"The historian Bernard Lewis is not the only one who has asked what went wrong?" In 2002 a committee of Arab intellectuals under the auspices of the United Nations published the candid Arab Human Development Report, said to be 'written by Arabs for Arabs'. The authors documented that Arab nations were plagued by political; repression, economic backwardness, oppression of women, widespread illiteracy, and a self-imposed isolation from the world of ideas. At the time of the report, the entire Arab world exported fewer manufactured goods than the Philippines, had poorer internet connectivity than sub-Saharan Africa, registered 2 percent as many patents per year as South Korea, and translated about a fifth as many books into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek...
It wasn't always this way...
...Why did Islam blow its lead and fail to have an age of reason, an enlightenment, and a Humanitarian Revolution?...
...Lewis Points instead to the historical lack of separation between mosque and state. Muhammad was not just a spiritual leader but a political and military one, and only recently have any Islamic states had the concept of a distinction between the secular and the sacred. With every potential intellectual contribution filtered through religious spectacles. opportunities for absorbing and combining new ideas were lost. Lewis recounts that while works in philosophy, and mathematics had been translated from Greek into Arabic, works of poetry, drama, and history were not. And while Muslims had a richly developed history of their own civilization, they were incurious about their Asian. African, and European neighbors and about their own pagan ancestors. The ottoman heirs to classical Islamic civilization resisted the adoption of mechanical clocks, standardized weights and measures, experimental science, modern philosophy, translations of poetry and fiction, the financial instruments of capitalism, and perhaps most importantly, the printing press. (Arabic was the language in which the Koran was written, so printing it was considered an act of desecration.) In Chapter 4 I speculated that the humanitarian Revolution in Europe was catalyzed by a literate cosmopolitanism which expanded peoples circle of empathy, and set up a marketplace of ideas from which a liberal humanism could emerge. Perhaps the dead hand of religion impeded the flow of ideas into the centres of Islamic civilization, locking it into a relatively illiberal stage of development. As if to prove the speculation correct, in 2010 the Iranian government restricted the number of university students who would be admitted to programs in the humanities, because, according to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, study of the humanities "promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs." -- Harvard Psychology Professor and Cognitive Scientist, Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of our Nature 'Why Violence has Declined.'"
