Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Islam did not create much of anything. This is simply a fact. Algebra – an Arab word – was invented 500 years before mad Muhammad by Greeks and Christians in Alexandria. Geometry [Euclid], Calculus [Pythagoras], medicine [Hippocrates, Galen]; scientific methods [Aristotle, Christian]; philosophy [Thales, Plato], hospitals [Christian]; architecture [Roman, Greek, Christian]; the arts [pagan, Christian]; theology, even alchemy all predate the rise of the cult named Submission [Islam] by many centuries if not thousands of years in some cases. Islam invented nothing.
When Moslems conquered half of the Christian world from Syria to southern France, the majority population was put to work by the minority Arab-Moslem occupying power. They were dhimmis or second class citizens. The 'wealth' of the Islamic empire[s] which so titillates Marxists Phds and the chattering elite was of course the expression of a powerful civilization[s] which had pre-dated the Moslem. Whilst the Moslems destroyed the library at Alexandria, and devastated North Africa, Spain and the littoral of Europe; the dhimmis did what they always had done; they worked, they traded, the invented, they paid taxes, and they survived.
Over time as Moslem totalitarianism and intolerance grew; and as war, plunder, rape and exploitation of the dhimmis proceeded apace, the population of those 'who can' declined. Non-Moslem populations as documented by extant literature and Moslem records declined sometimes dramatically. Forced conversions, emigration, and mass executions did the job. High taxes, dhimmi-slave status and the hatred for non-Moslems created a morbid culture – the exact opposite taught in universities today.
As the dhimmi population was effaced, so too did the vitality of Moslem states wane. Islam was lost without the dhimmis. Without the Byzantine architects, Armenian merchants, Greek craftsmen, and Egyptian peasantry, the Islamic world became the poverty-stricken place it is today; one that differs little from the Arabia of the seventh century. In a sense the Muslim world didn't decline. Rather, as the Christians, Berbers, Romans, Greeks, Hispanos, Persians and non-Moslems left, were killed, or converted to the Al-Lah Meccan cult, Islam simply returned to its barbarian roots.
Any progress whatsoever within the Islamic world was the work of non-Moslems, or non-Arabs. The city of Baghdad was built by enslaved Christian artisans and architects. The Christian physician Ibn Bakhtishu founded the great hospital of Baghdad imitating what the Nestorian Christians had built for centuries. Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock was designed and built by Byzantine architects – as slaves. Christian and Jewish scribes translated Sanskrit, Persian, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts into Arabic. Many of these scholars and artisans converted to Islam in order to work and to ensure their safety and that of their families and to avoid punishing taxation. Consequently, their accomplishments have been erroneously credited to Islamic civilization ignoring the fact that they received their training as Christians or Jews.
Eventually a handful – a trifling few - scientists and philosophers arose in Islamic culture thanks to the translations by Christians and Jews of ancient knowledge. Some advancements were made in optics, math, and philosophical commentary on Aristotle and other Greeks. These scientists and philosophers might have been converted Muslims, but they were mostly non-Arab. Historian Ibn Khaldun writes,
"It is strange that most of the learned among the Muslims who have excelled in the religious or intellectual sciences are non-Arabs with rare exceptions; and those savants who claimed Arabian descent spoke a foreign language, grew up in foreign lands, and studied under foreign masters."
In the 10th century Moslem theologians adhering to a 'pure Koran' shut down this incipient rise of rationality. The only necessary tool in life was the Koran. By the 11th century the brief period of some variety of learning and knowledge was dead. Averroes the most famous of the Moslem philosophers, who offered little which was innovative to Christians or non-Moslems [see here]; was persecuted, imprisoned, beaten, threatened and forced to recant his heretical views. So much for the Moslem golden age.
Historian Renan sums up the situation:
"Science and philosophy flourished on Muslim soil during the first half of the middle ages; but it was not by reason of Islam, it was in spite of Islam. Not a Muslim philosopher or scholar escaped persecution. During the period just specified persecution is less powerful than the instinct of free enquiry, and the rationalist tradition is kept alive, then intolerance and fanaticism win the day. It is true that the Christian Church also cast great difficulties in the way of science in the Middle Ages; but she did not strangle it outright, as did the Muslim theology.”
Islam has never offered anything new. Moslems will invade, destroy, pillage and desecrate Christian architecture into a mosque. Civilization exists in spite of Islam, not because of it.