Muslims remember an era when Islam ruled as the Earth’s greatest civilization.

Evidence

For many centuries Islam was the greatest civilization on Earth—the richest, the most powerful, the most creative in every significant field of human endeavor. Its armies, its teachers and its traders were advancing on every front in Asia in Africa, in Europe, bringing, as they saw it, civilization and religion to the infidel barbarians who lived beyond the Muslim frontier. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1784

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Iranian civilization dominated Islamic political and cultural power for centuries (similarity 0.87)
• Islam served as Europe’s principal civilizational other for centuries. (similarity 0.85)
• Islamic civilization sustained vibrant internal doctrinal contestation and humanism. (similarity 0.84)
• European thought supplied Muslim lands with revolutionary symbols and values (similarity 0.83)
• Islam’s rapid conquests seemed miraculous even to Muslim observers themselves (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Islamic historical writing outpaced all Christendom combined in bulk (similarity 0.83)
• Islam’s early expansion produced multiple distinct subcivilizations across three continents (similarity 0.82)
• Western power and ideas devastated the Islamic world from 1800 onward (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval Christians doubted Islam’s truth yet marveled at its success (similarity 0.82)
• Islam’s egalitarian message has been continuously contested by older river-valley social orders (similarity 0.81)
• Muslim-Western civilizational struggle reversed direction around 1683 (similarity 0.81)
• Islamization flowed from the cultural realm into social and political spheres. (similarity 0.81)
• Islam’s spread clashed continuously with the ancient river-valley civilizations it conquered (similarity 0.81)
• Islam’s intellectual peak came within four centuries, far faster than the medieval West’s (similarity 0.81)
• Muslims recognized Byzantium as a rival universalist faith and empire (similarity 0.81)