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There was a great book by the brilliant author Bernard Lewis titled “What Went Wrong”, about how Islam controlled large parts of the world and was the dominant power in so many areas, military, commerce, technology, etc.

Their downfall turned out to be their reluctance to accept knowledge of infidels, and that arrogant insularity was one of the main reasons for their decline.

In the Renaissance, there were huge swaths of Islamic literature, medicine, and technology that were translated from the Islamic world and assimilated into Western culture, but there was nearly no formal knowledge going back to the Islamic world from the left, because...they didn’t want it. It was infidel, and considered tainted.

In 600 years up to the Renaissance, only one book had been translated from a western language into Arabic...a book on venereal diseases. This was considered acceptable, because they were thought to be “Frankish Diseases”.

Even more telling, was after the Battle of Lepanto, there was a formalized account (officially recorded in the Ottoman records) of a discussion between two Islamic naval officers examining a wrecked Christian warship.

The warship was technologically so far ahead of their own ships in design (the same vessels that had roundly defeated them) that they were discussing the merits of the European design and marveling at it...but they couldn’t just copy it and incorporate it into their own designs. Because it was “infidel” technology, they had get a fatwa to allow it...because it was infidel in origin.

And THAT is “What Went Wrong” with Islam. And the humorous part of it is, even today, they cannot understand this. It is a “mystery” to them, the same way that it is a “mystery” to the NBA and NFL that their viewership has plummeted. They WILLFULLY refuse to even consider that perhaps their viewers don’t appreciate being dissed, called racists, and having the ills of black society being blamed on them...I swear, I read it this morning from Yahoo Sports and saw that their declining viewership was a “little bit of a mystery” and I almost fell out of my chair. Willful refusal to understand.

That is one of the great things about America. We incorporate everything we can, with little or no consideration of the origin. Food, technology, medicine, you name it. Even our language, English, is liberally salted with words and phrases from other languages and cultures, incorporated right into and become part of our English lexicon.