailer:

You are making a valuable contribution to the debate with your plan to pay the Muslims to leave Europe (and America). I agree when you speak of “the high quantity and low quality of the Muslim populations of Europe.” But when you say that this is the “root of the predicament,” it is evident once again that you know nothing about Islam, and in particular about the Islamic institutions of sharia, jihad, and dhimmitude. Because of these underlying and unchanging facts about Islam, if the Muslims were all high IQ types, the Muslim threat against our civilization would not be any less. The main threat Muslims as Muslims pose to us is not their presumably low IQ, it is that they belong to a crusading religion that is divinely commanded to enslave the world, and that already has—notwithstanding their low IQ—enslaved a very large part of it. Indeed, one could well argue that because of its quasi-totalitarian nature, Islam lowers the intelligence of the people subjected to it. As André Servier wrote in Islam and the Psychology of the Musulman available online here), as soon as Islam takes over a country, all the former intellectual and cultural life of that society shuts down.

I’m not saying that the biological issue is not valid. I am asking you not to reduce the issue to a biological issue. In the last sentence of your article, you call on the Europeans to save their civilization. No people can save their civilization if they see it, and its enemies, solely in biological terms.

(See follow-up on this discussion.)
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 28, 2005 11:04 AM | Send