Why don’t Muslims want us to know their history, their “hidden” history? Because it is far different from the Islamic Infomercial of our day.
“…the entire concept of an Islamic Golden Age, the three centuries between the seventh and tenth centuries during which the Muslim world enjoyed an altogether higher level of culture than Europe, is little more than a myth. The Golden Age of Islam, as archaeologists have found to their astonishment, has no archeological confirmation.”
The Muslims had “destroyed Classical civilization in Europe through an economic blockade, but in the Middle East, they destroyed it deliberately and methodically.” See here.
Like the Vikings in Northern Europe, the Muslims, throughout the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, plundered towns and cities, destroyed churches, monasteries, and libraries, murdered the men and made slaves of the women and children.
The actual history is well established; it has never been refuted. It is simply ignored.[1]
A current example is the newly opened exhibit at the Science Museum, South Kensington, London, of a thousand years of Muslim science, described as “Islam’s ‘forgotten story.’” With striking candor, to be sure unwittingly, the “forgotten story” is derivative, dependent on others.[2]
[1]See Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, 1996., and John J. O’Neill, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, 2009.
[2] BBC Radio 4, Today, “Islam’s ‘forgotten story,’” 5/24/2010.