The general process of how the Islamosphere (technical term for ‘Muslim world’) went from its Golden Age in the 9th-13th centuries, to being considered largely as compiled of ‘Third World’ countries by the Cold War, generally follows this progression:
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Raids and plagues, both brought on by the Mongols’ rapid expansion westward in the 13th century, both destroyed the centers of higher learning in both Baghdad and Cairo, as well as weakened central governmental rule, and led to the death of many. The Mongols however never invaded Europe past only some of the Eastern parts (parts of modern day Poland, Hungary, Turkey, etc), so Western Europe was given the time to be able to catch up to speed with the rest of the world in terms of advancing civilization in technology, knowledge, warfare, and medicine. The only reason the Mongols never invaded Western Europe was due to the fact that there literally were countless people who kept telling them along their advance westward that “nothing of value” to raid existed past the Byzantine Empire- which literally was true, as the largest city in Western Europe at the time was by far Rome, with only 50,000 residents, while even small-sized cities elsewhere in the world in the 13th century were at least twice if not more times the size of that (this reflected a lack of urban centers with commerce in Western Europe, with significant trade routes only really trading wool, and not even starting up until the mid 13th Century or so).
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Both the loss of strong centralized governments, and the loss of prominent centers of learning in the Islamosphere, led to a rise in religious schisms (non traditional centers of learning replaced the former centralized canonical Islamic universities, a la the advent of Sufi lodges, and the emergence of a multitude of local madrasas that taught slightly differing interpretations of Islam), led to a decline in ‘secular’ knowledge (the sciences, mathematics, and medicine to name a few), and led to a rise in regional conflicts between former neighbors over control of smaller territories (which only further weakened the Islamosphere).
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A rise sectarianism follows the rise of a multitude of regional centers of Islamic learning, leading to the final stages of the hardened split between what Shia beliefs and Sunni beliefs were/are defined as; this in turn of course, you guessed it, only further divided the Ummah.
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Since the Islamosphere was set back a couple hundred years in the progress of civilization, they were about matched up again with what Europe was like, which allowed for a more equal playing field, which led to the possibility of success for crusaders, which in turn drove more crusades to be made- each one bringing the military strength and degree of shared knowledge between the Islamosphere and Christendom closer to each other (as defensive military campaigns can only weaken but not strengthen political states, and more interaction, regardless of it being militarily or not, led to the European absorption of the secular knowledge that the MENA, Middle East/North Africa, built over the previous 4-6 centuries).
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While the introduction of gunpowder led to an advantage for the MENA over late-medieval Europe, as the Ottomans began using it to conquer Constantinople and the Balkans, Western Europeans began a drive to find a new routes for access to trade with China and the Indian subcontinent, by bypassing the newly Muslim-held territory that could tax Christian merchants higher rates than the Byzantines (who were also Christian) used to. This in turn led to Columbus’ landing in the “West Indies” (North America) in 1492 upon failing to reach the “East Indies” (Indian Subcontinent) by sailing west from the newly Christianized Iberia from ‘Reconquista.’
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The resources that the new Western European colonial powers (Spain, Portugal, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Holy Roman Empire, the Margraviate of Brandenburg, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and Eastern European outliers such as Polish-Lithuania, and Russia) stole in mass quantities from the Americas following Columbus’ travels led to an explosion of capital being sent into Western Europe that the Islamosphere (then including much of even Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia at that time) did not have access to. The only reason that Western European powers were able to amass such wealth so easily from the Americas too was due to the invention of gunpowder and steel weaponry that they had which the First Peoples of the Americas did not, as well as from spreading plagues that by this point nearly all of the Eastern Hemisphere carried (but was immune to), which everyone in the Western Hemisphere were never exposed to and thus perished in the millions from.
