The basic thrust of the show was that all knowledge has sprung from Islam. While Christians in Europe were shivering in their drafty castles plotting the next crusade, Islam was inventing peace, mathematics, the scientific method, blah, blah, blah.
The so-called history stopped about three hundred years ago. I guess stopping that long ago meant that the show's creators didn't have to explain modern terrorism and the fact that most Muslim's today live in abject poverty even though Islam invented everything worth knowing.
PBS is a travesty.
Yes, during the middle ages, the Arab world was more enlightened than Europe.
It has, obviously, languished and been surpassed by western civilization in it's achievements.
As my buddy Abe (who grew up in Morrocco) was taught, the Arabs "invented the zero and stayed inside it".
Well, actually, it stopped about 450 years ago, when the Muslim empires were so convinced of their military, scientific superiority that they withdrew into insularity. Meanwhile, Europe underwent a massive renaissance...
a couple of hundred years later the Muslim empires were in for a rude awakening.
As far as this business about Reagan being inept, it's obvious that the media simply cannot help letting its ideological bias creep into to anythng related to him. Few people realize how profound Reagan's efforts were in the destruction of Communism.
Fear not, 30 years from now, the history books will call him Ronaldus Magnus.