Why did the Middle East decline?

Until the Protestant Reformation people were probably just as loyal to Catholicism as Muslims were to Islam. So no.

Well I would say that non-Muslims are primarily to blame for the stagnation. The two events, or rather catastrophies, I'm talking about are The Crusades and The Mongol Invasion. Both of these destroyed many thriving Muslim cities and/or irrigation networks, and both of these radicalized first the clergy(which is also partly to blame) and then the populace. People will always seek answers, and especially if they are desperate and/or loosing a war. The invasions were exactly what was needed to trigger the backwards reformation of Islam, that proved to be so devastating for technological and social progress in the Middle East.

Or at least that's what I think, but what the hell do I know...

Loyalty to the religion has nothing to do with what he's talking about.

Good try, but that doesn't say anything and its completely irrelevant as to how religion did influence the knowledge spread.

But why was their a reformation in Christianity and not Islam?


And furthermore, why did Asia fall behind Europe? For a long time China had the technological one-up.

Well there is many different beliefs in Islam, right? The split in Islam between Shiites and Sunnis is probably the most important one. Who should be the leader of Islam, whether a really holy man, or it has to be Mohammed's descendents, is the reason they fight I think. And Sunni-Shiite clashes are a factor in Muslim nations for years. Like a majority Shiite with a Sunni government (Bahrain) or vise versa (Syria).

Maybe the Europeans, like every is saying, they got better technology, adapting to guns, so they could conquer easier. Asia fell behind because they had peace, as China's emporers neutralized most threats. No point in upgrading.

Simple. The Europeans have a knack for taking ideas from other civilizations and using them to kill each other. Take gunpowder for instance. The chinese always had gunpowder but never thought about making guns with it. The Europeans saw it and said "Hey if I put this in a barrel and put a stone in it and point it at somebody,I can kill them!".

The Chinese had been using firearms since the 8th century, six or seven hundred years before the Europeans.

Fire rockets for the win.

China may of devoloped it, the Moors started using them, but the Europeans devoloped them even further first.
Guns, germs, and steel lol

May have. And the Moors were in modern Morocco, and didn't use firearms before the Europeans. You may be thinking of the Turks, who famously used cannons in siege of Constantinople.

The Middle East declined because of Kaiserreich.
That is all.

Oops, one of my common grammer errors. I could blah blah blah about guns and stuff, but basically the Moors used cannons in the 1100's against Spain, but the Spanish took that tech in return. Gunpowder was known since Romulus, but China, of course, used it first.

I put it down to the printing press being banned by religious authorities. No wide access to the Koran, no Muslim reformation. Today's extremists are a sort of reaction to dubious people getting hold of the Koran for the first time (among other things such as naive communist policies), at least that's how I see it. There are lots of other factors I imagine, but I think the point at which Christianity moves 'forward' and Islam stagnates is the Reformation.

No. Aside from the First Crusade, none of them actually dealt serious damage to the Middle East, and certainly not to Islamic civilization as a whole. The Mongols destroyed a lot, but what they destroyed was primarily Persian, not Arab, and they would become Muslims themselves only shortly after.

The primary cause of the decline of the Middle East and Islamic civilization was religious, not political, societal, or economic. And since geopolitics is a zero-sum game, a small deficit in progress relative to Europe quickly became exponential.

Moors were also in modern day Spain, mind you

Also moors used cannons against the French and the Spanish kings around 1100

their cannons didn't do much, but still (early design and all that)

Actually the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the center for learning in the Middle East, and destroyed the irrigation systems in Syria, which would eventually lead to the decline of Damascus, another somewhat progressive large city.
For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilkhanate
The Mongols only converted to Islam after the damage was done. Before that, the majority of them were Buddist.
The devastation brought by the Crusades was both physical in the form of large massacres and psychological. The Muslims had lost one of their most sacred places to an enemy, and that causes people to ask questions regarding their faith. The answers the clergy gave them were wrong however.

Did you read my entire post? I went on to talk about Islam in the rest of the post, and that was actually my main point behind the post. I said that the Crusades and the Mongol Invasion were the catalysts/triggers of the radicalization of Islam.

Interesting, seeing as how they owned it. I'll assume that you mean Mongols here.

The damage done by the Mongols was temporal and very limited. The decline of Baghdad had much more to do with the dying out of the Abbasids, and Damascus' decline was set in motion long before the Mongols invaded. Go watch this documentary to get some of the basics. My minor is in Arabic and I've taken a course on the history and culture of Islamic and Arab civilization. It's a common Western misconception that both the Mongol invasion and the Crusades had significant impacts on Islamic civilization, probably because those events were so critical in European history. In the history of Islamic civilization, however, they aren't nearly as notable, and their effects are considerably less prominent. Certainly, neither of them can be considered responsible for the decline (directly or otherwise) of Islamic civilization against Western civilization, as both of these events did much more damage to the West.

And then proceeded to give unprecedented geopolitical influence to Islam.

This is just entirely incorrect. The Crusades were a rallying call for Muslims, and served to unite the fragmented Muslim groups much more than divide them. As well, I don't understand what you're trying to say with that last part.

Which is false. The Crusades had no impact on the position of the ulama.

Weren't cannons first used in the mediterranean during the 15th century by the turks? I've never heard of anything like cannons in Spain in the period before the Reconquista, unless you give me sources to this, nobody can believe you.

Ups..

The damage was far from temporary. Some of it can even be observed today. The irrigation networks in Mesopotamia and Syria were destroyed by the Mongols, which caused extensive
And tell me that this wasn't devastating for the Abbasids(though they were already in decline) and Muslim culture and science. For god's sake it says in the article that "this event is widely regarded as the end of the Islamic Golden Era"
Do you want more links about the destruction of Muslim cultural, economical, spiritual and scientific centers? Then you got it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/WestTech/xmongol.htm
One paragraph specifically reads:
"Iraq in 1258 was very different from present day Iraq. Its agriculture was supported by canal networks thousands of years old. Baghdad was one of the most brilliant intellectual centers in the world. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was a psychological blow from which Islam never recovered. Already Islam was turning inward, becoming more suspicious of conflicts between faith and reason and more conservative. With the sack of Baghdad, the intellectual flowering of Islam was snuffed out. Imagining the Athens of Pericles and Aristotle obliterated by a nuclear weapon begins to suggest the enormity of the blow. The Mongols filled in the irrigation canals and left Iraq too depopulated to restore them."
And the references to this seem solid.

I know you're qualified in the field,(I remembered you studied something about the Middle East) and the link was actually just a joke... I might watch the documentary, but not today.

Well of course you're going to call it a misconception since you disagree, but you're not going to convince me that the slaughter of first tens of thousands during the Crusades, and the millions during the Mongol Invasion, and that was just human casualties, had no impact on Islam...

The Crusades did much more damage to the West, I'm not sure I follow...
And I don't(at least in the time period) consider Russia as part of Western civilization.

That's debatable. The Mongols never let faith get in the way of a good massacre...

That's what I said. Muslims rallied around religious extremists, which caused the radicalization of Islam.(it was of course already present, but the Crusades empowered the movements)

Again, I'm not sure whether their position changed, but that their popularity increased greatly during this timeperiod.