>>Me too. Well we had the Greeks and the Romans, also we had the Arabs to take Europe out of barbarity and..., but sure that doesn't count :)
>
>The Arabs took Europe out of barbarity??

No, they were expelled, specially from Spain, to make room for the democratic institution called Inquisition.

>Yopu mean like all of their advanced cultures we see around the world today? <g> Yessiree.. Give the women a good blue burkah, keep them at home and out of school and if they show do something you don't like just gang rape them. That'll move society forward I'm sure...

Their attitude against women today is far less refined, most of the time actually outright cruel and brutal, compared with the same attitude here.

We're talking the Arab science and culture of the X to XIII or even XV century. These guys invented algebra ("al-gebr al-mukabala", "on moving from one side to the other", by Mohammad Al-Horezmi), several things in medicine (Avicena, aka Ibn-Sino), astronomy (Arabian word zemt was misspelled while copying from one Latin translation to another, so we have zenith today), shipbuilding and navigation ("admiral" comes from "amir").

Their (or our) problem is that they have a religion which wants to be the state, and that the religious laws should be the laws of the land. That may have served some purpose while they were building their nation in the first few centuries, but I believe the idea of shariyat is seriously outdated.

To ease your mind, though, they're not atheists.