A Warning from the Ruins of Golden Ages past

Recommendable as far as the brief overview of history is concerned, but quite wrong as to the application to current affairs.

"... There was a time, not so long ago in historical terms, when Baghdad and Cordoba were [...] intellectual centers of the world. Arab and Muslim scholars pioneered medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy. These were not just randomized bursts of brilliance; they formed the engine of human progress for centuries.

Then came the counterrevolution. In the 11th century, the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali published The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a sweeping attack on rationalist inquiry. With that single work, he helped turn the tide against thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Al-Farabi—giants of logic, science, and metaphysics. The rationalist school was branded heretical. Revelation trumped reason. And so began the implosion of once great civilizations.

The Andalusian polymath Ibn Rushd (Averroes) tried to fight back, famously defending reason in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. But he lost. And with him, the Islamic world lost its intellectual edge. It passed the torch to Europe—and never took it back.

Europe, too, once went dark. After Rome fell, the continent descended into centuries of intellectual stifling. The Church persecuted heretics, criminalized curiosity, and policed thought with the threats of pyres and gallows. Bruno was burned at the stake. Galileo silenced. And the pursuit of truth was reframed as a threat to moral order.

Ironically, it was through translations of the very Muslim philosophers condemned by the Islamic world that Europe began to reawaken. The Renaissance was not a divine miracle. It was the rediscovery of the idea that reason, not doctrine, drives human flourishing.

Civilizations across time have repeated this fatal mistake. Under the Qing dynasty, China’s imperial court executed scholars for misinterpreting Confucian texts. Innovation became dangerous; conformity, sacred. The result? China missed the Industrial Revolution and became a subject of Western colonization.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin decimated scientific disciplines he deemed ideologically impure. Geneticists were imprisoned, physicists vanished into thin air, and entire fields were replaced by pseudoscientific dogma. The cost was measured in lives lost, knowledge buried, and a superpower that ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own ignorance. ..."

A Warning from the Ruins of a Golden Age "History shows that every society that silences its thinkers signs its own death warrant"