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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

Western philosophy maybe but Western science owes its early foundations to al-Biruni, al-Khwarizmi, ibn Sina, etc. That all began to fad in the 11th century as the Islamic equivalents of the gnostics eclipsed the equivalents of the scholastics. Then the Mongols came through and killed all the city dwellers in the region. But an awful lot of what later western scientists would build on came from that region.

EDIT: And I'm not actually sure you can say central Asia didn't have a big philosophical impact. I seem to recall that ibn Sina's argument for the existence of God came to be pretty popular among Christians and Jews as well.

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I find it strange that we see much of the golden age of the Middle East through the eyes of Islam. We refer not to the period as say for instance the Perso-Arabic (indeed, much of it was Persian though) golden age or something equivalent but rather the Islamic one, even though Islam had little to do for it. Some comments also mention the cities sacked as Islamic, and not say Persian for instance.

Of course, it is a very decidedly modern and political framing, but inaccurate and bizarre nonetheless. As much as calling the Renaissance in Europe the ‘Christian Golden Age’.

It is also worth noting the interplay and knowledge transfer from China, India, Japan, and various South East Asian countries into Persia too: in an attempt to hold up this narrative, we forget to see some of the things that we give ‘Islam’ exclusive credit for that were actually merely translated from the Eastern original.

It behooves me to use widely accepted terms if I want to be understood. The early Islamic Central Asian efflorescence benefited a lot from being able to draw on both India and Europe for inspiration as well as possibly the high degree of numeracy caused by the Silk road.

I can't help but think of Intel reading this. What happened to the Islamic world that they didn't capitalize on that progress and reach industrialization first? Was it the Mongol setback, or did European infighting force the tech advancement until it surpassed the East?

There isn't any consensus on this.

Mongol raids destroyed a lot of Islamic cities, including Baghdad, a centre of learning. [0]

Fundamentalist ideas and sects rose to the fore, such as the Hanbalis [1], who were suspicious or hostile towards secularism and secular science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbali

Before Mongols there were Seljuks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seljuk_Empire. And fundamentalists of course played a major role. Good movie illustrating it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physician_(2013_film) The movie also points out the conduit role Jews played between Muslim and Cristian worlds and thus the results of the persecution.

Amazing movie tip, thank you very much!

I've thought about this as well. Various factors contributed to ultimately displace the trade routes from land to water. These factors range from Mongol invasions, to geography. When trade stopped the flow of ideas stopped.

The current geopolitical conflict is about preventing the shifting of trade routes back to land from Western controlled waterways. It is amazing to me to consider for example Armenia's history and see the constant back and forth between a west and east aligned contenders and see its echo it contemporary events. Ditto for the overall high level connectivity between east and west, and how its shifts mirror civilization balance between East and West.

> The current geopolitical conflict is about preventing the shifting of trade routes back to land from Western controlled waterways.

The "One Belt One Road" initiative is literally being marketed as an attempt to re-establish those same land-based trade routes. Though it's also criticized by some since it's perceived as coming with too many strings attached.

That's hard to answer. The philosophical, mathematical, and scientific flourishing in the the silk road cities of central Asia in particular during the Islamic golden age seems to have ended in the 1000s. Some people blame the influential book The Incoherence of the Philosophers[1], maybe they're right or maybe it just captured the zeitgeist and was effect rather than cause.

Before too long the Mongols came. Plan A for China was originally to kill everyone, burn the fields, and raise the biggest herds ever on the resulting grassland. Thankfully this was quickly abandoned for Plan B, conquer and tax the people. But Plan B needed larger armies than Plan A and when Khwarezmia offered an unforgivable insult while the bulk of the Mongol army was needed pacifying China they got the Plan A treatment and why it seems so weird to us that a contender for largest city in the world could have ever been in Turkmenistan.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...

A user below mentioned that once the land-based trade switched to water-based, central Asia lost their main source of wealth since all of the overland trade was taxed. I agree.

Another reason the Islamic world didn't reach industrialization first is because of a lack of capital concentration and resulting lack of a large merchant class. Christian Europe practiced primogeniture so large estates passed to a single, next heir. Islamic laws resulted in accumulated wealth being dispersed among more inheritors each successive generation. Furthermore, the Muslim world did not indigenously develop a legal corporate form that lasted beyond the life of any of the partners further limiting the ability to form large companies.

If you have access, check out some of Timur Kuran's papers on Google Scholar.

What on earth are you talking about? Some science yes, but certainly there were scientist from the "West", e.g. aristoteles

Aristotle was part of the incredible flowering of math and philosophy in Ancient Greece between 600 and 300 BC or so. There was a similar flowering in western Asia between 750 AD and 1050 AD or so. The one doesn't contradict the other. When Western doctors were treating patients in 1400 AD they were working from ibn Sina's (Avicenna's) Canon of Medicine rather than Hippocrates (though ibn Sina owed a lot of Hippocrates). When Colubus was trying to persuade everyone the Earth was small he was arguing mostly about al-Biruni's book on the topic (though al-Biruni owed a huge debt to Eratosthenes). Again, this is more about science than philosophy which in Europe did tend to go directly from the Ancient world to the Renaissance as far as I can tell.

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