Well, I haven't read the book so I decided to take a quick skim and look at what Mr. Stark has to say about my particular area of study, the history of the Middle East.

Good lord this man has no idea what he's blathering on about. I can't decide if it's the product of actual ignorance, out and out deception, racism or a combination of the three. This isn't history, it's polemic, and bad polemic at that.

What university is teaching you this nonsense?

Here are some excerpts I grabbed:

“Even more important, Islam holds that the universe is inherently irrational—that there is no cause and effect—because everything happens as the direct result of Allah’s will at that particular time. Anything is possible. Attempts at science, then, are not only foolish but also blasphemous, in that they imply limits to Allah’s power and authority.53 Therefore, Muslim scholars study law (what does Allah require?), not science.”

The Muslim scholars who studied science and made critical advancements in optics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics and other fields would be astonished to hear such a thing. This quote is an almost absurd misunderstanding of the conclusions of Al Ghazali. Ghazali held that the universe cannot be explained by reason alone because cause and effect are ultimately subject to the will of God. Being opposed to rationalism and being "irrational" are not the same thing. Moreover to conflate Ghazali's views with "Islam", which contains no such views despite their becoming the Islamic consensus after his death is laughable.

“But what of the “Golden Era” of Muslim science and learning that flourished while Europe languished in the “Dark Ages”? Chapter 4 makes it clear that the “Dark Ages” are a myth. The “Golden Era” of Islamic science and learning is too. Some Muslim-occupied societies gave the appearance of sophistication only because of the culture sustained by their subject peoples—-Jews and various brands of Christianity (see chapter 14).”

I suppose in technical terms you can't be racist against a religion, but whatever the religious equivalent thereof may be, this is it. To so blithely write off the accomplishments of every single Muslim over the course of the past 1400 someodd years would be laughably absurd if this book weren't, apparently, being taught as non-fiction. I also love that terminology, "Muslim-occupied societies." In the "Golden Age of Islam" the Islamic heartlands in Mesopotamia and Persia had long since nearly completely converted. Would the author use terms like "Christian-occupied Europe" to describe the centuries after the conversion of the Roman empire?

"Nothing went wrong. The belief that once upon a time Muslim culture was superior to that of Europe is at best an illusion."

Historians don't debate which cultures were superior to other cultures. Racists do that.

For some reason iBooks is struggling to copy, on my laptop now, but, to continue:

In chapter 14 under the subheading "Dhimmi culture" after ascribing all of the important cultural, technical and other works ascribed to "Muslims" and written in Arabic he then notes that even those scholars who actually were Muslim were shock! horror! actually ethnic Persians or Syrians. Well which is it? Were the Muslims bad science or just the Arab Muslims? This preposterously racialist.

The description of Averroes as concluding that Aristotle was infallible in contrast with the scholastics in Europe who started experimenting with physics is absurd. I know that there's push back against a lot of the misconceptions about the ordeals of Galileo but Christendom didn't exactly have a love for the scientific method. Also the Scholastics adored Averroes, Aquinas going so far as to give Averroes the honorific of "The Commentator."

"The Islamic world was backward then [in the middle ages] and so it remains."

Again: good. GOD! What is this!?