The British show “Connections” had an excellent piece on why China never developed an industrial revolution or scientific revolution, but the West did.
The Chinese imagined an ethereal “chi” or miasma, and you couldn’t study one set of items separate from the unknowable interconnected forces. In short, you can’t deduce laws of motion and physics because you cannot possibly analyze the whole universe’s components. So they did well with direct observations of the heavens, but didn’t bother to develop mathematical equations for it because they believed you couldn’t.
Islam suffers from its own stifling view that Allah is unknowable and can do anything on a whim. Scientific observation is somewhat tolerable, like noting what medicines do what.
However, you cannot develop a scientific method and experimental methods without:
* a prior belief that there are ordered laws of the universe
* people are able to determine these laws of the universe
* it isn’t a fatal act of blasphemy to try
For the Chinese, they lacked the first two beliefs. Islam suffers from the second. Africa had none of the above, even when Egypt was a major power in ancient days, though the Greeks were working somewhat toward the first 2.
Only in the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe did any large group not only do all three, but had networks of interconnected universities so that information spread beyond a few esoteric scientists to large groups.
China was and remains a “no-trust” culture.