Whether you call it "Western Culture" or "European Civilization" or simply the "Judeo-Christian Tradition", including much of North America and places like Australia, this stream of history has been an incredibly creative one.
According to the second Arab Human Development Report, which was written in 2003 for the United Nations Development Program by a group of courageous Arab social scientists, between 1980 and 1999, Arab countries produced 171 international patents. South Korea alone during that same period registered 16,328 patents. Hewlett-Packard registers, on average, eleven new patents a day. The average number of scientists and engineers working in research and development in the Arab countries is 371 per million people, while the world average, including countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is 979, the report said. This helps to explain why although massive amounts of foreign technology are imported to the Arab regions, very little of it is internalized or supplanted by Arab innovations. Between 1995 and 1996, as many as 25 percent of the university graduates produced in the Arab world immigrated to some Western country. There are just 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab region today, compared with the global average of 78.3 per 1,000, and only 1.6 percent of the Arab population has Internet access. While Arabs represent almost five percent of the world's population, the report said, they produce only one percent of the books published. Of the 88 million unemployed males between fifteen and twenty-four worldwide, almost 26 percent are in the Middle East and North Africa, according to an International Labor Organization study (Associated Press, December 26, 2004).
This trend continues despite the fact that the Arab nations are wealthier than not only the average nation, but also wealthier than even the average developed nation. In fact, Arab wealth allows them to enjoy the fruit of Western technology: in Dubai, what will soon be the world's tallest building is being built - with engineers and architects from Europe and America, who quickly discovered that local builders were not up to the task.
The excess of wealth in the Arab nations is used to enjoy Western technology, but not to help or advance human needs: when the Tsunami struck a number of Islamic nations, disaster relief and humanitarian aid came largely from Europe and America, with only a trickle from the Arab world.
In contrast with the West, Arabic culture seems to have shut down its creative capabilities.
