The Islamic Golden Age ran on raw devotional energy and Aristotelian intuition: God is rational, the world is rational, therefore rational investigation is worship. It produced miracles of creativity, but it lacked permanent mechanisms to prevent those miracles from hardening into untouchable tradition.

When a breakthrough (say, Ptolemaic astronomy corrected by Ibn al-Shatir) became consensus, it often became sacred consensus. Questioning al-Ghazali or Ibn Rushd could be construed as questioning the tradition that carried the Qur’an itself.

Europe’s genuine innovation was to institutionalize permanent rebellion against its own achievements:

1. Universities with chartered autonomy and mandatory disputation
2. Peer-reviewed journals and the norm of falsification
3. Legal protections for heresy and blasphemy (slowly, painfully won)
4. The Enlightenment principle that no truth is above challenge, ever

These were not improvements on Islamic science; they were safety rails added after Europe noticed that Islamic science, for all its brilliance, had eventually stalled under the weight of its own authority.

Europe turned the Muslim world’s brilliant sprint into a relay race that could never be stopped.