I'm from a Muslim country and now living in the West: and I can say that this is incorrect. Generally speaking where I am from, the best minds go to medicine, the next best to engineering and law, and the leftovers go to the military / religious study.
The failure of those best minds to produce results is an artifact of non-reason based education (in my country there was a huge emphasis on rote learning) and a lack of institutional support.
My friends in the West from other Muslim countries have corroborated this. It's always the bottom tier of students or the particularly devout that end up in the clergy.
My parents immigrated from Syria, and I lived there for a few years. What you describe is precisely how the educational system works, apparently by design; oppressive regimes don’t want smart people questioning certain platitudes about the proper relationship between rulers and those over whom they rule.
Ironically, a more “originalist” reading of primary Islamic texts would be more politically liberal than rulings which were issued centuries after the death of Muhammad -- these later rulings severely restricted the conditions under which people could rebel against their rulers.
Later, clergy aligned with the rulers, such as Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, took an even more absolutist position which made any public criticism against rulers a form of rebellion which is punishable by death.
These perversions are, of course, a failure of the clergy. But they have been set up to fail by the political regimes which designed these systems, as well as by their societies which reinforce and legitimize the intellectual caste system.
I suspect many people conflate scholarship with clergy because that was the way things worked in the middle ages in Europe: if you wanted to have enough time for scholarly pursuits the clergy was probably the best place to be. Once it became possible to make a career as a scientist this practice changed but the association between clergy and scholarship still lives in the public perception.
This definitely used to be true, but I don't think it survived colonialism. Nowadays as kids are growing up, there are pretty much two paths: secular (in a manner of speaking) Western style schools, or traditional madrassas (not dissimilar to pre-colonial schools in the region). At least in my middle class socio-economic circles, people who undertook exculsively religious study (as opposed to studying it on the side with western education) were looked at with derision.
The concept definitely lives on in places like Jesuit educational institutions, one of which I attended for 6 years in the Netherlands [1]. These are not religious schools, they are schools started by people from a religious group which had the odd effect of several of my teachers being priests teaching mathematics, classical and modern languages, physics, etc. The only religious aspect of the school was that the school year was opened and closed in church with the French teacher leading the sermon, the Latin teacher playing the organ, etc.
What the article seems to notice is that some parts of a civilization succeed to institutionalize themselves (and gain momentum over others thanks to it) and some don't.
In a very sketchy way:
- you may have excellent scientists and prestige for science, but no institutional structure/ecosystem to support, promote and benefit from it;
- you may have lousy clergy but a well-working institution/structure of religion that helps with its prominence over society.
The failure of those best minds to produce results is an artifact of non-reason based education (in my country there was a huge emphasis on rote learning) and a lack of institutional support.
My friends in the West from other Muslim countries have corroborated this. It's always the bottom tier of students or the particularly devout that end up in the clergy.