After 9/11 I tried to read up on the Muslim culture and history. Truthfully, I had never given it much thought prior to that time.
The thing that seemed to be constant in everything I read was that the Muslims were pretty advanced in the early days, but their religion actually stopped progress.
That seems to hold true today. They act like they live in the 7th century. I guess the more advanced live more in the modern world. But the general populace don’t. It amazes me...they do horrendous 7th century things like beheadings, stonings, etc and post them on the modern internet. Sort of a conflicting message.
1. When it absorbed Spain. It gained knowledge, culture, art, etc.
2. When it absorped the Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire. Same thing: Knowledge of medicine, art, architecture, engineering, the lot.
Note that the Golden Age was short-lived, once they cemented themselves into power, the poor downtrodden Spaniards and Byzantines couldn't flourish anymore. And the Muslim overlord culture quickly began to fade.
As for numbers? They're HINDI. Not Arabic.
As for astronomy? Big Frackin' Deal, they had clear skies that Europe didn't have, and so they did...well, what? They named the dots of light. WHOOPEE! It was the Europeans who invented the LENS and the TELESCOPE.
As for medicine? GALEN and Greek culture got that off to a start. Hippocrates, too.
For some reason, we like to trip all over ourselves congratulating this camel-shagging barbarians for accomplishments which were, in fact, WESTERN.
Well. No they were not pretty advanced. Their empires were. Precisely because until the 12th century and Timur e Langs genocide of Assyrian Christians, near genocide of Georgians and Armenians and Zoroastrians and Buddhists and Hindus there were majority non Moslem. As the % of Moslems increased, society’s culture decreased. Example the birthplace of Islam, the Arabian peninsula was a sh t hole already by the 9th century with Christians and Jews kicked out of this “pure” land
We had a topic about that around here not long ago. The fact is, the medieval fascism known as Islam has always been anti-intellectual and opposed to open inquiry and even logic. The writing systems of Arabia were banned by the Big Ol’ Mo and replaced with something new; the inscriptions have survived out in the largely uninhabited hinterlands, but were not published or translated until the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of that was lost.
There was a major stash of classical learning that a heretical sect of Christians established in what is now Iran, even then out of the reach of the dominant sect. When the muzzies imposed their rule on Iran, someone with curiousity among them found the archive and was completely jazzed by it.
That doesn’t absolve Islam of its various crimes — contrary to a common piece of agitprop, the Great Library of Alexandria still existed until the muzzies conquered Egypt, and the caliph ordered it burned, because all they needed was in the Koran. The story goes that it took six months to incinerate it all. That was the usual pattern, and in continued as they spread into Europe. The exceptions are just lucky breaks.
The children of the various caliphs and grand poobahs and things were perhaps analogous to the lib larvae of the 19th and early 20th century industrial titans, and could study stuff and get away with it. When the Spanish reconquered Iberia — it took nearly 800 years — they found the libraries on the former occupiers to be eye opening. A surviving copy of the old Roman Empire law digest changed the practice of law throughout Europe (it hadn’t made a dent in the despotic Islamic world); various Greek and Roman works of learning came through via Arabic translations, and there were original works building on the classical foundation.
And the muzzies had done nothing with it.