Why / How are these countries became so shit for the last two milleniums?

I'd say you're mentally challenged.

The biggest reason is the last 2 centuries before the fall of the Ottoman Empire followed by the handling of the territory by Britain and France followed by Cold War fuckery followed by Mongol invasions.

>shit
>meanwhile the west is dying out in their own fecal matter
The islamic world is eternal.

lol idiot
if assyrians existed, amorites, arameans and phoenicians then those lands wouldnt be shit like today

admit that arabs fucked up everything up

Oops, I forgot everyone is a rape baby somehow Arabs with their absolutely tiny population changed the demographics of the known world. Makes perfect sense.

Define "shit".

The Western and Eastern halves went under the political influence of Egypt and Persia respectively after Alexander. When it comes to grand imperial projects, then that situation certainly reduces the number of them built in the area.

When that division made it possible for the Arabs to take not only those two halves but the two controlling countries, it became the center again, with the cultural situation rapidly becoming more complicated and divided as the world was watching, until the Turks divided and conquered them, particularly the Timurids, Ottomans and Naderis. After Nader Shah the great empires slowly declined, leading the Fertile Crescent to fall into anarchy, with the once-pacified groups fighting after centuries of ordinary peace, to take over a region they believe they can rule the world from, and that is the current situation.

Pre-Arab conquest, un-Arabized non-Muslim peoples labelled some of those names you mentioned do exist, you must not know much about the region. Since they allied with the Mongols they might be partially responsible for the violence and poverty of the region which you are calling "being shit".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_philosophers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world

(1/3) lmao I don't care if you try to assert "they weren't Arab or Muslim they had Zoroastrian/Christian/Jewish backgrounds", the Islamic World provided a stable medium for them to spread their work. Ever used algebra? That comes from the Arabic al-jabr, which means "reunion". Though algebra was likely invented in Egypt first, it was refined by the polymath al-Khwarizmi, who did a lot in establishing algebra as we know it. Several classical philosophical works (Plato and Aristotle seemed to be especially popular) were translated and propagated despite being lost in the West (which rejected Greek philosophy for being "too pagan"). Radical Salafism as it currently exists only dates from the 1700s onwards, it's hardly existed the whole time Islam has.

(2/3) I'm not trying to state that there is something intrinsically great about the religion of Islam. These philosophers and polymaths are not great because of Islam. What Islam did do create a social fabric which made ideas easy to spread around, even if the sprawling Caliphates eventually fractured. I agree that there was indeed a societal stagnation that began to occur from the 1200s onwards. I'm also not using this to discredit intellectual achievements in the west, either. I'm fully aware of the great things the Carolingian renaissance and the birth of scholasticism achieved. However, the Carolingian renaissance faded after Charlemagne's death, and scholasticism developed in the wake of several centuries of already existing developments in the Islamic world. In naming Salafism or "radical Islam" a relatively recent problem I do not aim to diminish the fact that a majority of Muslims are conservative and do not have the most progressive values. This is covered with the social stagnation I mentioned earlier, but it is only one part of a multifaceted problem.

(2.5/3) In calling "interaction with westerners" a weak excuse for the condition the Fertile Crescent and by extension the entire Islamic World stagnating, you completely ignore the other problems brought up and also the basic nature of how technology/ideas spread. The destruction caused by the Mongols and their successors, most notably Timur, should not be underestimated. They caused the deaths of millions and destroyed massive amounts of infrastructure. An example of this is the qanat system aquifer system used in Persia, which was totally wrecked and majorly screwed over agriculture. Baghdad, the heart of the Islamic world, was also levelled. Though the second main intellectual center of Cairo in Egypt survived, it was still a massive shock to the Islamic World. One attitude that began to arise from this was reactionary thought and scaling back the intellectual freedoms of society, with the rationale that this was God’s punishment for being too loose with morals.

(3/3) The next point about development concerns both economics and interactions between people. A large part of the reason the West was able to ascend in economic development was due to the massive wealth gained from the conquest of the Americas. The main reason Spain and Portugal spearheaded the new drive west was to find a route to India; the traditional markets in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Silk Road were being blocked off by the Ottomans, so they had to find an alternative to get money. Because not much traffic from the west was coming east anymore, wealth and prosperity began to decline in the affected regions. This combined with the societal malaise mentioned earlier stunted intellectual and economic growth. Even though the Ottomans re-united the Eastern Mediterranean, they didn’t do a very good job at sponsoring smart people or undoing the damage caused by centuries of physical decay, so things continued stagnating. This large-scale insulation from things such as the Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment in Europe would greatly hurt populations under Ottoman rule in the long run. By the time contact got re-ignited in the 1800s with Napoleon, the Islamic World had already fallen behind and it got increasingly difficult to play catch-up as time went on.The Europeans developed modern colonialism and in the case of the Fertile Crescent post-WWI, did not care much for spreading progress or improving the social fabric of their new lands. In Syria and Iraq, different religious/cultural groups which previously did not have much interaction before were played off against each other to distract people from uniting against European rule. An example of this is the awkward Assyrian/Kurd/Shia/Sunni amalgamation known as Iraq. And we all know how well that turned out. De-Colonization did happen, but that was basically a cop-out to absolve former colonizers of their mismanagement and screw ups in the given colony.

