With this remarkable intellectual tradition spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, it's no wonder that historians frequently ask why Islamic learning didn't follow the trajectory European science would eventually take. In the words of historian Toby Huff, “The Arab achievement is so impressive that we must ask why the Arabs did not go ‘the last mile’ to the modern scientific revolution.” The Arabs, in Huff's view, “were perched on the forward edge of one of the greatest intellectual revolutions ever made, but they declined to make the grand transition” to the modern scientific
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