The period from roughly 750 to 1258 (the Abbasid Golden Age) was not a “medieval” interlude. It was the first fully realized modernity in human history.

It featured:

1. A rational, bureaucratic state administering a continent-sized economy
2. Paper currency, cheques, and double-entry bookkeeping
3. Public hospitals with medical records and clinical trials
4. Observatories operating as state-funded Big Science
5. A translation movement that treated Greek thought as raw material, not scripture
6. A cosmopolitan culture in which Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians collaborated in Arabic
7. The systematic conviction that human reason, properly applied, could improve the world here and now

All the defining traits we associate with “the modern project” existed first in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, not in Florence, Geneva, or London.

Contemporary Western modernity is not the original; it is the mutated, institutionalized, secularized descendant of an earlier Islamic modernity that burned so bright it eventually consumed its own oxygen.

To claim that modernity is a European invention is not just historically inaccurate. It is the intellectual equivalent of a trust-fund kid bragging that he earned his inheritance.

The Islamic Golden Age was proto-modernity: the original proof of concept. Europe merely took the prototype, added crash protection and regular software updates, and then patented the entire thing as its own.