That really should have been out of 4, but I underestimated how much I wrote.

In any case I am not being an apologist for regressive beliefs expressed by many Muslim nowadays nor am I trying to create some type of “we wuz kangz” narrative that clears the concerned populations of all responsibility in the current region of the Fertile Crescent. I am simply giving an explanation that attempts to cover the nuances of development there that occurred between the 700s and the current day.

imperialist Turks and then imperialist Westerners

>pushing the narrative of the Islamic golden age.
>pushing the narrative of western wealth built upon colonialism
Don't be a daft cunt

>The west is dying in Islamic fecal matter

Ftfy. Shariah is dogshit

/pol/acks have their heads too far up their own asses to look at history with any shred of logic

How is it untrue that muslim had an age of glory once upon a time?
Or that Europe heavily benefitted in colonization?

Islamic Golden Age is simply the Persian Bronze Age.

Centuries (millenia) of land mismanagement led to salinification. Iraq is facing an agricultural crisis because overirrigation + declining water levels in the marshes are destroying the productivity of their fields.

Judea also decayed into desert by the little ice age but the jews managed to bring it back. Saddam was not good enough to do the same for his country.

"Islamic" scientific advances magically stopped once Islam became the majority religion in the region. Also islam promotes marrying your cousins so muslims in the region have been especially keen on inbreeding for over a thousand years, leading to gradual degrading of their IQ. This combined with Mongols and Timurids wrecking the region and trade shifting from the silk route to oceans meant that absolutely nothing of value would be born or made.

Islamic inbreeding obviously.

That doesnt make the statement false

>How is it untrue that muslim had an age of glory once upon a time?
It's not untrue, its just over hyped as if it was something remarkable when in fact they were as anyone else. The Islamic golden age was built upon knowledge and wealth of those that preceded it and on those that they conquered. What makes them different than European colonizers?

Are you going to tell me how liberal and tolerant slave owenrs they were during this era?

>Or that Europe heavily benefitted in colonization?
Europe heavily benefited from trade, not so much colonization itself. Furthermore colonies were a result of European wealth and knowledge to begin with. It wasn't exactly people from mudhuts that were teleported to another continent and bled it dry to build a European utopia.

You talk about Spain and Portugal but the European reinessance started in modern day Italy in city states that were the richest places in Europe at the time and can be hardly argued they were built on colonialism.

tl;dr
>Europeans do something
Built on stolen wealth! Imperialists! Slavers! Genocidal maniacs! Backwards!

>Non-Europeans do something
Golden age! Remarkable societies! Tolerant! Diverse! Scientific!

Yes, invaders. That answer is incomplete as it doesn't explain why Mongols were advanced enough as they were to defeat them. Some people take the question all the way back to the end of the last ice age when men everywhere were hunter-gatherers and theorize that those who had the easiest environment (probably owing to mostly indigenous animals such as horses, goats, etc.) to survive in advanced more quickly so they were obviously were better able to conquer later on

Filthy K*rds

To be fair, although I don't remember the specific time-frame, the greatest mathematicians in the world (by far) were Muslim. Algebra and demonstrative math as a whole were invented by Muslims I think around the 980s. But shortly after they became aggressively and objectively ignorant. Funny enough you can observe the impact this shift still has today. Just compare the number of fields medals awarded to Muslims to those given to any other denomination, but I digress

>Algebra and demonstrative math as a whole were invented by Muslims
Who was Diophantus then? I suppose you believe arab numerals were invented by arabs too?

>But shortly after they became aggressively and objectively ignorant. Funny enough you can observe the impact this shift still has today. Just compare the number of fields medals awarded to Muslims to those given to any other denomination, but I digress
Great, I see you have some Himmler inside you. He found out he was wrong after his SS muslim divisions experienced mass desertions and were considered unreliable.

>Europeans do something
Master race! High IQ, western civilization! Rational! Scientific!

>Muslims do something
Never happened! built on stolen knowledge! Imperialists! Slavers! Genocidal maniacs! Backwards!

