I was at a lecture given by Tyson last night (this video seems like a summary of his point). After discussing the accomplishments of Islamic philosophers, such as al-Haytham's contributions to optometrics, the astrolabe, and the naming of stars in the sky, Tyson specifically attributed to the suppression of scientific pursuits to al-Ghazali, who apparently wrote that spiritual pursuits should occupy more time than other pursuits, and that the study of mathematics was a non-spiritual pursuit. He of course granted that "we tell ourselves" that the Golden Age of Islam was brought to an end of the Mongolian sack of Baghdad (with nary a mention of the Crusades), but notes also that no subsequent Muslim empire (Moorish Spain, for instance) has brought forth similar intellectual achievements as the Abbasid empire. He also showed figures comparing the amount of, for instance, Jewish Nobel Prize laureates (25% of the total), with the amount of Muslim laureates (2 or 3 people).
It seems like all sorts of a simplification to say that this was all (or even primarily) due to one philosopher nearly a thousand years ago, so my question is also two-fold: why haven't subsequent Islamic societies yielded similar intellectual products as the Abbasid Golden Age (or have they)?
This (and even the theories that the Mongols were the cause) is an old orientalist position. From what I've read, the strongest and most active English-language critic of it is george saliba (see eg his book "islamic science and the making..."), and I'll summarize some of salibas points.
First is that in the islamic world there were actually more scientists and more scientific instruments invented and used AFTER alghazali died. Only in the 17th century does there seem to be a slight decrease in rate of new scientific production. However, one must realize that scientific advancement in dependent on relatively enormous amounts of wealth and social organization, and by the 17th c, the Christian west was growing in both areas at UNPRECENDENTED levels and at the same time repressing growth in other regions--due to the pillaging of the Americas, the mass murder/death of native Americans, the new modern capitalistic forms of slavery, and modern colonization.
One of the big factors that contributed to the negative view of post-ghazali islamic science (besides the traditional western stereotype of Islam being anti-intellectual) is the fact that after alghazali the numbers of scientific commentaries increased a lot, and westerners assumed that commentaries didn't contain much new scientific thinking, when in fact they did.
Indeed, there were more advancements in astronomy (ndgt's field, kinda) AFTER alghazali than before, including the important works of Urdi, Tusi, and al-shatir (whose work, it seems, may have been crucial for Copernicus's advancements).
why you shouldn't trust Tyson's claims about history and old links talking about this claim:
essentially Tyson is a really smart scientist but has a basic teleological "pop history" version of the history of science and religion. He's also encountered some problems with his use of history over the Bush era (using a quote about
TYSON: Here’s what happens. George Bush, within a week of [the 9/11 terrorist attacks] gave us a speech attempting to distinguish we from they. And who are they? These were sort of the Muslim fundamentalists. And he wants to distinguish we from they. And how does he do it? He says, “Our God” — of course it’s actually the same God... “Our God is the God who named the stars.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422411861&x-yt-cl=84924572&v=h_jG5kKfacY#t=33
...except that was a quote from Bush's speech about the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia and had nothing to do with Islam. To my mind at least all of this stuff shows someone who doesn't really challenge historical sources or arguments if they confirm to his per-existing beliefs.
Looking though the comments before two address your question well.
from u/i_like_jam
I dislike the point he puts forward here as he misinterprets the point of Ghazali's work. Ghazali was a skeptic, rejecting the current courses of Islamic philosophy because he believed it should have its roots in Islam rather than being based on the works of Plato and Aristotle. He was more inward looking, but from what I've read he was not anti-scientific as NDT suggests here. True, we might perhaps argue that the followers of Ghazali later interpreted his writings as anti-scientific and based their actions on such interpretations but if that's you're argument then you can't lay the blame squarely on Ghazali. If you want to point fingers at philosophers there are probably 'better' choices, like the 12th century Ibn Taymiyyah, the forefather of what centuries later would be Wahhabism (the dominant creed in modern Saudi). But even this is flawed, as with the case of Ghazali you're ignoring the context of the philosopher's times and environments which brought these ideas about. As cfmonkey45 says, it's the decline/collapse of scientific centres such as Baghdad and Cordoba likely had a larger impact on Islamic science than any one philosopher's work.
From u/riskbreaker2987
al-Ghazali has become a popular target as the watershed for the "end" of the Islamic "golden age." It is certainly true that, as cfmonkey45 has said, al-Ghazali strongly rejected Neoplatonist and Aristotelian philosophy that was popular amongst certain sects of Islam - the Mu'tazilites specifically. The Mu'tazilites had gained significant standing in the Islamic world when they gained official court patronage in the early 'Abbasid period, but they had been on the wane already by the time The Incoherence of the Philosophers debuted. It is true, though, that the work of al-Ghazali helped to kill off this ideological school.
