This is essentially a shower thought that I had today while driving and it’s not meant to be Islamophobic. I don’t think it should be particularly controversial to point out that since the European Renaissance, Islam has become more conservative and less tolerant of science.
I’m just wondering why in its early days, the Middle East and greater Islamic world saw a long period of progressive thought and scientific/mathematical discovery, and what happened to make this period end relatively suddenly.
Did Muslims specifically reject the changes they were seeing in post Renaissance Europe?
Was there some inherent part of Islam that encouraged scientific enquiry but only so far as it didn’t challenge the religiously enforced view of nature?
Was it more of a cultural shift than a religious one that caused the start and/or end of the Golden Age?
Was it purely caused by the Mongol invasions? This seems to be the common explanation, but surely just having libraries in Baghdad burned only causes some knowledge to be lost, but not necessarily the thirst for knowledge. Why not rebuild the libraries and try and fill them back up with new discoveries?
Well, the thing is whatever Empire/State is leading the world ends up being the politically dominant one ends up leading the world in Sciences as well. I mean I can't list examples right now but even the Mongol Islamic empires (After all the destruction in the end 3/4 Mongol state rulers themselves embraced Islam) probably made contributions to science as well. Not to say there wasn't a setback - so many books (highly expensive objects at that time) in Baghdad alone were destroyed that the river turned black from all the ink.
And even during the Gunpowder Empire Era at lest the military equipment of the three major Muslims empires were quite advanced compared to others. Then Europe became the world leader, and now research in US dwarfs that in Europe.
(For Islamic legal thought though - well, despite what many countries claim there isn't a single country with a constitution based on Shariah. At most, European - or in some cases Soviet - ear constitutions with some stuff from Islam thrown in. As the system isn't in practice, how will it develop? After all there isn't any Church like institution in Islam that would work on this stuff independent of any government.)
In a way, you can say most Muslim countries still haven't even stabilized since the colonial era. For Muslims in the west - or those privileged enough to go to the west for their education - their thirst for knowledge is probably similar to others. And Muslim countries are not leading the world but they don't just ignore Science either. Iranian nuclear program is even a major concern for the US. (Not to say you don't have Muslims who - just like some Christians - think evolution somehow contradicts existence of God or something. Even though Darwin himself was a Christian and similar theories were presented by Muslim scholars in the past as well.)
[And don't worry this isn't Islamophobic at all. Many Muslims wish to answer this as well. But I doubt this is a doctrinal thing.]