Quote Originally Posted by xerx View Post
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.
Ok, so, I went and looked up who I was thinking of, and Al-Ghazali was the name. After Rome fell, the West was in the Dark Ages, There was no power in Europe to carry the torch which began with Hellenistic Greece's pluralism. The Muslim world picked up the torch, essentially. But after the Mongols had sacked the Abbasids and the Crusades happened, the torch had effectively been passed. The Mongols were bringing together disparate talents to advance their military conquests, and the Crusades "brought home" the lost information of the Dark Ages, setting the stage for Britain, France, Spain, and like to begin grasping for the throne. Combine this with Al-Ghazali's undermining of pluralistic thought, and you had the beginnings of a diminishing in importance. I think you misrepresent the Ottomans as a superpower; to be a superpower means you are ruling the world. By the time WWI had rolled around, the once proud seat of Constantinople was almost an afterthought in the conflict of Britain, France, Germany and Russia. The Mongols were ruling the world after the Abbasids, and then the power center shifted back to Europe, The Qing is an apt comparison-a brittle country which had long past its heyday. The apex of premodern Chinese civilization was probably sometime in the Song, the apex of premodern Muslim civilization was during the Abbasids. The span of time from the height of the Song to the end of Qing, and the time from the end of Abbasids to the end of the Ottomans, was the decline towards death (irrelevance or dismantlement) not the death itself. Analogous to middle and old age in humans; not without good times, but certainly nothing like what was achieved in one's prime.