It's surprising that the author appears to be unaware that Islam merely overran existing learned cultures (eg the Persian and Eastern Roman empires). The respective societies long period of descent began after Islam had enough time to calcify existing channels of science and education.
That's true, but to its credit, medieval Moselms allowed themselves to be influenced by these other learned cultures, adopting many of their advances and developing a more nuanced worldview as a result. Islam 1000 ago was not dominated by fundamentalist fanatics the way it is today. It was not a benign force, don't get me wrong, but it was not the crazed jihadist monstrosity it is today either.
The respective societies long period of descent began after Islam had enough time to calcify existing channels of science and education.
That's not true. Byzantine and Persian civiliations were declining long before the time of Mohammed.
And the Arab world's decline is directly related to the reduction of Zoroastrian Persian and Eastern Roman populations through genocide of those populations.
This article is garbage. The Greeks thought so much of honor that they thought using bows in warfare as cowardly because they could not face their enemy face to face - a concept that the European peoples all learned from the Greeks and helped give birth to chivalry - they would have considered al-Qaeda as cowardly barbarians and rightly so.
But lastly - trying to compare bronze age morality with our own modern version - even if it is comparing it to backwards Islam - is bad scholarship.