Why did the Islamic world, after centuries of military expansion, wealth and territorial domination, gradually fall behind Christian Europe scientifically, technologically, economically, politically and eventually militarily? The easiest answer is to keep looking for an external culprit: Crusaders, Mongols, colonialists, Western imperialism. But the fundamental gap predates colonialism by centuries and forces us to look where apologetics is least willing to look: inside Islam itself, at its religious, legal, institutional and cultural structures. This is the real issue: not what others supposedly did to the Islamic world, but what its dominant structures built, preserved and transmitted over the centuries.
The fifteenth century: while Islam was conquering, Europe was changing the world
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the cannons of Mehmed II. One of the most spectacular victories in Islamic history still confirmed the military power of a civilisation capable of expanding into the heart of Europe. In the following centuries, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires would rule immense territories. Yet while Islamic armies continued to conquer land, Europe was conquering something far more important: the future. In 1492 the Reconquista came to an end and Columbus crossed the Atlantic; only a few years later Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese and Spanish, followed by the Dutch, French and British, built oceanic commercial networks, improved cartography and navigation, developed increasingly sophisticated financial institutions and multiplied the production and circulation of knowledge. The Islamic empires still possessed armies, territories and wealth, but their military success concealed a far deeper transformation: the centre of scientific, technological, economic and institutional innovation was shifting towards Europe.
The question apologetics avoids
How did a civilisation that had conquered territories stretching from the Atlantic to India progressively lose ground to Europe? The Crusades, the Mongol invasions and colonialism do not explain the decisive issue: before European colonialism reached its height, the divergence had already taken place. A civilisation cannot be treated as an active protagonist of history when it conquers and then suddenly become a passive victim when it has to explain its failures. The United Nations’ own Arab Human Development Reports have documented structural deficits in the Arab world. The 2002 report identified three major deficits in freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge; the 2003 report bore the revealing title Building a Knowledge Society, and twenty years later problems of governance, competitiveness, education, inclusion and knowledge production continued to emerge. The real question is therefore unavoidable: which internal structures prevented the Islamic world from following the same trajectory as Europe?
The gap predates colonialism
By the time European powers began directly controlling large Muslim territories in the nineteenth century, they already possessed ocean-going fleets, advanced financial systems, industries, publishing networks, scientific institutions and superior military technologies. Colonialism did not create that superiority: it used it. In the Sunni world, religious law, theology and the authority of the ulama had come to dominate normative culture; rationalist philosophy did not conquer the institutional centre of Sunni culture, sharia remained the framework of law, and the ideal model continued to be sought in Islam’s founding age. The institutions that determined what was normative were religious institutions. That is where the analysis has to begin.
Madrasa and university: two different institutions
One of the most persistent myths is the claim that the old Islamic madrasas were equivalent to European universities. They were not. We addressed the question specifically in the article Al-Qarawiyyin and Al-Azhar Were Not Universities: The Myth Debunked. The madrasa was normally financed through a waqf, a religious endowment bound by the founder’s stipulations, and its centre of gravity was Islamic law together with the disciplines required for religious education. The European university, by contrast, emerged as a universitas: an autonomous corporation of masters or students, equipped with statutes, privileges, the ability to negotiate with secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and institutional continuity independent of the individual people who composed it. Bologna, Paris and Oxford were not simply places where educated men happened to teach: they were self-reproducing institutions. An intellectual community endowed with legal continuity accumulates traditions, defends privileges, creates careers, trains successors and turns debate into a stable profession. Knowledge ceases to depend solely on the individual teacher, prince or patron and becomes a structure.
Disputation as a method
In the medieval Christian university, the disputatio transformed intellectual conflict into method. A question was posed, opposing arguments were presented, a response was formulated and the objections were addressed one by one. Dissent entered the very mechanism of education. An authority could be studied precisely in order to be challenged. When Aristotle entered the Latin West on a massive scale, he was not preserved as a relic: he was absorbed, corrected, condemned, defended and eventually surpassed. Thomas Aquinas reinterpreted him, other scholastics challenged particular conclusions, and the university condemnations of the thirteenth century generated further controversies. The result was not paralysis, but more inquiry.
Europe had another weapon: nobody controlled all of Europe
Europe’s political fragmentation produced a decisive advantage. Monarchies, principalities, republics, autonomous cities, ecclesiastical territories and empires competed constantly with one another, and no ruler controlled the entire continent. A book banned in one territory could be printed in another, a persecuted thinker could find protection across a border, and an expelled merchant could transfer capital and expertise to a rival city. Joel Mokyr has described this situation as a genuine market for ideas: competing states combined with a transnational intellectual culture made it impossible to impose a single orthodoxy on the whole continent. Europe was politically fragmented while simultaneously connected by Latin, universities, commerce, printing and later the Republic of Letters. Censorship could strike in one place, but it could not close down the whole of Europe.
