The decline-of-Islamic-science narrative is a Eurocentric fabrication.

Evidence

What I am describing, then, is something that will characterize Islamic Orientalism until the present day: its retrogressive position when compared with the other human sciences (and even with the other branches of Orientalism), its general methodological and ideological backwardness, and its comparative insularity from developments both in the other humanities and in the real world of historical, economic, social, and political circumstances. … Some awareness of this lag in Islamic (or Semitic) Orientalism was already present towards the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps because it was beginning to be apparent to some observers how very little either Semitic or Islamic Orientalism had shaken itself loose from the religious background from which it originally derived. … The first Orientalist congress was organized and held in Paris in 1873, and almost from the outset it was evident to other scholars that the Semiticists and Islamicists were in intellectual arrears, generally speaking. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 671 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: The claim of Islamic scientific decline is a Eurocentric projection, not history — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 352; The decline of Islamic science after the eleventh century is a fabricated narrative; Arabic literary study was reorganized around European-origin decline narratives (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• The decline of Islamic science after the eleventh century is a fabricated narrative #corroborates (1.00)
• Arabic literary study was reorganized around European-origin decline narratives #expands (0.80)
• Islamic Orientalism was intellectually backward compared to other human sciences #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 671
• Ottoman decline stemmed from institutional resistance to Western science, not internal decay #corroborates (0.80) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1741
• Orientalists fabricated ethnographic details to fit a timeless-and-declining Orient narrative #exemplifies (0.80) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 195
• An Arab historian built his account of Islamic decline on European sources #exemplifies (0.80) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 526
• Orientalism’s decline thesis attributes Muslim stagnation to an immutable inner essence #expands (0.80)
• Histories of science are doubly Eurocentric in scope and in authorship #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1594
• Colonial capitalism and print made Islamic elites adopt European decline narratives #expands (0.75)
• Textualist assumptions about Islam produce the fiction of a static, homogenous Muslim civilization #expands (0.72)
• European science built directly on Muslim scholarship and Copernicus drew on Arabic sources #contradicts (0.72) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 340
• Flattening Islam into one object enabled civilizational judgments against it #expands (0.70) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 270