In the past at one point, the Middle East was enlightened and prosperous, while Europe was a backwards savage shithole...

In the past at one point, the Middle East was enlightened and prosperous, while Europe was a backwards savage shithole. At what point did it become the other way around and why?

Mongols

They stagnated and regressed.

And it was the opposite during the Roman empire.

Swings and roundabouts.

>Whig History
>Le Dark Ages meme
>Positivism
>Le Progress meme
Why the fuck is this allowed?

Extremist Islam took a foothold via the changing dynasties and drastically changed the middle eastern horizon for ever.

This can be somewhat correlated to the end of the Abbassid Dynasty.

>it was the opposite during the Roman empire
Bullshit, the eastern and southern Mediterranean was doing great and most of Europe outside of Italy and Greece wasn't really worth mentioning. Persia was at a low point for a while but they rebounded.

degenerate tribesmen started taking over

i always assumed it was because new sea trade routes were discovered so they lost their control on trade with the far east

fragmentation, turks moving in and finally mongolians landing the final blow

at one point we had 4 different Persian dynasties ruling that all claimed descent from the Sassanids

They got MONGOLED

Cause liberals want to control history to indoctrinate the minds of the future, we do it already.

Carolingian renaissance put Western Europe on the uptrack and fragmentation put the Islamic world on the (slow) downtrack. They got to be about even around the time of the first crusade and then Mongols happened

Islam took over, a lot of books were burned and knowledge lost because they belonged to those fire-worshipping zoroastrian heathens. Then the mongols came and it's very hard to recover from being KHAN'd.

>mongolians landing the final blow
Don't you mean, the final bow... ?

>At what point did it become the other way around and why?
Once europeans started receiving translated arabic literature and asian inventions through muslim merchants. Europeans absorbed all that knowledge and technology but the different material and ideological circumstances compared to the islamic world caused Europe to develop differently from there onwards. A major split was when the ottoman empire established itself and Europe started looking for alternative trade routes to Asia, and discovered a lot of new resources thanks to sea travel.

The eastern provinces were the richest for most of the empire's existence

They ran out of spoils to pass off as their own. They were the original white male.

During the Roman empire, the Persian empire were competing with Romans. The Greeco-Bactrian were rich trading spots for Buddhists

After being nearly completely destroyed by the Mongols Islam needed to do a bit of soul searching. A man named Al-Ghazali wrote a book titled The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Finding that it was impossible to reconcile both rational inquiry and Islamic doctrine, he argued that the Greeks and everything that proceeds from them must be discarded in favor of pure Islam.

A response to this work, entitled The Incoherence of the Incoherence, by an Andalusian named Ibn Rushd, or in the West as Averroes, was made to defend Aristotelian thought and Neoplatonism. It had little sway in the Islamic world but was translated into Latin and became extremely popular among Christian scholars, serving to reignite interest in the Greeks.

Checking again it wasn't after the sack by the Mongols, but just prior in response to the unislamic enthusiasms present in that time. The work did gain credence immensely after the Mongols though