By now most people in the West know that while Europeans were sleeping with their own oxen and unscrewing each other's heads with abandon, Arabs were inventing algebra, trading with China, and building structures whose beauty staggers us to this day. Yet in less than three centuries their glittering culture would be crushed and humiliated by barbarians they had once bettered in every way. How could this be?

The roots of failure in the cultures ascribed to Islam are the same that lead to their success, and therein lies the great Sophoclean tragedy of it all. Because the ground in which these roots, of both triumph and oblivion, rest was created by the Koran.

Ironically, it's the history of Christianity that best illustrates this argument. Jesus preached his ministry in the center of a prosperous, and oppressive, empire arguably the most powerful the world had seen. His crucifixion occurred perhaps only five years after the beginning of his movement, introducing an element of instability Christianity lives with to this day. Because the movement was both escatalogical (the end of the world is nigh) and subversive (we're the only ones with a ticket out), a natural fault line developed dividing the spiritual power of Christianity (do as I say because you'll go to Hell if you don't) from the temporal power of the Empire (do as I say or I'll run you through with this sword).

While the rise of Christianity to official status largely filled this chasm in the Eastern half of the empire, historical happenstance (in the form of various flea-bitten but no less ferocious barbarian hordes) maintained it in the West. Over the next thousand years an uncomfortable and unstable status-quo set itself up between a Church that could command hearts and kings who could command steel. Europe suffered four centuries of darkness while it all got sorted out.

All of these things, doctrinaire instability, subversive revolution, the very concept of a separate "church" and "state", were completely alien to a follower of Islam. Unlike Jesus, Mohamed had an extremely long, productive ministry, in which all of the core documents of the movement were written by the founder himself (or by God through him, if you like)*. This made for a comparatively stable religious foundation, which to date has experienced only one significant doctrinal dispute. Islam was created in an area with no government institution larger than what was needed to manage a city. Therefore when the Bedouin exploded out of the desert they were able to grasp both secular and religious power simultaneously.

Herein lay the roots of Islam's success. As a merchant, Mohamed knew almost instinctively that the key to the success of a society was consistent laws enforced consistently. If there was any question of this he had the abject lesson of the Christians of the Eastern empire, who at that point were damning and killing each other over paintings and the precise date of Easter, to instruct him. His long ministry allowed the final and absolute resolution of the thousands of petty arguments that arise with any complex movement. Finally, Islam was able to stab upward into the underbelly of the two richest and paradoxically weakest empires in existence at that time.

This all combined to create a very rich and culturally complex environment almost purpose-built for stability, safety, and free movement. Without the albatrosses of oppression and suspicion around their necks, Muslims were able to look at the enormous libraries of Greek knowledge in their conquered Eastern territories with fresh eyes and open minds. They took this and literally ran with it, extending and expanding beyond even their own expectations. The torch of learning was not extinguished when Odacer deposed Romulus Augustus in 476. It was instead set aside, only to quickly be picked up by Arab hands who, for a very long time, carried it well indeed.

So what went wrong? Again, it's more instructive to first look at Christianity before examining Islam.

It took nearly a thousand years, but eventually the Medieval west settled into a sort of equilibrium uncomfortably managed by bishops and feudal warrior-kings. They grew strong enough that by the end of the eleventh century they were able to carve a chunk out of the Islamic empire and maintain it more or less intact for nearly three hundred years. Far more important, although less glamorous, was the Reconquista, the crusade to reclaim the Iberian peninsula for Christianity. By conquering but not destroying the great Moorish cities a sort of "back door" was created, allowing the re-introduction not only of the old Greek learning once lost, but of all the Muslim developments as well.

However, even this wasn't enough to start what would come to be known as the European Renaissance. It would take the scythe of the Black Death hacking away perhaps as much as a third of the population of Europe to light the fuse on that powder keg.

Labor, once nearly free, became fantastically expensive. Empires in the past were able to respond to this through conquest and importation of slaves, but Europe was too politically fragmented for any one state to command that much power. People were able to demand rights and privileges from their rulers in return for their labor, and the rulers had to give it to them or risk those same people offering their services to someone else who would.

But not everyone had this option. Enormous tracts of land, complete with villages and their resident peasants, had been ceded to monasteries over the previous centuries. At first, this was actually one hell (as it were) of a move up for said peasants. No armies to feed, no randy knights hacking and burning houses when they got bored, and no Droit de seigneur. What wasn't to love?

