(Why) Are Muslims Less Intelligent than Genetically Similar Non-Muslims?

And what about the cases where the opposite happens?

The HBD personality and brief writer of erotica

Sebastian Jensen

described an “Islam Effect” in his post on IQ differences within Europe. I’ve been interested in this for a long time. At first, I denied it. I believed that Albanians were low-IQ because of unreliable testing in Albania. But it has been confirmed time and time again (see SJ’s other post on National IQ estimates for a review of the big ones). Furthermore, Albanians are a problematic group. They commit a lot of crime in Western European countries. In America they don’t have a great reputation either. It makes me very upset, because secretly deep down inside I actually like Albanians.

I hear that some of this is due to organized crime being more common among Albanian immigrants than among other Muslim immigrants.

Bosniaks and Macedonians also seem to lag behind other Europeans, although it really depends on the study. Both countries have a large Muslim minority, but are religiously heterogenous. And in the case of Macedonia, there is a large Albanian Muslim minority. Bosniaks are Muslim Serbs more or less, so it is interesting that they lag behind actual Serbs as well as Croats and probably due to their unique religious demographics.

The “Muslim Effect” is found elsewhere as well. In Israel, Christians are smarter than Muslims, despite being ethnically not very different. Around three quarters of Christians in Israel are Palestinian Arabs. I would imagine the rest are largely Lebanese Christians, Syrian Christians, Copts, Assyrians, all in all probably not that genetically different from the surrounding Arab populations.

By the way, “Mizrahim” includes Sephardic Jews.

This is expected, in America Palestinian Christians tend to have higher status than Palestinian Muslims.

Historians have finally figured out what Jesus looked like (SHOCKING)

And lastly, Armenians seem to be somewhat smarter than genetically similar populations (Kurds, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Georgians, Levantines) across most National IQ tests. But the difference is small and perhaps not significant. The data gets fuzzier the lower you go in National IQ. Except for Georgians these groups are Muslim. I don’t want to focus much on this case because it’s just so fuzzy. It could be due to different admixture and have nothing to do with genes. Armenians seem to be genetically very similar to Assyrians at least on G25, which is interesting as Assyrians are also Christian.

There are also proxies for IQ which Christians from Muslim ethnicities score higher on than Muslims. For example, Lebanese Christians are higher-income in Australia than Lebanese Muslims in Australia. Studies show that Maronites make more than Muslims in Lebanon as well. This may be because Christians are better educated, however. Coptic Christians in Egypt also have a long history of wealth both inside and outside of Egypt, and are traditionally more occupied in skilled labor.

I don’t believe that Muslims are less intelligent because Islam is simply a “stupid religion”. I do think that Islam is a stupid religion, but I don’t think that intelligence caps exist on any mainstream religions. Mormonism is even stupider than Islam, and Judaism is probably around as stupid as Islam in my personal judgement, and yet both groups are “high human capital” and perpetual talk of the town in the HBD community. Hell, this is even the case for non-ethnic religions. I don’t doubt that liberal denominations of Christianity in America are high-aptitude despite being ridiculously fast and loose with the bible. It is definitely true with Unitarians and Quakers according to Steve Sailer. On the flipside, many religions I feel warmly towards are mostly believed by unintelligent people by an accident of geography. In fact, I’ll discuss that a bit later.

The second common suspicion I want to cross off is that it is due to genetic components. If the question was “Why are Muslims Low IQ?” then this would be the answer for the most part, but this isn’t very productive. Muslims have genes different from other groups by mostly coincidental factors. If you limit your scope to Africa you could say “Why are Christians less intelligent than Muslims?” but it’s obviously because North Africans have a higher IQ than Sub-Saharan Africans. Bosniaks are genetically more or less the same as all other Balkaners, who in general are derived from Roman-era inhabitants mixing with Slavic tribes. Albanians are genetically closest to Northern Greeks. Neither group, in fact no group in the Balkans, has significant ancestry from the near east that postdates the Roman period. There does seem to be a connection between “southerliness” in Europe an lower IQ, but it cannot explain this especially since the more southerly Greeks and Southern Italians are smarter than the more northerly Albanians and Bosniaks.

That graph of Copts I posted before comes from

Cremieux

’s excellent article Elites are Genetically Different, where he suggests that the reasons Muslims lag behind is due to the potency of the Jizya, the tax on infidels that was common historically in Muslim nations. Some Muslims have suggested to me that the Jizya was not a tool to convert infidels, but was simply a fair fee for Muslims protecting infidels. Whether or not that is true, it had a very significant role in the conversion of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians to Islam. Cremieux notes that in Egypt, areas with harsher Jizya taxes were more susceptible to Islamification. Jizya encourages the poor to convert the most, because they are less resilient against these sort of financial penalties. In late medieval and early modern Bosnia, conversion was associated with low household income. This results in a selection effect, basically. The economic elite, who are presumably more intelligent, remain Christian, while the lower classes convert to Islam and this causes Muslims to have lower average IQs than the non-Muslims.

