Yes, of course I’m biased. Everyone is biased. By lumping things as different as the Inquisition and the Crusades into one sentence you are showing your bias. The important thing is for us (Christians, Muslims, and atheists) to try to get past our biases and see what is true.

I should have made it clearer that Islamic lands were ahead of Europe precisely because they generally embraced reason as well as faith; After all, many of the early European translations of Aristotle were made from Arabic, not the original Greek. The Europeans didn’t get the better translations until the Muslims took over the Eastern Roman Empire and the Greek scholars fled west with their manuscripts. Coincidentally, around the same time the Muslims started rejecting the importance of reason–most obviously in the successful attacks by devout Muslims on Averoes, one of the greatest Muslim philosophers (by successful, I mean they succeeded in repressing his works; they did not use reasoned arguments; they used raw force).

I think it is obvious that the reason the commercial and military power of the two cultures switched is because the relative importance of reason also switched. But the real question is, why did both cultures switch their emphasis on reason at the same time? I suspect it may have to do with the advances in philosophy and theology on both sides; In both cases, it took many centuries of cross-pollinated effort to solve the theological problem of Divine Transcendence; i.e. Can God/Allah create a rock so big that He can’t lift it?

Loosely speaking, the Muslim *theological* answer is that Allah is so Transcendent that He can not only create a rock so heavy He can’t lift it, but He can also lift a rock so heavy that He can’t create it. The Christian *theological* answer is that God’s nature is elegant and not self-contradictory; i.e. you can’t take a nonsense statement and make it sensible by including God in the sentence. Theology drives Reason drives Science drives Economics drives Military Power.

As far as the Inquisition and Crusades are concerned, I would recommend checking your sources. For one thing there were many of both. I was referring mostly to the Inquisitions (of which there were only one or two bad ones, for the reason I cited).

The Crusades were counter-attacks against Islam nations that had taken over Israel (don’t forget that the entire Mediterranean Basin was once Christian)–they were political wars with a religious twist. My take on them is St. Francis’s meeting with Sultan Melek-el-Kamel. The Sultan was so impressed by Francis’ love and kindness that he said, “If all Christians are like this, I would not hesitate to become one.” In other words, with enough men and women like St. Francis, the “Crusades” would have been settled without violence and we wouldn’t live in fear of suicide bombers today.

Still, an interesting read.