Why did the Scientific Revolution arise in Christian Europe?
The Scientific Revolution was not a lottery that happened to produce Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle and Newton on the same side of the Mediterranean. These men worked within a system that had created universities, publishing networks, international correspondence, scientific institutions, political competition and a conception of knowledge in which the past could be corrected. Latin Christianity had also developed, over centuries, a powerful tradition of rational debate: the nature of Christ, the Trinity, free will, grace, the relationship between faith and reason, natural law and divine law were subjected to endless philosophical and theological disputes. Reason conquered an institutional space that had no equivalent in the Islamic world. When this space encountered mathematics, observation of nature, universities, printing, political competition and scientific societies, the result was the Scientific Revolution: nature could be interrogated, authority could be corrected and knowledge could accumulate.
Al-Ghazali and the problem of causality
Here a decisive divergence emerges. In the Ashʿarite tradition, the absolute omnipotence of Allah was defended by denying creatures any necessary causal efficacy independent of the divine will. Al-Ghazali made the issue famous through the example of fire and cotton: observing cotton burn when it comes into contact with fire does not, in his framework, mean that fire possesses an autonomous causal necessity capable of producing that effect. The ultimate cause remains God, and the metaphysical consequence is radical: causal necessity does not properly belong to things themselves, while the order we observe depends upon the divine will. In Christian Europe, another perspective gradually prevailed: creation as an ordered, intelligible and mathematically describable reality whose regularities could be investigated by reason. To study nature meant to discover its laws. The Scientific Revolution arose in this environment.
The exceptions did not change the paradigm
Al-Tusi, Maragha and Mulla Sadra did not alter the dominant paradigm. They did not transform the structure of education, remove the religious sciences from the centre of culture or produce an institutional revolution comparable to the European one. Philosophy survived at the margins, but it did not govern the normative centre of Sunni culture, which remained occupied by the Qur’an, hadith, fiqh, theology and religious law. The distinction between properly Islamic religious sciences and philosophical disciplines of foreign origin was recognised by Muslim classifiers of knowledge themselves; we discussed it more extensively in Foreign Science in Islam: The Myth of Islamic Science. There is no need to burn every philosophical book in order to marginalise philosophy: it is enough for philosophy to lose the battle for the centre of culture.
Averroes: what Islam did not transform, Europe debated
The fate of Ibn Rushd, Averroes, encapsulates the divergence. In the Islamic world his philosophical approach did not become dominant; in the Latin West, by contrast, his commentaries entered the heart of university teaching. By the thirteenth century Averroes was known simply as the Commentator, and his theses were taught, attacked, condemned and reworked, while so-called Latin Averroism fuelled controversies for centuries. Europe did not turn Averroes into an untouchable authority: it used him, challenged him and moved beyond him. Europe turned inherited authority into material to be subjected to criticism. Contemporary rhetoric that automatically transforms knowledge produced in Islamised territories into a “scientific miracle of Islam” deliberately confuses religion, language, empire and the actual activity of scholars. The issue is also analysed in Islamic Science: The Myth of the West’s Debt to Islam.
From the individual scholar to the permanent scientific institution
An individual scholar does not create a scientific revolution: institutions are required to make knowledge cumulative. In early modern Europe, universities, academies, scientific societies, printing houses, libraries and correspondence networks created a community of knowledge independent of the lifespan of any single teacher. In the seventeenth century institutions such as the English Royal Society and the French Académie des sciences emerged, allowing experiments, observations and results to be communicated, replicated and criticised. Knowledge acquired an institutional memory, and the mechanism became discovery → publication → criticism → replication → correction → new discovery. It is not enough to possess an occasional astronomer; what matters is building a system that keeps producing scholars and then surpassing them.
Printing: almost three centuries that mattered
Printing makes the divergence brutally visible. Gutenberg perfected European movable-type printing around the middle of the fifteenth century, and within a few decades the continent was flooded with a quantity of books previously unimaginable. A thesis could reach thousands of readers, a discovery could cross borders and a refutation could be printed and quickly provoke a reply. Printing fuelled the Renaissance, the Reformation, political controversy and the Scientific Revolution. In the Ottoman Empire, Jewish and Christian communities had long used printing presses, but Muslim printing in Arabic script remained outside the dominant cultural circuit for centuries. İbrahim Müteferrika received official permission in 1727 to print non-religious works, and his first publication appeared in 1729: almost three centuries after Gutenberg. A technology that had revolutionised the structure of knowledge in Europe took centuries to penetrate the Muslim cultural mainstream, while in Europe knowledge was beginning to multiply faster than any authority could control it.
