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    Quote Originally Posted by Whoobie77 View Post
    When I said "medieval Muslim caliphates", I was thinking of the Abbasids, I think. That's why I specified medieval to distinguish them from the Ottomans. If I recall correctly, there was a fundamentalist backlash after a period of scientific achievement and relative political/religious tolerance. It may not have been the end of the Abbasids, but it was the end of tolerance and rationalism, the end of its contributions to human freedom and liberty, which effectively signaled the beginning of decline. But my memory may be failing me, it's not my area of expertise, for certain.

    When I say "civilization", I mean something along the lines of, "Larger than a nation-state, with tendencies towards hegemony/hyperpower". Once again, perhaps not true of the Abbasids, but, it's social science, not chemistry, there's bound to be some ambiguity.
    There's a lot of misinformation on the subject out there, so your belief is understandable. Nevertheless, any "continuous" decline from the Abbasids onwards would have cascaded to the later Islamic states inheriting the Caliphal title, like the Ottomans'. What we see is that the Ottoman Empire was one of the most religiously tolerant states in Europe, with vast religious minorities; a notable episode was the sheltering of Jewish refugees fleeing the Spanish inquisitions.

    At its height, it was a technologically advanced and highly organized superpower, and one of the first states to employ gunpowder on the battlefield.

    There were scary periods of fanaticism throughout Muslim history to be sure, esp. following the collapse of the Abassids, notably by figures like Tamerlane, an Islamic Mongol who massacred untold numbers of people, ostensibly out of religious duty, including other Muslims. But even his descendants, who later came to rule India, governed an organized, culturally-rich and contemporaneously modern empire.
    Last edited by xerx; 09-14-2014 at 01:07 AM.

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