MemeMachineGo!

Then:

Possibly one of the best-kept secrets in the history of science is what was going on in the so-called Dark Ages. […] Early Islam probably encouraged the greatest international, cross-cultural, intellectual collaborations, under the banner of science. A phenomenon that has not been recorded in history of science since. […] By the 11th century, Muslim rulers had established large institutions in all the major cities to preserve their treasury of knowledge. In cities like Gondeshapur in Persia there were international communities of academics and scholars. Some, like the Nestorians, had been forced to flee from Christian lands because of their beliefs. They could speak the ancient languages and found it easy to learn Arabic, so were the ideal choice for much of the translation work. […]

In the early days of Islam, knowledge was actively encouraged and scholars could do more than just translate the manuscripts that came to them, they could develop the ideas further. Less than 400 years after the first Islamic conquests, all kinds of scientists were at work throughout the vast Islamic Empire. They picked apart, catalogued and developed a huge intellectual legacy from the ancient civilisations. From the broadest ideas of the physical Universe, to the invisible workings of the human body, they organised and made sense of it all. They managed to simplify much of what the Greeks and other ancients had started and then improved on it.

Now:

Arab countries are lagging behind much of the world in education. […] Readership of books was limited, education dictated submission rather than critical thought, and the Arabic language was in a state of crisis. […] [The 2003 UN report] cited official educational curricula in Arab countries that “bred submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking.”

No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire millennium, equivalent to the number translated every year into Spanish.

If it weren’t bedtime, I might have further comment or the whole educational curricula that bred submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking thing.

Updated: My bedtime isn’t really 7:54 in the morning. That’s what comes of deciding I’ve posted enough for one evening, and using MT 3.2’s cool scheduled-posting feature to delay a new entry till morning, while being too tired to notice that the entry’s content marks it as having been written at the end of the night.