Islamic law and the long economic divergence
The problem also concerned law. Timur Kuran has shown how institutions of Islamic law contributed to the long economic divergence between the Middle East and Europe. Inheritance rules tended to fragment estates among numerous heirs, traditional commercial partnerships were closely tied to the individuals who created them, and the waqf bound large amounts of property to the founder’s original instructions. Classical Islamic law did not independently develop a general institution equivalent to the Western corporate legal person. The consequences became decisive when economic activity required organisations that were increasingly large, impersonal and permanent. In Europe, communes, universities, guilds and commercial companies could outlive their members, accumulate resources, assume obligations and alter their own structures: they were institutions capable of living beyond individuals. When commercial capitalism required larger amounts of capital and increasingly complex organisations, the West already possessed instruments that the Middle East would later have to import.
The waqf: preserving the will of the past
The waqf illustrates the rigidity of the system. The founder’s will enjoyed exceptionally strong protection and, once the purposes of an endowment had been established, changing them could become extremely difficult even when economic and social conditions had changed. Vast assets could therefore continue to be administered according to instructions laid down generations earlier. The Western corporation followed a different logic: it survived its members while retaining the ability to adapt. The contrast is clear: preservation of the original will versus institutional adaptability.
Europe transformed warfare as well
The Ottomans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made effective use of firearms and artillery. In the following centuries, however, Europe transformed warfare into a system linking technology, taxation, credit, administration, industry and science. Permanent armies required enormous resources; fleets required shipyards, artillery, navigation and finance; European states developed public debt, banking, increasingly effective fiscal systems and administrations capable of sustaining long and expensive wars. The military state became a fiscal state, and the fiscal state financed further military power. The decisive issue was no longer which side happened to possess the better cannon at a particular moment, but which side possessed the system capable of continually producing better cannons, paying for them, transporting them and replacing them.
European competition turned even warfare into innovation
Europe’s political fragmentation also forced states constantly to observe their competitors. An effective fiscal technique was imitated, a new military formation copied, a successful banking structure attracted rivals and a more effective navy forced opponents to adapt. Those who failed to adapt lost ground. Competition therefore became a permanent mechanism of institutional selection. Europe had no single centre empowered to establish the definitive model: it had many centres forced to compete.
The traditionalist paradigm: perfection has already happened
Behind these differences lies a fundamental religious issue. Islam locates a normatively perfect model in its founding past: the Qur’an, Muhammad, the Sunna and the first Muslim generations. Al-Mawardi systematised political authority within the Islamic order; Ibn Taymiyya attacked philosophy, the cult of saints, religious practices he regarded as illegitimate and doctrinal innovations by appealing to fidelity to the sources. The concept of bidʿa concerns religious innovation, but it expresses the logic of the system perfectly: normative perfection does not have to be built in the future because it has already occurred in the past. The ideal model is Muhammad and the original Muslim community, and within the traditionalist paradigm distance from those origins becomes corruption.
When “reform” means going backwards
This explains an apparent paradox in Islamic history. Numerous movements described as “reformist” do not call for moving beyond the origins but for returning to them. The reformer denounces superstition, contamination, innovation and deviation and presents the recovery of the Qur’an, the Sunna and the salaf as the solution. From ʿUthman dan Fodio to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the return to supposed original purity itself became a revolutionary programme, but a revolution directed backwards. Western modernity emerged when it became progressively possible to think that the ancients could be corrected, institutions could be remade and no historical order had to be regarded as perfect by definition. The difference is radical.
The great Islamic empires concealed the problem
The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires retained immense territories, powerful armies and substantial tax revenues for a long time, and precisely this strength helped conceal the transformation taking place in the balance of power. As long as an empire continues to conquer provinces, it can continue to perceive itself as victorious, but Europe was changing the very meaning of power. The Portuguese, Dutch and British were building oceanic networks, commercial companies were mobilising increasing amounts of capital, banks were financing governments and trade, cartography was transforming navigation, science was feeding technology and the Industrial Revolution would eventually multiply productive capacity. The Islamic empires continued to measure strength through territory and armies while the world was learning to measure it through knowledge, production, finance and technology.
When the gap became obvious, the model came from Europe
By the nineteenth century the direction of institutional transfer had become impossible to ignore: it was the Ottoman Empire that looked to Europe for models, not the other way around. The Tanzimat reforms, launched in 1839, attempted to reorganise administration, the military, justice, education and law. New ministries, schools, courts and codes inspired by European models were introduced. In 1850 the Ottoman government adopted a commercial code largely derived from the French Code de commerce of 1807; further administrative and legal reforms followed, and in 1876 a constitution and parliament appeared. When the Empire understood the depth of its own backwardness, it looked to Europe.
