[laishly]

"And when they arrived in Constantinople, they sacked it."

Actually, Constantinople was sacked and fatally crippled as a bulwark against the muslims by the Fourth Crusade, which never reached the Holy Land. The Crusade was hijacked by Venice, which supplied the shipping transport for the Crusaders and was more interested in loot than liberation. The Byzantine Empire was briefly ruled by an emperor installed by the crusade and lasted only a couple of hundred years more as a shadow of its former glory and power.

Ironically, the advance of the Arab empire had been forestalled by Genghis Khan, who sacked and destroyed cities across the Middle East and South Central Asia in reaction to the Arabs defiant slaughter of a diplomatic mission of Khan's. The impact on the Arab civilization was analogous to what happened to the Incan Empire. They never recovered their former leadership in warfare, science, mathematics, astronomy, etc. They were left as a withered and bitter shell wallowing in the primitive superstition that is today exemplified by the jihadists. Only oil and liberal "good intentions" has enabled them to infiltrate western societies to destroy them from within.

[johnb838]

Were the Arabs really ever all that advanced? Or did the advances come out of the formerly Greek and Zoroastrian societies that the muzzies conquered. I mean, I know the slamis didn't WRITE the books in the great library at Alexandria. But they did know how to BURN the books in the great library at Alexandria, maybe the single greatest loss ever to civilization at a single moment in history.