As I mentioned, al-Ghazali has become a popular target over the last decade or so for the decline of Islam with regards to science, but there is an excellent - and extremely readable - argument made by Arabist Jamil Rageb for why this is simply false. Rageb also cites in the article some of these attempts to lay the blame at the feet of al-Ghazali, so that you can have a bit more of a look yourself.
The article: "When Did Islamic Science Die? And Who Cares?"
For the layman, science doesn't simply die out after al-Ghazali's lifetime at all, and Rageb cites a number of significant developments in the sciences that occurred firmly after al-Ghazali's death. Examples of this include the discovery of the pulmonary transit,while there was a huge amount of scientific and philosophical texts that continued to be produced and created in the Islamic world centuries after al-Ghazali had died.
Tl;DR Science is alive and well in the Islamic realm long after the death of al-Ghazali. Suggestions that science occurred "in spite of Islam" and not because of it belong to a long modern discourse of Orientalist scholarship.
Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast has some good critiques of the myth that there was a "death" of Islamic scholarship perhaps caused by al-Ghazali. Here's a short blog post of his briefly addressing the claim. I would also reccomend checking out the episodes he has on al-Ghazali himself in order to get a much better image of what his thought consisted and influence consisted of than the broad cookie-cutter approach advocated by the pop theories that Ghazali somehow single handedly killed the "Islamic Golden Age". And if you have the time the later episodes also clearly show that intellectual activity still continued to flourish in the Islamic world which it should be noted is a very very large thing so the idea that Ghazali writes a book and suddenly every Islamic scholar thinks like him is pretty silly. He also addresses the somewhat related claim that ties the "death" of Islamic scholarship to the Mongol sack of Baghdad and likewise demonstrates the fallacious thinking involved in that view.
The rise of a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam rather than a open Humanistic one did hurt the advancement of Islamic learning, as men in the Islamic spent more time on the Hadith rather than Plato and Aristotle. A good date when Islamic Scientific advancement practically stopped was the closing of Istanbul observatory of Taqi ad-Din in 1580 which possessed the most advanced Astronomical instruments at the time. It was closed when a faction of clerics put pressure on the Sultan to stop the heretical practice of man predicting the actions of heavens, which to them was like fortune telling. Besides the rise of a more fundamentalist view of Islam in which knowledge came from Allah's revelations and not human observation there was the issue of centralization of power and knowledge . The reason why Europe surpassed China and the Islamic world scientifically as the two stagnated was that Europe wasn't uniformly ruled. The monopoly on idea had been held by the Catholic Church since the fall of Roman Empire, but with the advent of the printing press and the Reformation there was no longer a monopoly on ideas and innovations, men like Kepler, who in Roman times would have had to take his own life like Seneca when his ideas where no longer welcome in the Creaser's court had the ability to find refuge in various European states whenever he wore out his welcome in one. Da Vinci was Italian, but worked in numerous courts before dying in France. If Columbus had lived in China his chances of a state sponsored ocean voyages would have ended with a single bad audience with the Emperor, in Europe he was able to lobby several courts until Spain fearing that Portugal would back him and grow richer gave him three ships. The lack of a centralized power in Europe meant that it was hard to stop ideas and police heresy in Christendom, and that scholars usually had some option of exile.
He also showed figures comparing the amount of, for instance, Jewish Nobel Prize laureates (25% of the total), with the amount of Muslim laureates (2 or 3 people).
I would just like to point out that this is a pretty flawed comparison that says more about the Nobel Prize than Muslim scientists.
On the somewhat bizarre topic of Muslim science ending with Al-Ghazali for some reason, I recommend a refutation of his anti-Aristotelian Incoherence of the Philosophers - Averroes' cleverly-titled Incoherence of the Incoherence. Al-Ghazali didn't even actually criticize scientific fields; his concern was limited to metaphysics and the logic thereof. I don't know where an intelligent man like NDT gets such distorted ideas about history.
Really recommend this paper by Wael Hallaq on this question. He discusses the issue of "ijtihad" (legal interpretation) in particular, about which orientalist scholarship has blamed Ghazali for stagnation in Islamic legal and scientific progression. That claim is pretty hogwash.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/162939?sid=21105731260323&uid=3739256&uid=3739560&uid=4&uid=2
If anyone can download/share, that'd be great. Hallaq is a bit dense and verbose at times, but this paper - his phD thesis that made his name in the field of Islamic Studies, specifically Islamic law - is worth the read on this subject.