This is an interesting history post that reminds us of many Arab discoveries and theories that were erased and later white people took credit for. Europeans erased centuries of knowledge from the East because of fear. Then they “rediscovered” it:
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And later they allowed religion to erase their knowledge and innovative approach, the same way Christianity did on the west centuries earlier.
Many people proposed theories of evolution before Darwin, Darwin’s greatness was to describe the mechanism for how it worked (natural selection) and provide a great deal of evidence for it. He also knew the weakness in his theory, which was later removed by the discovery of genetics.
Muslim scientific inquiry during the Muslim Golden Age was extremely limited; it didn’t extend far beyond Al-Andalus, and it was far from being without religiously-imposed limits. It also didn’t stick – the core of Islam overwhelmed it within only a few centuries and erased what was once a vibrant scientific culture in a tide of religious mania. Under that tide of mania, the society that allowed those discoveries to be made was deemed essentially heretical and dismantled.
That Muslims discovered great things is not in contention – that they discovered them because of Islam very much is. Muslims of today wish to boast of those discoveries as if they were made because of Islam – when in truth, they were made IN SPITE of the rule of Islam rather than because of it.
The world currently ruled by Islam wasn’t always under the iron fist of Islam. At the time of Al-Andalus, it was a far more dynamic and heterogeneous mix of societies that considered each others’ thinking far more freely than is seen amongst the Islamic states in the centuries since. In the tolerant climate of Al-Andalus, Muslims heard ideas coming from those of other faiths and were free to consider them and draw scientific discoveries from them. Under the subsequent Islamic caliphates, that freedom was expunged.
Oftentimes, the discoveries Westerners have made from earlier Muslim writings have been rightly attributed to those Westerners – because unlike their Muslim forebears, they’ve been able to get these understandings to work in the modern world, and spread the basic understanding of them to all levels of society. This is something which their original authors manifestly failed to do, because it was something that Islam’s suffocating rule prevented them from doing. And it was something that subsequent Muslim societies failed to do, as they were busy teaching that the only book anyone needed to read was the Quran.
When history is viewed as a whole, it shows that just as with the rule of Christianity, the rule of Islam has been a blight upon scientific inquiry and public freedom alike. Considering that both of these religions have grown out of the original Jewish faith, it’s highly likely that had that religion gained the same prominence, it would have been equally repressive in its rule. The Abrahamic religions are simply bad for freedom of thought, and therefore bad for scientific progress as a whole.