Why did the scientific revolution happen in Christian Europe and not in the Islamic world?
That’s a very big question. There is no answer that I can give you that would command a consensus of historians of science. My perception is that a number of factors came together so that scientific institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to. At a certain point, the Vatican no longer objected to scientists who examined the physical world. They distinguished between the study of the natural world and the spiritual world. As far as I can tell, this split never happened in the Islamic world. Sure, but that concession by the conservative Catholic hierarchy was done at a point when nobody in science really cared what they thought anyway. It was not as if the Catholics could censor or stop science in the late 19th century. But that happened much earlier. If you go bac
