Quote:And yet you don't even know the previous living standards of the areas Islam took over. Again, the "previous levels" you whine about were for the core region "Southern Mediterranean (Southern Europe)" - which was basically the Italian Peninsula.
Not Spain I take it? Was it the pot of gold under Rome, or the oil well that was the missing key ingredient?
Quote:The point being your logic that living standards barely increased under Islam assumes a like for like comparison between the standards of the Southern Mediterranean zone and the Egyptian/Syria-Iraq zone as if they were the same area - and is therefore flawed.
Why is it flawed? This was not tied to geography by this stage. If anything the Caliphate had a huge advantage in controlling the trade route.
Quote:The only way you can draw the conclusion you are making is if you knew the living standards in Egypt and Iraq-Syria both immediately pre and post circa 700CE - which you don't, because Morris doesn't provide them.
I have explained at length before that moving the capital should not make that much difference. You ignored this point. You are still ignoring it. Rome's wealth came from being the centre of a large empire that significantly overlapped with the Caliphates.
Quote:What we *DO* know though is that the economic and cultural centres of the Islamic Empire became, in a remarkably short time, the economic centres of the entire Western World
The entire post-apocalyptic western world. Again, you set the bar incredibly low.
Quote:Rome was born and developed on the shoulders of centuries of continual growth and development. Islam was born on the ashes of an unprecedented catastrophic crash in social development. Please look at your graph. Are you still going to peddle out the absurd lie that the decline that preceded the rise of Islam was not unique?
The causes of the decline were immediately removed by the Caliphate - except of course the political ones. It does not make sens to blame the low living standards before the Caliphate on was, mass migration etc, then hold out the same excuse for after the Caliphate took over. This is another point I have made at length several times, which you ignore.
Quote:Also, I hope you understand that you are shifting your argument that the Islamic Empire "did not even register" and "achieved almost nothing" - to an argument that appears to be dependent on Islam achieving the same level of prosperity as Rome did.
If it was a truly great empire, it would have caught up to what came 100 years earlier, and gone past it. Plenty of past empires rose from the ashes and fringes to do this. Islam was not unique in the challenges it initially faced.
Quote:Nice attempt at deflection, but thats not my concern here - and I'll happily admit that the Islamic Caliphate didn't achieve as high a level of Morris's 'social development' as Rome did.
Fail.
Quote:he excruciating fumbling of your argument is on display when you conclude that the social development under the Islamic Empire "stagnated" or at best "barely saw an increase" - based on nothing else but a flawed comparison of data from two completely different regions - one under Islamic control, the other not. Of course it never dawned on you that for places like Baghdad and Cairo to go from nothing to the economic centres of the western world, it required something a little more than stagnant economic growth.
You keep insisting the comparison is flawed. I explain why it is not flawed. You repeat yourself and ignore what I posted. How long will you keep this up Gandalf? What was so special about Rome that prevented the Caliphate from reaching the same standard of living as the Roman Empire? Why have you gone silent about the causes of the decline in social development that you yourself brought up? Is it because they highlight how reasonable it is to expect a rapid recovery to Roman levels once these causes were eliminated? Was the Caliphate really confined to some geographic backwater that made it so weak? The truth is that the Muslims turned the Italian peninsula into a backwater by raiding it for slaves.