Osama bin Laden is dead?!

[Jenova's Witness]

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[Kudistos Megistos]

When I mentioned this idea to an academic, they called it teleology and then tuned me out.  I can't quite figure out what the hell that means; wikipedia isn't helping.  There isn't a single sentence which clearly states what teleology is in the entire article.  Apparently none of the English majors don't hang out with Philosophy majors, at least not with the ones who edit wikipedia.

He probably meant that you were looking at the result and inferring causes from it: you were talking about Islamic history as if all the things that happened over the generations were put into place so that a certain goal would be reached. He was saying that you were looking at things with too much hindsight and this hindsight was influencing your interpretation too much. Hindsight can be a dangerous enemy when you're looking at the past.

I think you're also forgetting one of the other major factors in the Arab expansion: the rest of the world was such a mess.

After the fall of the European classical civilisations, civilisations whose empires spread as far as north Africa and north-Western India, there was a power vacuum. Any large and vaguely organised empire would have been able to dominate the world west of the Ganges (China was the only other powerful empire, and they were too far away to be of any interest). Europe didn't get back on its feet until the Renaissance, and when that happened, the tide quickly started to turn.

The Arab and Ottoman empires rose to power not because of any great qualities that were later lost, but because there was no-one big or organised enough to stop them. Certainly not the Europeans, who were divided up into countless tiny states and spent all their time fighting each other over pointless crap and having schisms. Only England and France would have been sufficiently organised to mount any opposition, and they never needed to because they were so far to the north-west.

 

[Jenova's Witness]

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[Kudistos Megistos]

Why was Europe such a mess?  I heard an argument that Rome declined in three phases: first when it degenerated from republic to empire,  again when Christianity became the norm for the ruling class, and lastly when East and West split in two.  The guy who made this argument said that the newly powerful Christians drove the pagans out and, in doing so, deprived their nation of it's classically educated classes.  So where did these people go?  Many of them were killed, but he guessed that they went east to Byzantium and to the (I'm not gonna try to spell what he said) rival empire in what's now Iran.

Sounds like a questionable theory of Rome's decline to me, but I'll answer your question about where all the classically educated people went: a few of them fled to Byzantium, but most just died of old age and no-one replaced them.

Europe was a mess because of the power vacuum; where there had been strong leadership in the past, there were now various tribes running rampant all over the continent and warlords replaced emperors. There was no longer much of an educational system, so scholarship, and particularly secular scholarship, declined. Calling it the "dark ages" is a bit of an exaggeration, since there were still literate people around, but literacy was greatly reduced, kingdoms were small and the lifestyle for the average person was much like it was before the Romans or Greeks came, except they had a different religion. Since there was a power vacuum and the continent was unsafe and unstable, the economy was a mess too. It's much harder to do trade and grow a business in tribal societies. Roads aren't looked after, there's less law and order so you have a bigger chance of being robbed and there were probably problems with currencies too. During the Roman empire, inflation was low and everyone used the same coins.