who was mostly wise, could impose a philosophy that has destroyed Islam as a worthwhile system for the development of knowledge. the notion that the universe is driven by magical intervention by allah is the epicentre of philosophical failure in islam and it develops from the eleventh century onwards. al ghazali, whose influence is ubiquitous, saw science as chaining the hand of god; believing such a thing was anathema.
he's the cork. the cork that makes dogma intransigent and thus prevents the development of ideas. to this day, sunnis oppose the concept of ijtehad, which would permit the evolution of moslem theology and science.
this is just like athanasius in christianity. for athanasius, christ's divine nature imposed dogma in much the same way. for centuries, free thought was punished. orthodoxy controlled by rome crushed curiosity and scepticism. people with ideas were silenced, tortured and burnt at the stake. you could only advance knowledge in favour of confirmation of the church's theory of the universe. no one was permitted to challenge the prevailing conception of reality.
once you oppose change, once you disqualify new theories and disqualify the testing of existing ones, your ideas begin the process of diverging from experience. the more that time passes, the more detached your philosophy becomes from the world.
fortunately for the west, we had bottle openers - folks like copernicus, giordano bruno, galileo, leonardo, kepler, newton and darwin. and then also people like luther in the religious realm.
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