Well, primarily, the eastern lands had access to paper. That in itself would explain a lot of the observed differences - it is so much more difficult to maintai

Well, primarily, the eastern lands had access to paper. That in itself would explain a lot of the observed differences - it is so much more difficult to maintain an advanced culture when your only writing material is many dozens of times more expensive than what some other cultures had at the time. But to claim that "Muslims were busy reading Aristotle" and that they were "religiously tolerant" seems like almost a child-like simplification. Aristotle was being read not only by Muslims, and certainly not all Muslims were busy reading Aristotle. Not just that, but even in the Middle East, Aristotle was not even accepted unless he didn't contradict faith, as the existence of The Incoherence of the Philosophers seems to suggest (although early on the social climate might have been different). And more generally, the boundaries of "religious tolerance" were massively stricter than what a modern HN reader might expect that term to mean. EDIT: Here's what seems to a good dissection of the impact of Greek philosophy in the Middle East: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6stvd6/what_was_the_impact_of_greek_philosophical_ideas/dlfozfj/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6stvd6/what_...