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In general I feel people take the wrong lessons from medieval history. "For a thousand years, Christians were this way, and Muslims were that way,"--as if that says something meaningful about Christianity, or Islam. The belief system governing Catholic Europe wasn't Christianity so much as Christianity grafted onto Greco-Roman civilization, then smushed together with Germanic tribal law and left to stew for a couple of centuries. Likewise the Muslims, at the peak of their flourishing, weren't always all that strictly Muslim; the caliphs got drunk as hell and wrote poems about diddling little boys.
The real lesson of the Middle Ages is that, when people have their backs against the wall, they tend to get vicious. Catholic Europe spent several centuries getting invaded, assimilating the invaders, fighting off different invaders, invading and oppressing some other people during a lull, then back to getting invaded, assimilating, and hey look at the time, guess we'd better reform this embarrassing papacy, hmm, surfeit of heavily armed and barely civilized men, let's give 'em something to do, CRUSADES! Surprisingly, this lifestyle did not yield cultured poets and philosophers.
Meanwhile, in Muslim Spain, things were peachy. The native Christians were shoehorned into some northern mountains, and the Franks had not done well at invading over the Pyrenees. So they relaxed, got a nice arts scene going, occasionally raided the Christians and demanded tribute . . . until a sudden domestic crisis caused the collapse of the caliphate. Spain splintered into dozens of little kingdoms, some of them ruled by Jews or Christians. This did not sit well with the Muslims, who whistled for some violent, reactionary zealots from North Africa. When those didn't do so hot, they whistled for a somewhat worse pack of zealots from the same source. Still they got pushed back; finally Ferdinand and Isabella married, neatly unifying the Christians, and presently taught the Muslims what violent, reactionary zealotry was really all about.
Meanwhile, with the Muslim threat from the west diminished and no Vikings, Magyars, Lombards, etc. to worry about, the rest of Europe had finally calmed down enough to start the Renaissance. Still had Turks on the horizon--not to mention spectacular internal strife--but we gradually got more civilized from there. Things really took off around the time the Turks started rolling back. Then came the Enlightenment, when various philosophers with enormous grudges against the RCC and a passing intellectual interest in Islam largely invented the narrative we've been spouting with few variations ever since.
A century after that, Islam became so feeble as to become briefly fashionable in an Orientalist craze, in much the same way we invented Pastoralism once actual bucolic life was largely a relic of the past. A century after that, it was so feeble that we were able to hand out pieces of the Ottoman Empire like party favors after WWI. Another century of intercultural pimp-smacking later, much of the Middle East is stuck in a mentality we describe, with a shudder, as "medieval." Savage, insular, and proud of its own ignorance.
But we don't learn the obvious lesson from it.
The real lesson of the Middle Ages is that, when people have their backs against the wall, they tend to get vicious. Catholic Europe spent several centuries getting invaded, assimilating the invaders, fighting off different invaders, invading and oppressing some other people during a lull, then back to getting invaded, assimilating, and hey look at the time, guess we'd better reform this embarrassing papacy, hmm, surfeit of heavily armed and barely civilized men, let's give 'em something to do, CRUSADES! Surprisingly, this lifestyle did not yield cultured poets and philosophers.
Meanwhile, in Muslim Spain, things were peachy. The native Christians were shoehorned into some northern mountains, and the Franks had not done well at invading over the Pyrenees. So they relaxed, got a nice arts scene going, occasionally raided the Christians and demanded tribute . . . until a sudden domestic crisis caused the collapse of the caliphate. Spain splintered into dozens of little kingdoms, some of them ruled by Jews or Christians. This did not sit well with the Muslims, who whistled for some violent, reactionary zealots from North Africa. When those didn't do so hot, they whistled for a somewhat worse pack of zealots from the same source. Still they got pushed back; finally Ferdinand and Isabella married, neatly unifying the Christians, and presently taught the Muslims what violent, reactionary zealotry was really all about.
Meanwhile, with the Muslim threat from the west diminished and no Vikings, Magyars, Lombards, etc. to worry about, the rest of Europe had finally calmed down enough to start the Renaissance. Still had Turks on the horizon--not to mention spectacular internal strife--but we gradually got more civilized from there. Things really took off around the time the Turks started rolling back. Then came the Enlightenment, when various philosophers with enormous grudges against the RCC and a passing intellectual interest in Islam largely invented the narrative we've been spouting with few variations ever since.
A century after that, Islam became so feeble as to become briefly fashionable in an Orientalist craze, in much the same way we invented Pastoralism once actual bucolic life was largely a relic of the past. A century after that, it was so feeble that we were able to hand out pieces of the Ottoman Empire like party favors after WWI. Another century of intercultural pimp-smacking later, much of the Middle East is stuck in a mentality we describe, with a shudder, as "medieval." Savage, insular, and proud of its own ignorance.
But we don't learn the obvious lesson from it.
Elok is not a nerd. 
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