“The Arab Enlightenment was put to an end circa 1000 AD in the early stages of what became known as the Mongol Invasions. They spent the next 900 years living on a Turkish tax farm. You did know that, right?”
How could BCW know that when it isn’t true? The Mongols became a problem for Arab Muslims only well after 1200. You’re off by more than 200 years. What ended the “Arab Enightenment” was what the Arab Muslims did to themselves.
Example:
“But the caliphs who followed al-Mamun upheld the doctrine with less fervor, and within a few decades, adherence to it became a punishable offense. The backlash against Mu’tazilism was tremendously successful: by 885, a half century after al-Mamun’s death, it even became a crime to copy books of philosophy. The beginning of the de-Hellenization of Arabic high culture was underway. By the twelfth or thirteenth century, the influence of Mu’tazilism was nearly completely marginalized.”
See that? 885!
Another example:
“The greatest and most influential voice of the Ash’arites was the medieval theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (also known as Algazel; died 1111). In his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali vigorously attacked philosophy and philosophers — both the Greek philosophers themselves and their followers in the Muslim world (such as al-Farabi and Avicenna).”
See that? Before 1111. That’s more than a century before the Mongols showed up.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
Muawiyah, this is the book you need to read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933859911?ie=UTF8&tag=the-new-atlantis-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1933859911
By the time the core Mongol group in Mongolia and the Chinese periphery had achieved technological parity with China, these fellows had already driven Central Asian people and culture into wave after wave of settlers who moved boldly into Europe and the Middle East. Finally the Mongols themselves came on the heels of these people and really raised some cain ~ among other things they re-established the Silk Road.
People who spoke Turkish languages were already on the scene, and took over about 1060.
The Islamic Caliphate was turned into a tax farm for the benefit of the Turks in short order.
Neither Persian nor Kurdish nor Arabic are FInno Ugric, or Altaic languages. Turkish languages are, to one degree or the other, both ~ with related and cognate Turkish languages spoken from Estonia/Finland/Hungary all the way to Japan. The guys who brought those languages to those areas were not peaceful agrarian reformers.
The loss of the Umayyads to the Iberian peninsula contributed greatly to the initial decline of the Arabs