Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
I was with you (sort of) until you got to the part about dogmatic turns in Islam "creat[ing]" a period of economic stagnation. Until about 1880, Islam prospered in regions of the world where the natural resources were, um, overlooked. They did not have an industrial revolution as a result.
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I was refering to the first dogmatic shifts of the late middle ages that moved the center of rapid advancement in sciences and the arts from the Islamic world to Western Europe. I'm no scholar of 19th century Middle East, so I'll take your word on the worsening effect of the exploitation of oil, but the colonization of the Islamic world by Europe was long underway by that point already, and largely due to a period of stagnation on the part of the Islamic world. In the 12th Century, the Islamic culture was the most dynamic one in the West, and certainly controlled large areas that one would consider rich in non-oil resources (3/4 the Mediterranean, Spain and Portugal, and part of France, much of the souther portion of Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and a substantial part of the Indian subcontinent). 500 years later empires were built out of small pieces of Islam's domains (Spain, France) that would eventually dominate and colonize much of the Islamic center. Islam, like the Amish, acheived a certain level of comfort and then stayed there while their neighbors passed them by. The Amish are lucky that we Baltimorons don't view Lancaster County, PA the same way Napoleon viewed Egypt.
