[ExI] are all cultures equivalent?

[John Grigg]

John K. Clark wrote:
Let's look at a subset of the Muslim world, the Arabs. There are over 250
million Arabs and they have most of the world's oil, but nevertheless the
GNP of the entire Arab world is less than that of Spain, a country with no
oil and a population of only 40 million. One reason for this may be that the
number of books translated into Arabic over the past thousand years is about
the same as the number of books translated into Spanish just last year.

I freely admit this is an entirely subjective statement but in my personal
opinion Islamic culture sucks.
>>>

My question for the list members is why did Islamic culture, which in
medieval times had a technological and cultural heyday that greatly
surpassed Europe, fall so short in the intervening centuries that lead up to
the present era?

I have read it was among other things, the Mongol invasions that devastated
entire kingdoms, and also the rise of Muslim theocracies over the secular
states.

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20090413/c88c7ed7/attachment.html>