What happened to the Muslim world?

FR ^ | Dec 1 | RF

[RandFan]

Watching a documentary on the Muslim world i.e Constantinople, the grand buildings, mosques, infrastructure, design, technology, markets, culture etc.

Now I look at various countries and I wonder what went wrong.

What happened there? They were quite advanced at one stage weren't they?

[Rummyfan]

...“individual Moslems may show splendid qualities,” that thousands of Muslims are “brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen,” and that all Muslims “know how to die,” he judges them paralyzed in their “social developement” and Islam the strongest “retrograde force…in the world.”

- Winston Churchill

[Agatsu77]

Constantinople was a Roman and Christian city before being conquered by the muslims.

[TexasFreeper2009]

invading and stealing technology and knowledge does not make you advanced, just a thief.

the supposed “golden age” of Islam was no more than the pinnacle of their pillaging and theft.

[TexasFreeper2009]

which ironically is exactly what communism did 100’s of years later.

[TexasFreeper2009]

Something else that no one ever talks about happened which doomed Islam.

1492

Everyone knows that is when Columbas discovered the America’s.

BUT

What most people DONT know.. is that it is also the same year the Muslims were finally thrown out of Spain after occupying it for over 700 years.

[ByteMercenary]

Some one in the G W Bush administration is supposed to have said “the muslim steals that which he cannot create and uses technology to destroy that which he cannot build” or words to that effect. He was of course referring to the negative effect islam has upon ingenuity.

[Keb]

As best I have it:

The Islamic Civilization is the only post stone-age civilization I can name, that seems to have contributed nothing to the sum of human knowledge. With no exceptions I have found, what is credited as invented by the Islamic Civilization was actually invented by someone else. What the Islamic civilization did do, was to absorb, preserve, and transmit knowledge, from the Greek, Roman, Jewish, Assyrian, Indian, and even Chinese civilizations.

For example, what are called “Arabic Numerals”, are so called because Europe, which made the best use of them, learned them from Arabia, after Arabia learned them from India.

One thing that contributed to this, was that Islam was founded on top of the greatest trade route on the planet. (If you want to chart the world’s main trading route, prior to the great age of European travel, start in the Nile delta. Draw a line up the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, into Turkey. Then turn East, and draw a line East through India to China. That will approximate it.) the Muslim Civilization blocked anyone else from using this trade route, but maintained its own contact with Europe through China. The Islamic Civilization destroyed the Assyrian and Eastern Roman civilizations, and badly damaged the Greek, Jewish, and Indian civilizations, taking knowledge for itself, but largely preventing anyone else form acquiring it, except through them.

(The Muslim blockade of the main land trade route from Europe is part of the reason that Spain financed Columbus’ expedition to find a route to the far East, by going West.)

The Muslim civilization contributed to the Renaissance, in a sort of backhanded way. Wherever the jihadis went, they drove out the learned, capturing some, but causing others to flee. Some fled to Europe. The hybridization of the scholarship of the Orient, which the refugees from Islam carried into Italy, with the scholarship of Europe, was one of the currents that fed the Renaissance.

[BobL]

Thanks for posting - this isn’t even 50 years ago. Much of the Muslim world has advanced significantly since then. I remember looking at a random street scene on Google Maps on a remote island of Indonesia - the place looked like Japan. Likewise Egypt is now quite a bit more than a desert wasteland.

But no thanks, I still have no intention of actually living there - I just respect their recent progress.