The measure I just gave you proves you wrong. Iraq went from wasteland to the intellectual centre of the world with possibly the largest city in the world - built from scratch by the muslims.

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Islam achieved the same thing that the Romans did nearly a millenia earlier Gandalf. The best it could do was imitate the greatness of earlier civilisations or contemporary non-Muslim civilisations. Islam only compares well if you leave out the history of non-Muslim society.

Why did you bother responding but not addressing that point Gandalf? Are you going to keep pretending I didn't say it?

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No you didn't. It was a metaphor Gandalf.

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So this is the example you chose - creating new cities? Do you think this had never been done before?

So this is the example you chose - creating new cities? Do you think this had never been done before?

It's like someone saying Australia is a great empire because we built Canberra from scratch and put the best museums (in Australia) there.

But it fell short of what came before it in the west and what came at the same time in China - in both cases it fell short by a very wide margin. It could not even come close despite already being shown how.

And where did

Growth of trade
One of the most far-reaching changes in Fāṭimid times was the growth of Egyptian commerce, especially in Al-Fusṭāṭ, which had become the port city for Cairo, the Fāṭimid capital. Theretofore, Iraq in the east and Tunisia in the west had been flourishing centres for trade conducted both within the Muslim world and between the Muslim and the Christian empires of the West. A number of factors contributed to alter this situation in favour of Egypt. As centralized power declined in Iraq, Mesopotamia, and Syria during the 9th and 10th centuries, traffic on the trade routes across these areas also declined. In Egypt, however, the establishment of a strong government, which soon controlled the Red Sea and maintained a strong navy in the eastern Mediterranean, offered an attractive alternative for the international transit trade between the Eastern and Western worlds. In addition to having the political stability essential for trade, the Fāṭimids encouraged commerce by their low tariff policy and their noninterference in the affairs of merchants who did business in Egypt. These factors, along with increased European mercantile activity in the Italian cities, helped restore Egypt as a great international entrepôt.

The period of the Caliphate is seen as the golden age of al-Andalus. Crops produced using irrigation, along with food imported from the Middle East, provided the area around Córdoba and some other Andalusī cities with an agricultural economic sector that was the most advanced in Europe by far. Among European cities, Córdoba under the Caliphate, with a population of perhaps 500,000, eventually overtook Constantinople as the largest and most prosperous city in Europe.[15] Within the Islamic world, Córdoba was one of the leading cultural centres. The work of its most important philosophers and scientists (notably Abulcasis and Averroes) had a major influence on the intellectual life of medieval Europe.

Muslims and non-Muslims often came from abroad to study in the famous libraries and universities of al-Andalus after the reconquest of Toledo in 1085. The most noted of these was Michael Scot (c. 1175 to c. 1235), who took the works of Ibn Rushd ("Averroes") and Ibn Sina ("Avicenna") to Italy. This transmission significantly affected the formation of the European Renaissance.[

The historian Said al-Andalusi wrote that Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III had collected libraries of books and granted patronage to scholars of medicine and "ancient sciences". Later, al-Mustansir (Al-Hakam II) went yet further, building a university and libraries in Córdoba. Córdoba became one of the world's leading centres of medicine and philosophical debate.