An Arab historian built his account of Islamic decline on European sources

Evidence

Working from these sources, Zaydan explained that ‘the history of Islamic Civilisation … constitutes the history of the civilised world in the Middle Ages’. Describing the period of the first four caliphs as the highest phase of Islamic civilisation, Zaydan represented every subsequent period, from the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates onward, as a successive stage of decline. The purpose of the work was to show for each stage the ‘political’ causes of decline, and its cultural consequences. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 526

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: how the ‘decline narrative’ of Islamic civilization was itself a European export adopted by Arab writers.
• XREF: connects to: The decline-of-Islamic-science narrative is a Eurocentric fabrication.