This rosy arrangement started to unravel shortly after the plague, and it only went downhill from there. The duke, bergher, or king may have been an unpredictable bastard, but you could at least bargain with him. The abbot had God on his side. Negotiating a reduction in the harvest tithe was not an option, since the percentage was decided by the Lord himself and who were you to question that? Demanding a change in the tax rate to make your business more competitive with the Venetians merely resulted in blank looks. Push harder and you risked a Crusade being called down on your head.

Of course, in the long run it couldn't last. The monasteries were rich enough to hire a few dozen armored goons to keep the peasants in line, but they were no match for the burgeoning power of the kings and merchant empires. Eventually the peasants either ran off to the nearest free city or took shelter with a prince only too happy to double the wages made miniscule by four centuries of inflation. Over time, one by one and all across Europe, the monasteries were cracked open like oysters on the belly of a sea otter, slowly removing the last vestiges of the medieval and clearing the way for our own modern world.

By all accounts the Arab empires suffered at least as much, if not more, from plague. They had the additional burden of being in the way of the most effective light horse army the world has ever seen (Mongols). And yet with similar pressures came very different results. Christian Europe exploded, first consuming itself in successive paroxysms of religious, trade, and revolutionary wars, then when that became too expensive hacking empires out of everything around them. Muslims, in contrast, coalesced into a single monolithic empire that, once established, essentially coasted unchanged for the next three hundred fifty years. At its end this Ottoman Empire, so powerful that at one point it literally threatened Christianity's existence, was itself allowed to exist at the whim of these "barbaric" Europeans, to be ignominiously dismantled by them when it was finally no longer useful.

The comparison with the medieval monasteries of Europe is striking. True, Islam shuns monasticism in all forms, but by melding religious and secular power into the sharia, they inadvertently made the entire culture beholden to what was in effect a highly organized and indeed quite powerful religious order. The innate conservatism inherent in all organized religion meant that any cultural or economic innovation that the mullahs could not understand would be crushed before it had a chance to break anything.

The burgeoning Ottoman empire, then at the hight of its power, absorbed the impact of the Black Death not through innovation but through the forced migration of perhaps millions of slaves. What commerce existed did so at the whim of the Sultan, and the Sultan never took risks. The culture of empire meant there would be no escape for the common people, no rival petty kings to check the power of the mullahs, no chance for a Renaissance of clever, questioning men to take hold. The empire, as all empires do, slowly ossified, trapping what was once a vibrant and brilliant culture in a pretty, frozen drop of amber.

Islam, once so fortunate in history's eye, chose precisely the wrong moment to crystallize into a monolithic empire. Europe had stumbled onto a combination of culture and technology that, however horrifically violent in its infancy, gradually allowed fantastic gains in productivity. The cold truth is that even without Napoleon, by the beginning of the nineteenth century Europe had become so incredibly rich it could have hastened the end of the last great Islamic empires through the simple expedient of purchasing them.

Islam tried to catch up, but by the time it figured out it was even in a race it was too late. A set of cultures raised on a thousand years of divinely decreed, indeed self-evident, dominance was suddenly confronted with the shattering realization that they were not, in fact, the alpha and omega of creation; that it would be a different set of people, ascribing to a religion they had supposedly discredited ten centuries ago, who would in fact rule the world. They have quite simply never recovered.

For a time it looked as if the old salves of retrenchment and revival, a "returning to the old ways", would bring holy wrath down upon the infidel's head and restore the faded glory of mullah and mosque. Certainly the spectacular collapse of the two most prominent landmarks on the infidel's horizon at the hands of these fundamentalists signaled the dawn of a new age, when divinely inspired martyrs would rain death down on the heads of these prurient, effete infidels and show that the power of Islam had not in fact faded into history.

Of course, as with all escatological fantasies, the world obstinately refused to end. It took five hard and difficult years of planning to kill three thousand infidels in a single day. Yet less than two years after this triumph the only countries in Islam to ever successfully take on the West lay in ruins, their leaders dead, imprisoned, or running too hard to even show their faces. Even worse, the people of these countries are showing signs of adapting to the infidel, of turning their backs on the men of God who should be leading them, riding down the seductive road of perdition called "self government."

In fact, their predicament is no different from that experienced by their Christian brethren six centuries ago. Because to them the world did end, for the one when the last tower of Cluny was pulled down by French peasants so enraged they used their bare hands, for the other when the bronze statue of a madman was yanked off its pedestal while infidel tanks rolled unopposed through the city that once formed the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

It remains to be seen whether the hold of the mad mullahs can be broken, whether, given the chance, great men will arise from all walks of life and lead the peoples of Islam in adapting to modernity instead of being martyred by it. Because without a doubt the peoples of the old Islamic empires must come to terms with the world around them.

It is up to them to choose whether they do so united under a flag of liberty, or the tombstone of a mass grave.