>The Europeans developed modern colonialism and in the case of the Fertile Crescent post-WWI, did not care much for spreading progress or improving the social fabric of their new lands. In Syria and Iraq, different religious/cultural groups which previously did not have much interaction before were played off against each other to distract people from uniting against European rule.
False point. Colonialism in the Middle East wasn't for very long.

Euto chimps then mongol chimps then euro chimps again

user I just wanted you to know that as a history lover I appreciate this informative and well thought out post. Unfortunately this place is filled to the brim with idiots, but pls don't let it stop you from anymore future post. That goes out to any other anons out there as well.

Length of time has little to do with it. Syria and Iraq are still dealing with the problems resulting from the state model France and Britain left them with today, in the form of the Syrian Civil War.

(1/3)

>The Islamic golden age was built upon knowledge and wealth of those that preceded it and on those that they conquered.

As stated in the post, "I'm not trying to state that there is something intrinsically great about the religion of Islam. These philosophers and polymaths are not great because of Islam. What Islam did do create a social fabric which made ideas easy to spread around, even if the sprawling Caliphates eventually fractured. I agree that there was indeed a societal stagnation that began to occur from the 1200s onwards."

>Are you going to tell me how liberal and tolerant slave owenrs they were during this era?

Well, despite the Mamluks being pretty cool, but I don't try to posit anything in this manner in my original post.

>colonies were a result of European wealth and knowledge to begin with
The Americas were discovered by accident, with the original intent being to bypass the Ottoman Empire to directly gain a route to unimpeded eastern trade. When it comes to the conquest of said Americas, big fleets, horses, and gunpowder were hardly uniquely European innovations. However, I will admit the caravel was a distinctly Portuguese development that definitely enabled European pursuits overseas.

(2/3)

>It wasn't exactly people from mudhuts that were teleported to another continent and bled it dry to build a European utopia.
I don't try to posit this either. Europe had a number of good factors going for it. As I mentioned, the Carolingian Renaissance and the development of Scholasticism were undeniably a factor in intellectual and ideological development in the pre-Discovery/Renaissance period. [Central/Western] Europe was fairly shielded from the Mongol conquests, being spared the mass devastation and psychological trauma seen in the Islamic World, Russia, and to some extent China (not sure about the “psychological trauma” for that one). Sure, the black death did happen and that killed somewhere around a third of Europe. However, in the wake of this economic innovation was spurred, with peasants having more bargaining power and drives towards the cities in a feudal system collapsing bit by bit. This was important for the development of the middle class, a cornerstone of any modern society.

(3/3)

>You talk about Spain and Portugal but the European reinessance started in modern day Italy in city states that were the richest places in Europe at the time and can be hardly argued they were built on colonialism.

It’s important to note that I make a distinction between the colonialism that started in the 1500s and the modern colonialism that developed in the 1800s. The former was important for the history of the Fertile Crescent because the trade routes were redrawn and there was less incentive to go east. The latter is important because the short period of European colonialism in that area served to fuck things up even more. See: >3361597
Anyway, the Renaissance was indeed started in Italy by Italian states who gained their livelihood off of banking as opposed to trading (Florence as opposed to Venice for example). However, the already existing prosperous situation in Italy was in a large part due to trade with the east (handled largely by Genoa and Venice), which up to this point was re-ignited by the Crusades and bolstered by the Fourth Crusade which shattered Byzantium as an economic rival. Combine this with Italy’s position in the center of the Mediterranean, and you get some very wealthy people. In the span of time between the late 1000s and the late 1400s, it’s hard not to say that massive amounts of cash money were gained from this arrangement.

Honestly, I can see the brown middle easterner who wrote this, with a smug expression on his face thinking he ''debunked'' western colonialism. Do you realize that maybe, the colonial powers didn't try to merge different people to make a weaker state ? When France colonized Syria, it granted a separate state for the Druze, the only state that represented them. This displeased greatly to the sunni majority, and it sparked resentment and later was among the causes of a rebellion, because the Westerner was trying to weaken them !

Do you see ? If the western powers give minorities a state to represent them, the majorities growl. If they don't, then they tried to create failed states on purpose. What happened was taht they quickly created nations from scratch because either way it wasn't their turf anymore, so why bother, and because dissent would come to be anyway, and taht the natives were yearning for their fast emancipation. Stop talking out of your ass

>last two mileniums
It was the more relevant part of the world during a good chunk of the first milennium.

you see ISIS?
600 AD arabs were worse, idiot
killing male and raping the females
they dont, all those people are arab with turkic and mongol genes
do you believe pre islam mesopotamia didnt have all that?

Peoples known as Arameans and Assyrians do not speak Arabic and are not Arabs although they may have Turco-Mongol ancestry.