The West Owes Islam Nothing
by
There is unending propaganda about an Islamic Golden Age of the past that today’s Islamists want to recreate.
I don’t know what’s worse, junk science or junk history. There is unending propaganda about an Islamic Golden Age of the past that today’s Islamists want to recreate. Much the same as a century ago, fables about an “Aryan super-race” long before Western Christianity motivated a lethal totalitarianism. Neither is true, of course, and obscures the amazing story of how Western Civilization got us to where we are.
A good example is a recent podcast by Tharik Hussain, a Muslim travel writer praising the contributions of Muslim Cordoba to Europe. The best evidence this chap offered was an odd paean from an amateur historian a century ago — that in Cordoba’s prime it had street lighting, public baths, paved streets, arabesque decorations on palaces, schools for children, and an “Alexandrian library,” while Christian Europe was dark, dirty, muddy, and its monks and rulers unlettered.
Sorry, that’s all wrong. A few of the wealthiest Muslim cities in the Middle Ages did manage to hold on to the benefits of the Roman world they had conquered, including architecture and street layouts. But the vast majority of Islam was illiterate and impoverished. Cordoba’s streetlights were just some oil lamps hung along the central arteries. Big deal. Public baths, another legacy of the Romans, were much more common in Europe. Only in the 16th century, with waves of new diseases, did they decline, when some Tony Fauci in that era decreed that hot water spread disease.
Far from being uneducated, Europe’s Christians led the way past the fall of Rome and into the future after the barbarian invasions. Unlike Muslims, Christians have always believed the pen is mightier than the sword. For its first 500 years, the Church didn’t fight — it preached, argued, evangelized, and published its teachings on a scale the world had never seen. Then, it began a process of previously unimagined formal education, based in churches and tens of thousands of monasteries and convents. Monasteries ran local schools, assembled libraries, published books (before the printing press, everything had to be hand-copied), advanced agriculture and technical research, cared for the poor and elderly, conducted trade fairs, and often protected locals with their massive stone walls.
Compare that to just a few big Muslim towns like Cordoba and Baghdad that had libraries, while in their hands, the greatest library of all, the one in Alexandria, Egypt, fell to ruin. Similarly, the great Roman canal that linked the Red Sea to the Nile and the Mediterranean was neglected, then demolished. Most of the achievements of Islamic scholars descend from the great Persian and Byzantine schools, persisting under their new Arab masters. Raymond Ibrahim and Goldie Ghamari have many podcasts on just that. The question is not what Islam gave Europe, but just how far Europe and the rest of the world might have advanced without Islam.
Anyway, Christian Europe recovered from the barbarian wave because it had the secret sauce. The rule of law, based on the Imago Dei. The rights of all mankind because we are made in His image.
Ordinary people got to live more freely than in any previous society, and they even got to vote on their government — at towns and cities, often with strong written charters; and judicial officers like the Saxon hundred, in trials by juries; and professed monks and nuns even voted for their leadership.
full story at https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/the_west_owes_islam_nothing.html