Yep and then they decided religion is more important than science and stagnated to modern day... There's a lesson there.
While renaissance started to steamroll west into the scientific future while the world of Islam stagnated, the story of Iran is far more complex than that of a continuous medieval theocracy which the brief statement above suggests (intended or not).
Before 1979 coup Iran was a more or less secular modern state and not a theocracy.
But it was destablized before that by the 1959 coup backed by UK and US interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
As an outsider (non-Persian) I feel Iran would have been evolved into an interesting ally for the US in the long term, if we hadn’t meddled in their affairs all those years ago.
There was a famous and nuanced published discourse between a philosopher named Al Ghazali and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) on the merits and failures of knowledge.
The observers of the discourse basically warped it into science vs. religion battle and as with all things with binary fanbases one school of thought had to prevail over the other. The delicate harmony between religion and knowledge shattered.
As the Middle East has learned and continues to learn the dangers of the spiritual ungrounded by knowledge, the West is now learning the dangers of knowledge unelevated by the spiritual.
Such as? Cause from where I stand it seems science is trying to save the world from global warming and spiritual leaders are busy protecting oil money and denying there's any danger :)
All the talk about "spiritual balance" eventually ends with "hate gays, oppress women, endorse slavery, kill nonbelievers". If that's the benefits of spiritual balance then good riddance.
I am a non-expert on the topic, but I think for example Native-American spiritual tradition has always considered industrial scale modification of the natural environment as a bad thing.
Special prize for energy companies for funding skepticism towards climate science because it was obvious 40 years ago that most of the oil we've dug out and burned really should have not been.
I suppose. But scientific revolution reduced human suffering considerably by doing so, for example starvation in most of the world stopped and vaccination saved millions of lives. Science solves on problem, possibly causes another and then solves it, etc.
The problem with religion is that it only creates problems and invents justifications for why they are natural and good.
No, that was religion (or one particular religion) and its adherents. Remove the religion and the simplification ceases to be a factor, hence the simplification isn't really a factor, only what is necessary gets to be called a cause.