It's the damned Mongols' fault
No it probably isn't, but who knows? I'm just channeling my inner Eric Flint and indulging in some alternate history. It is however very discouraging to look at the turmoil and horrors of a great part of the Islamic world today and compare it to the Islamic Golden Age, which essentially collapsed today in 1258 when the Mongols sacked Baghdad and broke the Abbasid caliphate.
Any thread mentioning Islam invariably gets at least one defensive response that Islamic regimes were once, and for centuries, far ahead of both Christian Europe and Imperial China in art, science, technology and learning. They gave the world great advances in math and engineering and government, as well as being far more tolerant and cosmopolitan than other regimes to outsiders.
All absoluitely true. That was under the Abbasids. Thanks, Mongols for fucking that up.
Now obviously it wasn't a toggle switch between the Abbasids and ISIS. The Ottomans had some good points without a doubt for a start, and the Mamluks weren't hell on earth either. Moorish Spain varied between enlightened pluralism and snappish oligarchy for another 200 plus years, but the great Golden Age of Islam died today in 1258. And while it's trendy to blame Euro-whitey for everything Islamic extremists do today, it's worth pointing out the Crusades petered out before the Abbasids did, and both the Mamluks and the Ottoman Turks suffered great humiliation at the hands of westerners without any similar responses. Heck the surviving outposts of the Abbasids didn't start kidnapping and beheading Mongols in 1258. Maybe they should have. Restoring THAT caliphate would not have been a bad thing.
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