Victor Davis Hansen’s book, Carnage and Culture, shows explicitly why Western civilization has been superior to all other world cultures for two and a half thousand years. This page shows just how superior Euro-American culture is by comparing Euro-American achievements to those of the Islamic world (including Europeanized Turkey).

The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral– shackled rarely by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion, or ethics, by anything other than military necessity.
…Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom. They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself. The rare word “citizen” exists in the European vocabularies.
…Because free inquiry and rationalism are Western trademarks, European armies have marched to war with weapons either superior or equal to their adversaries, and have often been supplied far more lavishly through the Western marriage of capitalism, finance, and sophisticated logistics.
…Western capitalists and scientists alike have been singularly pragmatic and utilitarian, with little to fear from religious fundamentalists, state censors, or stern cultural conservatives. [pages 21-22]

The pre-Muslim Arab world did give the West Arabic numerals, which were far superior to Roman numerals for computational purposes. Islamic medical science of the Middle Ages was easily superior to European medicine, which was ridden with superstition and religious dogma. Euro-American Civilization parted company with the Islamic world when it shook off its chains of ignorant superstition during the 17th and 18th centuries. Militant “Islam” still thinks like this:

“In all matters, especially in religion, your reason is a better tool of discernment than all the sayings of prophets and clerics.” The words for which history professor Hashem Aghajari was condemned to death by hanging by an Iranian “religious court.”

“At the very moment [Thomas] Aquinas was telling his fellow Europeans how faith and reason could coexist, his Iranian counterpart, the leading Arab philosopher Ghazzali, concluded that the treasure of ancient texts represented social dynamite. The study of science and philosophy, he wrote, was harmful because it would shake man’s faith in God and undermine the Muslim religion. Accordingly, the ruling caliph of Baghdad, to demonstrate his piety, ordered the burning of all manuscripts in the city’s great library. [Books were then frightfully expensive because they had to be reproduced by hand.] Muslim scientists, tightly controlled by the ruling theocracies, had access to the ancient science texts, but were ordered to use any of the knowledge they gained only for religious purposes” (Ernest Volkman, Science Goes to War, p. 60)

The result of this kind of thinking is that the Islamic world has contributed absolutely nothing of significance to the improvement of the human condition, or to the military sciences, for well over two hundred years. As far as we know, no one from the Islamic world has ever won a Nobel Prize for medicine, physics, chemistry, or literature. Muslim Nobel Laureates are almost if not entirely the exclusive products of Euro-American nations. If we discount terrorist Yassir Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize as the scam and fraud it was, no one from the Islamic world has done anything for world peace either.

The medieval Japanese– who were still parading around with samurai swords in the mid-19th century– realized that there was something wrong with their national attitudes toward outsiders and technological progress in general. Japan grew up very quickly, with children who had grown up in a feudal society living to see (and in fact serve in, as did Admiral Togo) steam-powered ironclad warships while riding railroads and getting their news by telegraph. The samurai vanished but their spirit did not, as shown by the lord-retainer relationship that has served Japanese corporations so well. In other words, Japan discarded the elements of its culture that didn’t work but retained and adapted those that did.

As far as we know, Turkey and Iran are the only Muslim-majority nations that have even tried. The Ottoman Empire imported Prussian advisors in the 19th century and Kemal Ataturk modernized Turkey in the early 20th century. Shah Pahlavi, despite his faults as an autocratic monarch, tried to modernize Iran but was overthrown by medieval fanatics. The bottom line is, however, that most of the Islamic world has yet to earn the right to talk to the Euro-American world on an equal basis. Civilized people talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to understand one another’s concerns and needs. Barbarians must be held at arm’s length, and cultures that sanction domestic violence against women, femicide, religious fanaticism, book-burning, and execution of anyone who advocates reason over religious dogma are barbaric and outside the pale of Civilization.

This is not to say that the Islamic world cannot make the same choice that Japan did and make very profound changes within a few decades. These changes will not come, however, from official Saudi textbooks that define Jews and Christians as apes and swine respectively, Palestinian textbooks that promote hatred of Jews, or medieval Iranian mullahs who threaten to punish rational thinking with hanging.