If European whites were really a genetically superior race, then why had Europe lagged so far behind Islamic culture in technology, art, and science for much of the Middle Ages? Why was it Baghdad that had become the world’s largest and greatest city in the ninth and tenth centuries—a place with superior doctors and libraries, where pale-skinned European emissaries were sent to learn from dark-skinned Arab scholars about astrology, algebra, and the science of distilling alcohol?
