Sometimes non-Muslims are so blinded by their hatred for Islam that they blame Islam for things our religion has nothing to do with. Consider the post
Islam's War on Women by one Sara Coslett. Sara had noticed some demographic statistics for certain Middle Eastern countries that show a sex ratio favoring men:
I wonder how is it [sic] that in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar the ratio of men to women is greater than 2/1, in Kuwait 1.5/1, Bahrain 1.34/1, Oman 1.26/1, and Saudi Arabia 1.22/1.
These particular ratios are for the population as a whole but, Sara, taking them at face value, doesn't dig deep enough. Instead, she comes up with two pathetic reasons for the skewed sex ratios:
Two possibilities come to mind. First, Muslim countries are notorious for practicing female infanticide.
Except, this isn't true. If Sara had said India or China are notorious for practicing female infanticide, I'd have quickly agreed with her. The problem is, the countries Sara highlighted don't have very high abortion rates to begin with. According to
Johnston's Archive, which tracks historical abortion statistics, we find that the abortion percentage for all residents, in and out of the country, were extremely low for the six countries in question. While not all countries have a full listing for their statistics, the abortion percentage for
Qatar was 1.3% in 2004, 0.05% for
Kuwait in 2001, and 0.07% for
Bahrain in 2004. The abortion ratio wasn't available for either the
UAE or
Saudi Arabia; however, the total number of abortions in 2006 for both countries among residents was 63 and 5, respectively. Note that
all of those abortions were obtained overseas, meaning no abortions were performed among residents
at all inside those countries. (No statistics are available for Oman.) With numbers so low, there's no reason to believe abortion is a cause for the skewed sex ratio.
In fact, it is not. If we next look at the
CIA's World Factbook, we can look at the sex ratio
at birth. Here, we find that for Bahrain, there were 1.03 boys born for every girl (2007 est.), 1.04 boys for every girl in Kuwait (2007 est.), and 1.05 boys for every girl in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (2007 est.). Compare this to India (1.12 boys per girl; 2007 est.) and China (1.11 boys per girl, 2007 est.), and you see that Sara's argument with regard to female infanticide holds no water.
Sara's other argument is even more absurd:
The other possible reason for such a disparity between males and females is that census counters do not include females when polling the population. We know that Muslims regard women as property, so like a slave, they would not be considered a human and thus not counted.
Even if one were to accept Sara's argument at face value, the fact of the matter is that other sources, such as the World Factbook would provide fairly realistic estimates for the male-female population (see the "Age Structure" statistic).
Of course, there's one possibility that Sara hadn't considered, and that's immigration. Looking at
NationMaster statistics, we see that immigrants make up the following
percentages of the national population: Bahrain - 40.66%, Kuwait - 65.83%, Oman - 24.45%, Qatar - 78.34%, Saudi Arabia - 27.51%, and the UAE - 70.85%. And, as any expat will tell you, the vast majority of all expats are men. It's not surprising, then, that the sex ratio in the six Middle Eastern countries Sara highlighted should favor men: they're the ones who moved to these countries in search of work.
But Sara would rather blame Islam; that way she doesn't have to think too deeply about why things are the way they are:
It is obvious to me Islam has declared war on its female population.
Stupid Sara.
Update: Since writing this post last night, Sara has re-written her original post, plus written another. The problem is, while Sara realized that she made a mistake after reading my post, she compounded the original error by falling on another bogus claim:
Clearly something tragic is happening to females after age 15. Therefore, instead of two possibilities I realized there was a third - honor killings.
Most of the remainder of the re-written first post is merely a rehash of her original post. The second post,
Erratum: Islam's War on Women is a strange mish-mash of retractions, corrections, and old allegations. On the one hand, she admits to forgetting about the impact of immigrants into the six countries she originally highlighted. She also admits that she was wrong "...in my assumptions that the Muslim practice of honor killings and a disregard for women as people..." However, she also makes some odd statements, such as:
Surprisingly I noticed Mr. JDsg did not refute or even mention anything about honor killings.
What Sara disregarded was the fact that
she had not written anything about honor killings in her original post. What was there to refute or mention? Even so, honor killings is not going to be a high enough number to explain the skewed sex ratios. Honor killings do, of course, happen, but the number of killings committed is not going to be
that high. This is merely Sara grasping at another straw.
Sara concluded her new post by writing:
While population data is a poor example for Islam’s War on Women, the war does continue.
That's it, Sara, keep beating your dead horse. You've been wrong in just about all your other "reasonings." Show us how more wrong you can be.
Update #2: Looked at Sara's blog once more, just to see if she had followed up on the comments I had made there the other day. No, she hasn't responded, and she's shut off her comments once again to only those who have "registered" (the usual cowardly BS tactic used by right-wing blogs who don't want to hear that the emperor wears no clothes.)
The Economist had a recent graph showing oil reserves as of the end of 2008, with the number of years remaining for each country's reserves at the 2008 rate of production. I posted a similar graph from The Economist back in June 2006, so we'll do a little analysis to see how things have gone in the past three years.
