
Originally Posted by
xerx
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.