We’re not communicating. Never mind
My comments were not directed at the Near East as a whole but at the Islamic civilization centered around Baghdad in the 13th and 14th Centuries, until the Mongol genocide around 1400. Any serious historian will admit that it was a great flowering.
But let us look nearer the coast, for a moment, in the earlier period you address. Sir Walter Scott did massive research from original manuscripts in old libraries for his Waverly Novels. He was a practicing Christian and hardly an advocate for conversion to Islam, yet he pictures Saladin as not only a great and noble warrior, but a great physician. I will trust his research over someone today, trying to make a point, in a time of stronger religious antagonisms.
To understand what happened to the competence level in what is now Iraq, and in other areas affected by the slaughter, consider what would happen to American culture if the 20% of the population with the highest IQs, were to be subjected to a massacre by a conquering army? Or look at what happened to Russian agriculture, after Stalin subjected 7,000,000 to 10,000,000 of the best farmers to deliberate starvation.
There is no question but that religious intolerance can set a nation back, both by suppressing creativity and by driving out above average achievers. But the real killer comes when you lower the intelligence level of a population by targetting its brightest for expulsion or destruction. The Near East represents the effect of destruction. France failing to match England in progressing to an industrial revolution represents expulsion--the expulsion of the Huguenots who were dominant in the sort of skills that in England led to industrialization.
What is essential to understand history is to understand that people make their own culture, not the other way around. The culture at any particular time, in any nation, will be largely determined by the proclivities and aptitudes of the people who comprise that nation. Of course, there is the effect of inertia. If you kill off the best and brightest, those brought up in the culture may still maintain the outward forms for a time--although they will gradually become corrupted. But people make their culture.
The great lie of the Socialists is that by artificially altering culture, you can remake people. It did not work in Russia; it was not working in China, when the pragmatists there began to subtly abandon it. It cannot work anywhere.
William Flax