One good piece of evidence I found for this in my research is the case of the Hui, a term used for Han Chinese who practice Islam. The most famous historical example is Zheng He, the Hui Eunuch who voyaged throughout the Indian Ocean. Hui Chinese have an average IQ of 103, not much lower of the Han average of 104-106. Hui have some amount of admixture from Tibetans, Mongolians, and West Eurasians (presumably through Turkic ancestry), and yet they have higher intelligences than the Yellow Uyghurs (97) (actually not very genetically close to Uyghurs proper btw), Mongolians (95), and Tibetans (92). The Hui did not convert to Islam under duress, but were likely converted by silk road travelers or the Semu ascendancy of the Yuan Dynasty.

It is a good theory, however there are some shortcomings. First of all, Muslims from countries with sizeable Christian minorities don’t seem much dumber than Muslims of similar stock from countries where the Christian minority has been largely subsumed. Maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t see it. Secondly, it can’t fully explain the Muslim effect in Europe, because Albanian Christians still exist and contribute to Albania’s national IQ. Albeit, some did move to Italy. Bosniak and Macedonian Christians also wouldn’t have really benefitted from moving to another Yugoslavian country, as they were all part of the same state under Ottoman rule and again under Yugoslav unity.

A second common theory I hear often is that it has to do with Islamic marriage patterns. You know, incest. This is probably a general reason for low intelligence in much of the Islamic world, however Balkan Muslims and Turks are among the least incestuous Islamic groups.

Cousin Marriage is banned in the Balkans, and family structure in the Balkans was historically exogamous like the rest of Europe (except for Sardinia).

Global marriage types really warrant their own post, in my opinion they’re among the most influential elements of “kulcha” on success.

I believe an under-analyzed cause of low IQ in Balkan Muslims is brain drain — but not to Europe. There was brain drain to Christian Europe, most likely, but there were other causes of brain drain that went in the other direction, into the Ottoman imperial elite. Namely through the eminence of Albanians and to a lesser extent Muslim Serbs in the Ottoman bureaucracy, and secondly through their overrepresentation in the military and especially the elite military.

Firstly, their political eminence. Albanians comprised around a sixth of Ottoman Grand Viziers. They comprised around a third of non-Turkish Grand Viziers. The third most common ethnicity for Grand Viziers, behind Albanians and Turks, was Bosniaks. The Bosniak gentry were given privileged positions as beys and governors.

On the front-lines, the Ottoman military was very disproportionately Balkan, and especially Albanian and Bosnian. Children were forcibly taken by the Turks, converted to Islam, and turned into Janissaries, Bureaucrats, sometimes Eunuchs. These were called the Devshirme. I could not find any official numbers for the demographics of the Devshirme, but on the Wikipedia list for Devshirme I counted 1 Georgian, 16 Albanians, 15 Serbo-Croatians (mostly Bosniaks), 1 Kurd, and 5 Greeks. There were some other entries that didn’t list ethnicity, and for some the ethnicity was unclear but usually a toss-up between Albanians and Yugoslavs.

The Devshirme were, according to some citations that are unfortunately behind paywalls¹², disproportionately from the aristocracy. Many were peasants as well, but they were Christian peasants, so we can expect even the peasants were wealthy enough to pay Jizya. Furthermore, they weren’t just chosen at random. No, an empire that chooses its administrators and warrior-elite out of random peasants would not last for several centuries. Candidates were selected based on perceived physical and mental aptitude³ by scouts. Orphans, single children, cripples of any degree, and those too young for proper judgement would probably not be recruited. I think it is fair to assume that the judgement of these professional agents has some positive correlation with general intelligence, it is something a trained person can see in children because IQ is basically mental age in childhood. Could you tell the difference in intelligence between a fourth and an eighth grader? Probably.

What there are records of, is ethnicities of Ottoman cavalrymen during major campaigns. As you can see, Bosniaks and Albanians are massively overrepresented. 42% were Bosniaks, and another 23% were Albanians. There is likely some bias here, as it was a European campaign.

When Devshirme were kidnapped, they were separated by percieved qualities. The smartest ones were sent to palatial academies to eventually become bureaucrats. The toughest ones became janissaries. Many Janissaries were reported to have secretly kept their native religion, and secretly despised the Turks, while others became Bektashi Sufis, perhaps as a way to reconcile Islam and Christianity and practice a more moderate version of Islam that wasn’t so virulently anti-Christian. Nonetheless, being a Janissary meant you were quite likely to die in war, or at the very least permanently settle somewhere far away from your homeland. Being a bureaucrat meant assimilating into the Turkish aristocracy, and have your descendants eventually leave for turkey. Many bureaucrats were also castrated, meaning you would be a genetic dead end.

