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    Quote Originally Posted by Whoobie77 View Post
    Not the Medieval Muslim Caliphates falling to fundamentalism.
    Friendly correction: the Muslim Caliphates didn't "fall" to fundamentalism:

    The Ummayids (EDIT: or rather, its decedents) were conquered by Spain.

    The Abbasid caliphate was defeated and ravaged by Mongols.

    The Ottoman empire was dismantled by the Allies after WW1, well after the Ottoman state had initiated modernizing reforms in the 19th century based on the French and German models.

    External forces had a bigger hand to play in creating Islam's modern conditions, not least of which was Europe's monopolization of Indian ocean trade, which no longer had to pass through the Mediterranean to reach the West. The Italian city states faced a similar period of stagnation following the decline of Mediterranean trade.

    An internal culprit was the dominance of a single, large, reactionary state over most of the region capable of stamping out threatening innovations; the Ottoman cast-like social contract was too rigid to easily change in the face of entrenched corruption and new political systems, whereas Europe's split into many competing statelets made control by a single entity impossible -- the most powerful and likeliest such entity being the house of Hapsburg in alliance with the Catholic church. China under the Ming, and most of the Qing, dynasty suffered the exact same fate for similar reasons.

    If anything, religious fundamentalism helped guide Europe on its modern path towards pluralism by kicking off the reformation.


    ... but yeah, I agree that civilizations (though the term "civilization" is itself ambiguous; I'll assume you mean major states) can suffer decisive blows.
    Last edited by xerx; 09-13-2014 at 11:08 PM.

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