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The three major Islamic “Gunpowder Empires” of the early-modern period (the Ottomans in Eastern Europe & the MENA, the Safavids in Persia and the Caucuses, and the Mughals in the Indian Subcontinent) were in a constant state of perpetual warfare (Ottomas vs Safavids, Ottomans vs Central European Holy League, and Mughals vs regional Desi princely states), thus diverting resources from ever striking the growing Western European colonial empires while they were still weak and vulnerable. Also notable for this time period was the final affirmed definitions of what it meant to be Sunni vs being Shia or vice versa, which was driven by rivalries over land between the Ottomans and Safavids, who both began digging their heels into the differences in stances on Islam between Shiism and Sunnism, as justification for war against fellow Muslims.
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By the turn into the 19th century, European colonial powers (specifically France, Austria, Britain, Portugal, and Russia in this case) became so wealthy and powerful from the colonization, the invention of modern capitalism (see the early history of the concept of the stock market and the birth of European usury-based banking in Renaissance Italy), and the Industrial Revolution (which was birthed from the combination of modern capitalism and colonization), that they began setting their eyes on colonizing parts of the Islamosphere. Russia, Portugal, and Britain took chunks out (in the form of regional puppet governments and outright annexations) of the Safavid state- while Austria, Russia, and France respectively snatched up the Balkans, Ukraine, and Egypt from the Ottomans- and Britain and Portugal collectively took out the Mughal Empire entirely.
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In a last ditch effort in the 19th and early 20th Centuries to catch up to the wealth and power of Europe, the Ottomans, Safavids, and newly semi-independent/British client state of Egypt, all took out massive interest-based loans from the European powers in order to fund the propagation factories in forced attempts at bringing their economies up to speed with the industrialized modern-capitalistic systems of the “Western World.” When the Ottomans’, Safavids’, and Egyptian’s investments all failed to compete with European colonial products on the global market, they all defaulted on their massive loans, and began essentially acting as puppet states for whichever respective European nation-state that loaned each respective Islamic nation the money to begin with. Not to mention proxy wars that were propped up and funded mostly by Britain (such as but not limited to, the Crimean War, and the Greek War of Independence) as a way of further weakening the Islamosphere.
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When WWI rolled around, the Egyptians were already fully colonized by Britain, the Ottoman nation was shrunken into just containing what is now modern day Turkey, plus the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, and the Hejaz. The Safavids acted as a puppet government that was shared between Russia and Britain, who split Persia into 2 zones of influence, Russian in the north, and British in the south. With the Ottoman nation being the only remaining independent Islamic power at the breakout of WWI, they ended up choosing to ally with Austria-Hungary, the 2nd German Reich, and other small global nation states, as a way of taking back Greece, Ukraine, and Egypt. Of course, this failed terribly, and upon the Treaty of Versailles, the Ottoman nation was further carved up so that only regions of Anatolia and Thrace remained (which are what make up modern day Turkey). Meanwhile, Arab-nationalists led by the Sharif (essentially ‘mayor’) of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, had allied his anti-Ottoman revolution with the British in WWI to help open up an eastern front against the Ottomans (this was famously when British Colonel T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” fought alongside Hussein bin Ali in WWI). Ali viewed the Ottoman government as allowing the Young Turk movement in Constantinople to move the nation away from Islamic beliefs, values, and unity, and towards an environment of divisive ethno-nationalism (leading to the loss of Greece and Albania respectively to ethno-nationalist revolutions, and to the Armenian Genocide as well), and even some degree of agnosticism as well. In return for opening up an eastern front against the Ottomans, Britain promised Ali that he would get an independent nation-state (although it was unclear whether this would be a republic or monarchy, and whether or not it would be promote Islamic unity and include all of the former Ottoman territories or be a purely Arab-nationalist state that included everything from then-British occupied Egypt and Sudan to the modern borders of Turkey and Iran). In reality however, when the war was over, the Middle East was only further carved up and colonized by France and Britain under the “Sykes-Picot Agreement,” which created the modern day borders of Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and etc (notably, Lebanon had one of the only borders in this process that had much deliberate