[Billthedrill]

The real, aching irony is that what we really got from Arab civilization was, of all things, religious tolerance. Hard to believe when viewing contemporary Islamic theocracies, but it's a fact. They were the only ones to manage multiple religions in the same area without extensive bloodshed, even the Romans couldn't manage that.

It was this that enabled the Arabic component of Islam to survive the Turkish takeover of the secular government functions - they maintained the caliphate, the religious end, and gave the sultanate, the governing part, to the Turks. When the Turks withdrew from imperial government and went secular in 1917, all that was left was the religious end, which had been effectively disempowered for half a millennium. It is for this reason that current Arabic governments do not display the tolerant characteristics they did in the beginning if Islam, and why religious fervor has taken on a new stridency in the Arab world. Islam misses its secular counterweight - it misses the Turks.

[aristotleman]

The only good thing Islam created was the Turks.