Colonialism comes too late to explain the decline
The chronological problem is elementary: the superiority that made colonialism possible already existed before colonialism. Europe did not become scientifically, industrially and militarily superior because it conquered the Muslim world; it was able to conquer much of the Muslim world because that superiority had already been built. Before the height of colonialism came the Renaissance, oceanic expansion, the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. To use colonialism as the original explanation is to begin the story after the decisive phase of divergence had already occurred.
What about the Mongols?
The destruction of Baghdad in 1258 does not explain the centuries of divergence that followed. Europe endured dynastic wars, epidemics, famines, religious conflicts and the devastating Thirty Years’ War, yet its institutional and scientific development continued. A catastrophe can explain destruction; it cannot explain centuries of relative failure to recover.
What about the Crusades?
The Crusader states were eventually destroyed by Muslim powers, and the Crusades cannot explain a scientific and industrial divergence that matured centuries later. Invoking them to explain why Newton, the Royal Society, the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution arose in Europe is simply to confuse different periods and different problems.
What about geography?
Geography does not produce corporate universities, company law, printing, political pluralism, scientific societies and the experimental revolution. Natural resources can create wealth, but they do not automatically create knowledge. Modern oil wealth is the clearest demonstration.
The present: buying technology is not the same as producing it
The problem does not belong only to history. UNESCO’s science reporting on the Arab states documents a persistent dependence on imported technologies and inadequate research and development spending across much of the region. The Global Innovation Index 2025 likewise shows deep differences in the ability to transform capital, education and infrastructure into actual innovation. A wealthy country can buy laboratories, universities, weapons systems, satellites and artificial intelligence; it cannot buy the cultural and institutional process that continuously generates the next stage of knowledge.
The thread connecting everything
The sequence is clear: theology → law → education → institutions → circulation of knowledge → economic organisation → fiscal capacity → technology → power. An educational system dominated by religious tradition determines what deserves to stand at the centre of learning; a legal system that does not develop flexible corporate institutions shapes the kinds of economic organisations that can emerge; a culture that places normative perfection in the past approaches innovation according to a logic opposite to that of a culture that regards the past as something that can be surpassed; and slow circulation of ideas weakens the cumulative process of knowledge. Eventually the result appears in the economy, in technology and on the battlefield.
Conclusion: the problem cannot always be somebody else’s fault
The dominant structures failed to turn exceptions into a paradigm. Rationalist philosophy did not conquer the normative centre of Sunni culture. The madrasa did not develop the corporate structure of the European university. Sharia retained enormous authority over law and society. Islamic economic law did not independently produce corporations equivalent to those of the West. Printing entered the Muslim cultural mainstream centuries late. Fiscal and administrative structures fell behind those of the leading European powers. When the gap became intolerable, Ottoman reforms looked to Europe for legal, educational, administrative and military models.
On the other side, Christian Europe developed autonomous universities, plural centres of power, competition between states, printing, scientific societies, financial institutions and a culture in which every authority could be debated, corrected and surpassed. From this process came the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the technological superiority that would redefine the global balance of power. For centuries the Islamic empires retained territory and prestige, and conquest concealed the delay, but eventually the bill came due.
The Crusades, the Mongols, colonialism and the West continue to be invoked in order to avoid the central question. The core problem is internal. A civilisation can buy the products of modernity without producing the cultural conditions that generated them; it can build universities without guaranteeing academic freedom, finance laboratories without allowing its own foundations to be subjected to criticism, and import technology developed elsewhere without creating the system capable of producing the next technology.
And this is precisely where the religious problem returns to the centre. As long as the Qur’an is regarded as the perfect, eternal and final word of God; as long as the Sunna of Muhammad remains a normative model for human conduct; and as long as the religious law built around these sources retains an authority exempt from the same freedom of criticism applied to every other historical construction, the conflict with modernity will not be accidental: it will be structural. Laboratories, universities, satellites, computers and artificial intelligence can all be imported. Freedom of thought cannot.
Sources and further reading
- United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations, New York, 2002.
- United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society, New York, 2003.
- United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2022: Expanding Opportunities for an Inclusive and Resilient Recovery in the Post-Covid Era, New York, 2022.
- UNESCO, UNESCO Science Report 2021: The Race Against Time for Smarter Development, chapter “The Arab States”, Paris, 2021.
- World Intellectual Property Organization, Global Innovation Index 2025, Geneva, 2025.
- Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.
- George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2007.
- Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
- Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2011.
- Timur Kuran, “The Absence of the Corporation in Islamic Law: Origins and Persistence”, The American Journal of Comparative Law, vol. 53, no. 4, 2005, pp. 785–834.
- Timur Kuran, Freedoms Delayed: Political Legacies of Islamic Law in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023.
- Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2016.
- Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009.
- Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.
- K. Kivanç Karaman and Şevket Pamuk, “Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective, 1500–1914”, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 70, no. 3, 2010, pp. 593–629.
- M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West”.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Ibn Rushd [Averroes]”.
