The standard Western narrative is triumphalist and self-congratulatory: modernity was born in Europe through a series of original genius moments (Renaissance humanism, Protestant individualism, Baconian science). The lecturer dismantles this myth with a single devastating observation:

Every single ingredient of European modernity was first mass-produced in the Islamic world between the 8th and 13th centuries, then consciously imported, translated, and only later refined by Europeans.

1. The Renaissance The recovery of Aristotle? Paid for and executed by Muslim translators in Baghdad and Toledo. The European humanists were reading Arabic-Latin versions produced in Cordoba and Sicily.
2. The Protestant Reformation The core Protestant insight (direct, unmediated relationship with God, scripture in the vernacular, priesthood of all believers) was lived experience for every ordinary Muslim for eight hundred years before Luther nailed anything to a door.
3. The Scientific Revolution Controlled experiment, mathematical hypothesis, peer critique, the very idea that nature is a uniform book written in mathematical language (Galileo’s phrase) were all codified by Ibn al-Haytham in 11th-century Cairo, five centuries before Francis Bacon.

Europe did not invent these ideas. Europe photocopied them, often quite literally (the first printed editions of Ibn Sina and Averroes predate Gutenberg’s Bible in some libraries).

What Europe did invent was not the content of modernity, but the institutional antivirus software that keeps dogma from killing progress.