Why Did the Islamic Golden Age Lose Its Lead?

For about 400 years, the most advanced place on Earth was the Islamic world. That is simply where the work was being done.

• Algebra arrived as a general method, a way to solve whole families of problems. The word algorithm comes from the name of the man who wrote it down.
• The controlled experiment. A scholar in Cairo showed that light travels to the eye, not out of it. He did it by testing, not arguing. Change one thing, hold the rest still, and see what moves.
• Medicine. A medical encyclopedia was written that European universities taught from for six centuries.
• Hospitals had wards, records and exams for the people who worked in them.

This was a golden age of specific, checkable things.

Two popular answers

They stopped being curious. This is usually blamed on one book by one scholar. It describes the outcome and calls it a cause.

Colonialism. This is true, but it arrives too late to be the whole answer. The decline was under way about 300 years before the first colonial administrator.

So the real question is what made a thriving system brittle. The answers are about law, money and power, not belief.

Inheritance law

Islamic inheritance rules gave fixed shares to a wide circle of relatives. Daughters inherited. In much of Europe at the time, the eldest son took everything.

As social justice, it was centuries ahead. As a way of building capital over generations, it caused a problem. A large estate was divided at every death. Three generations later, the biggest fortune in a city was a hundred modest ones.

Business partnerships had the same weakness. They dissolved when a partner died. Anything slow and expensive, such as a mine, a fleet or a canal, was barely worth starting.

Europe met the same wall and answered it with the corporation: a thing that owns property, signs contracts and does not die when its people do.

The endowment that could not change

A waqf is a permanent charitable endowment. Its income funds a hospital, a school or a fountain for ever. It is one of the most generous ideas any civilisation has produced, and it worked for centuries.

In some regions a very large share of productive land was held this way. The terms were meant to be unchangeable. What a founder wrote in the 12th century still governed the money in the 18th.

So the wealthiest institutions became the least able to adapt. Nobody did anything wrong. The rules were working as written.

A bargain between rulers and scholars

This part is a scholarly argument, not settled fact.

The historian Ahmet Kuru traces a change from about the 11th century. Before it, scholars and merchants were largely independent of the state. Merchants funded scholars, and scholars did not need a ruler's permission to be right.

Then rulers began to buy legitimacy from the religious establishment, which received protection, land and salaries in return. Independent scholars now competed with salaried ones.

Other historians point to plague, shifting trade routes and invasion. Nothing this large has one cause.

Then colonialism

An older, brittle system met a very capable extractive one. Land ownership was rewritten and local industry was deliberately undercut. A region that had clothed much of the world was buying its cloth back at a markup.

Borders were drawn by people who had not been there. New states inherited an administration designed to extract.

Then oil

A state funded by selling a resource does not need to tax its people, and a state that does not tax you does not have to answer to you.

Money that arrives unearned buys finished things, not the ability to make them. You can buy a hospital. You cannot buy the two generations of people who run it well.

Now

Research spending across most Muslim-majority countries sits well below the world average, with some exceptions. The bigger loss is people. A country trains a scientist for 20 years and has nowhere to put them.

The way out is well understood. It is slow and unglamorous:

• institutions that let anybody start something that can outlive them
• courts that rule against the powerful often enough to be believed
• manufacturing, even badly at first
• education measured by what people can do
• about 40 uninterrupted years

The short answer

Every part of this is about law, money and power. None of it is about faith or ability. The Golden Age was not a miracle. It was a set of conditions, and conditions can be rebuilt.