The extraordinary enterprise represented by Muslim
scholarship, science, religion and commerce probably reached its highest level
of achievement at the end of the fifteenth century; the reversal since that
time has been quite remarkable. From around the middle of the sixteenth
century, Islamic learning began to be superseded by a dramatic growth of
knowledge in the West. In this last respect, the Muslim world was actually a victim
of list own success. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 promted a
mass exodus of Byzantine scholars to Rome and other European centres of
learning. They brought with them the learning of ancient Greece, which had been
preserved in the libraries and universities Byzantium, and thereby set in
motion a process of intellectual reawakening which eventually culminated in the
Renaissance, and it was the later which ultimately brought about the eclipse of
Islam as a world power.
One consequence of the Renaissance was broadening of
European horizons in terms of world geography; the great voyages of discovery
at the end of the fifteenth century quite literally put Asia on the map and
enabled Europe to challenge the Muslim hegemony of East-West trade. Vasco da
Gama’s arrival off the Malabar Coast of India, in 1498, marked the beginning of
the end of the long-standing Muslim domination of trade in the Indian Ocean and
beyond, though the battle was fiercely fought in the initial years. With the
Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1508, the fight was over. Little by little,
Muslims began to lose out to the economic, technological and military advances
of the West and the Islamic world entered into a long, slow process of decline,
drawn out over centuries, culminating in colonization by the West and the
slicing up of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War.
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