thought put into drawing them, as they were made to include a slight Arab Maronite Catholic majority with significant Eastern Orthodox Christian, and Shia & Sunni Muslim minorities, as to give French Catholic preferential treatment to the Arab Maronite Catholics, and stoke conflict between all 4 religious groups; meanwhile, the French Syrian and British Iraqi borders with Turkey were made with the intention in mind of splitting up the Kurdish people between lands so that they would be a majority in none of them, which also would stoke conflict- both of these border decisions were deliberately up against the Turkish border as to halt any reunion movements of the former Ottoman nation). Following the collapse of the title of Caliph in 1923, Sharif Ali of the former Hejaz (then called “Kingdom of Transjordan” which included what is now modern day Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine) claimed the title of Caliph of Islam, however he renounced the title in 1924 after world Islamic leaders met his caliphate title with mixed opinions. Furthermore, for the act of declaring himself as Caliph, the House of Saud (a royal family famous for their revolution against the Ottomans in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula 150 years prior) exiled Ali from the Arabian Peninsula and declared the independent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ali then went on to start the Hashemite Dynasty in what remained of the Kingdom of Transjordan, now just called the Kingdom of Jordan, following the Saudi revolution and the British seizure of Palestine as a colony in 1923.
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Following the end of WWII, the global decolonization movement of the mid-1940’s to mid-1960’s was kicked into gear. However during all of this, due to ties from WWI kept between the Hashemite family in Jordan with Britain and France, when Britain and France gave up their colonies in the MENA, they turned all of them into puppet states that they could still control, all of which were made kingdoms led by members of the royal Hashemite family, thus establishing the short lived royal Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Syria respectively. Decades of neo-imperialist puppet dictator rule in the Islamosphere following the worldwide decolonization movement, only led to further political unrest and economic turmoil in the “Third World” countries of the Cold War (literally meaning, not members of First World NATO, nor Second World Warsaw-Pact states, but the forgotten ‘decolonized’ ‘others’ in the Cold War conflict). There were attempts at reunification of nations in the MENA, however all failed due to ideological differences and disagreements over who would get power. There were also multiple wars with the Israeli state that still resonate to this day, as not only are there still obvious aggressions being made on the Israeli’s parts, but the act of colonizing Palestine during the height of the global decolonization movement, was received with such wide military response by mostly Pan-Arab (and later some pan-Islamist groups) governments in the MENA, which in turn, was met with even greater strength by an Israeli military that was funded and trained by NATO powers, which only weakened the militaries of nations that went to war with Israel, as well as kept beating down the notion of post WWI-MENA reunification each and every time the wars were won by the Zionists. Furthermore, as the wars continued to happen with Israel, the causes and motivations of the wars began being distorted by Western media as having religious connotations (despite having zero to do with it), which in turn escalated religious guerrilla tactics by the 1980’s, and set the course for the West’s modern variation of their Orientalist perspectives on the Muslim and Arab worlds respectively.
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In the modern day, the now over 100-year old Sykes-Picot Agreement, along with numerous attempts at varying degrees of neo-imperialism, continues to cause the problems we see in the MENA, and the greater Islamosphere. The reason why the MENA and Muslims in general are always framed as being “violent” and “backwards,” is because of a mix of lack of patience/lack of resources to learn the many nuances of this complicated history on the part of many of those in the West, as well as outright Orientalist prejudices remaining from the colonial days.
TLDR: Mongols destroyed the Islamic world but not the Christian one, Western Europe used the advantage given by the lack of mongol attacks and closer geographical area to the Americas colonize it and then use the American resources to colonize the Islamic world too in 3 stages: 1800’s battle for empire, WWI broken promises, and neo-imperialism.
However, this topic does deserve all of the nuances that come with it, so I highly recommend reading the above and then checking out Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” and Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” both of which are books I strongly view should be required reading in all American schools’ world history classes.
(I didn’t proofread; I apologize in advance if any parts might be confusing or grammatically incorrect.)
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