Jinn of Current Events

Islamic society has been a transmission belt through which some knowledge from the ancients has reached us, albeit often in imperfect form. Islam achieved no major intellectual development on its own. In fact, Islam discourages any sort of scholarship aside from the study of its own edicts. The ideas, values, and creativity absorbed through their conquests always quickly faded away, because the subjugated people either died or converted, thus abandoning any form of active intellectual pursuit. What we've described is "islamoactive decay" — take any creative culture, inject Islam, and watch it rot. This horrible phenomenon has been observed countless times in the last 14 centuries.

Montaigne's Cat adds an important element: One further point — they systematically destroyed the traces of the pre-Islamic cultures they conquered. Some texts were translated into Arabic, but the originals were destroyed. This is like a thief covering his tracks. Thus they could claim originality, and never have to face the fact of their secondarity or inferiority. This is exactly the opposite of the Western impulse of preservation. By preserving texts and artifacts and artworks, the West can always return to the original to deepen its understanding. It is why the history of the West can be seen as a nearly continuous series of Renaissances, and the history of Islam as one of deepening decline and stagnation. 

At the 732 AD Battle of Tours, Charles Martel won a great victory over the Saracens which gave a decisive check to the career of Arab conquest in Western Europe... Gibbon devotes several pages of his great work to the narrative of the battle of Tours, and to the consideration of the consequences which probably would have resulted if Abderrahman's enterprise had not been crushed by the Frankish chief. Schlegel speaks of this mighty victory in terms of fervent gratitude, and tells how the arm of Charles Martel saved and delivered the Christian nations of the West from the deadly grasp of all-destroying Islam. 

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1395) described in his Muqaddimah the Arab/Muslim modus operandi. This is their plan for our future, should they win the current war: The Muslims desired to learn the sciences of the foreign nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mold of their own views. They peeled off these strange tongues and made them pass into their own idiom. The manuscripts in the non-Arabic languages were forgotten, abandoned, and scattered. Thus students of the sciences needed a knowledge of the meaning of Arabic words and Arabic writing. They could dispense with all other languages, because they had been wiped out and there was no longer any interest in them. [via Montaigne's Cat at lgf]