Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!
And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well, if only as Japan's victim), I'm pretty satisfied with "World War" as descriptors.
I am one of those people, too- I only found out while watching James Burke's Connections series a few years back, and then reading way too much Wikipedia.
To be fair, other regions of the world have never heard of "the Dark Ages". History is too big for the layman to avoid simplification.
(although, renaming it "the Lost Ages" seems like it would help clarify things)
This is a very misleading description of what happened. The early Muslim conquests caused major disruption in the Middle East, otherwise known as the Roman and Persian Empires, as cities which had been full of scholarship and prosperity for centuries were invaded and the population conquered, enslaved, and sometimes killed, with the concomitant destruction of libraries and learning. There is a major disruption of the written historical record during this time period comparable to what happened in the Dark Ages or even worse.
It wasn't until after the "explosion of Islam" that the Muslims gradually realized the value of the Greek texts that were preserved during their conquests and everything settled out such that scholars were able to return to their work.
The main reason a lot of classical learning fell into disuse in the West was that the Germanic peoples migrating in didn’t care much, and there was a language barrier - most stuff was in Greek, and they only knew Latin, for the most part. With a very few exceptions, nobody was going around actively destroying stuff. Indeed, the Church is the main reason so much was preserved in the West, particularly some later popes that took a keen interest in the preservation of ancient texts. Easily the worst thing the West did was the burning of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, because again, the Byzantine Empire, even what remained of it by then, was a real center of learning and probably easily the biggest surviving repository of books on the planet at the time, so undoubtedly we lost some texts then.
This isn’t really a religion vs religion thing - the Christians came into an existence in a society and region already steeped in Greek learning, and slowly assumed political control over the region. The Muslims were in an entirely different situation: they were from an underdeveloped region and came into the Middle East via conquest. They simply didn’t know what they had, and the violence of the conquests was a major setback. In some ways, the region never really recovered - that and the Mongol invasions.
That's like describing 'The Great Leap Forward' as a Sino-centric view of history.
"The Dark Ages" refers to a time as well as a place. Specifically, Western Europe.
Which is the problem.
Yes, I believe so. I'm not even sure the Dark Ages are taught outside of countries with European heritage.
Nevertheless, anywhere the topic is discussed, it's usually mentioned in comparison to other periods of European history. That alone tells us that it's a term intended to describe regional rather than global events.
Er, even 20 years ago when I was in college it was taught as both largely a misnomer and a label applied to a (somewhat ambiguously bounded, especially as to the ending point) period of Western European history.