Several Albanians also served as administrators of other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The most famous case of this was the Albanian formation of a parallel state to the Ottomans in Egypt under Mohammed Ali Pasha. Large amounts of skilled albanians left for Egypt, and many Albanians also came to serve as soldiers. Mohammed Ali Pasha and his descendants were interested in creating a successor state to the Ottomans. They regularly switched between British and Ottoman affinities, but were ultimately quashed by Nasser. Today there are still thousands of people, perhaps around 20,000 people, of Albanian extract in Egypt, but before Nasser there were much more. It is also estimated that millions of Turks today have Albanian ancestry.

It is possible modern Turks have a significant amount of Balkan ancestry. When I run in G25, I get Slavic component universally. South Balkan IA ancestry also seems to show up either as Mycenaean or Thracian.

Modern Turks are, however, among the smartest Islamic populations in the world. Actual, proper Turks have an average IQ around 95. The national average is bogged down by Kurds and Arabs. I really doubt Turks are being boosted by their Turkic ancestry, as the closest modern analog to Oghuz Turks, Turkomans, are no smarter than Anatolian Turks.

The Turks in Anatolia were already Muslim, and were a military elite, so it is possible they were selected for. They likely also had a good pick of brides, and it is a well known fact that they assimilated some of the Byzantine elite. The Turks did not assimilate all of Anatolia, instead they subjugated the Hellenized Locals and eventually killed a lot of them, exchanging the rest with Balkaners in return for Balkan Turks. It could very well be the case that Muslim ruling elite of Rumelia left for Anatolia during the population exchanges, in a similar way that many Irishmen converted to Anglicanism in order to get educated, and then assimilated into the Anglo-Irish gentry causing their descendants to return to the UK during the mass voluntary exodus of Anglo-Irish families. This does not conflict with the theory of Islam selecting against intelligence. Even if the Islamic converts were lower human capital, some of them would have been skilled enough to rise through the ranks. Furthermore, Christians were being pruned of their better halves as well through the Devshirme system. There was probably brain drain across the entire Balkans, but Albanians and Bosniaks got hit the hardest.

Considering the numbers of Janissaries that served the Ottomans over the centuries, and the standards the Ottomans had in some places (one out of every forty households, ideally), I don’t find it to be a stretch at all to say it had a selective impact on the Balkaners. Especially when so many people point out the genetic impact of Western Europeans, over the same course of time, enacting draconian punishments for crimes. All it takes is a small fraction of the population each generation, for several generations. Albeit, in the case of the criminals it is the definitively worst faction. For Devshirme and elite Muslim families, it was probably less intensely high-quality.

A note on Turks, they do generally seem to be less victim to Islam’s low IQ. Tatar areas in Russia are about as high IQ as Russian areas, meanwhile Chechens and Dagestanis are sub-90. This is probably not because of Siberian admixture, as Altaian Turks are much lower IQ and Yakuts are slightly lower than Russians and Western Tatars.

I suspect it has to do with Turks being less beholden to endogamous family structures, tending to take brides outside of the family and sometimes outside of the community. They often established themselves historically as a local elite, with the Ottoman Sultans famously taking mostly Slavic and Circassian brides. Incest in Turkey is very uncommon in the Turkish parts, but more common in the Kurdish and Arab parts.

Furthermore, the Turks were converted from Tengrism and Buddhism. Muslims are less generous to heathens than they are to “People of the book”. Less hesitancy simply forcing them to stop their traditions and convert. Although I believe Tengrism is more or less quite true, and although I believe the same for European religions, it seems like when Abrahamism encountered Paganism it only converted the lower class in an urban setting and, once powerful enough, converted the elites. In Europe it was always the country bumpkins who were last to convert, in fact the term “pagan” means something like “hillbilly”. There are exceptions to the rule, such as the late Neoplatonists who held out, but the bulk of the last generation of Pagans were not what Richard Banania would call “elite human capital” to say the least. It may have been this way in Siberia as well.

To end this off, I feel a lot about Albanians like Vegeta felt about Broly in DBZA.

Skibidi Albanian Aura W

Also, Skanderbeg was ITALIAN!!!!!! NOT ALBANIAN!!! George Washington was Albanian doe.

1. Charles Jelavich; Barbara Jelavich, eds. (1963). The Balkans in Transition. University of California Press. p. 68. “Politically, it meant that the devshirme class, composed primarily of descendants of the Balkan noble and rayah (peasant) classes”

2. Kumar, Krishan (2019). Visions of Empire How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Princeton University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-0-691-19280-2. “Lowry shows that not only Christian peasants but large numbers of the Byzantine-Balkan aristocracy were recruited into the Ottoman ruling elite”

3. Ipsirli, M. (1995). Enderûn. In Diyanet Islam ansiklopedisi (Vol. XI, pp. 185–187). Istanbul, Turkey: Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi.