AH Challenge: An Arabic World

Not one of those "Muslims take over the world" crap things. At one time, the Middle East and such was more advanced than Europe. Your challenge is to make it so that Arabia remains more developed than Europe.
 
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Europe never discovers the printing press, remains dumb and backward, and is slowly gobbled up to the east by Asians and the South by Arabia.
 
The Middle East has a very fragile environment which has much more difficulty feeding itself than somewhere like Europe or China. Barring some catastrophic event like the black plague wiping out Europe or geographical PODs (which are ASB) its very difficult to have the Middle East as the dominant region in the world because it cannot support a larger population of merchants, soldiers, and scientists than the Europeans or Chinese.
 

Nikephoros

Banned
Easy. Get rid of the Mongols somehow. Baghdad used to be one of the world's biggest, richest cities. Until the Mongols came. That area still hasn't recovered in population.
 
It also wouldn't hurt to have the Muslims with the Battle of Tours and advance further - perhaps all the way to the Rhine. Now we need to make sure they keep it somehow. That'll lose us England, which should delay the Industrial Revolution. Losing France and Spain by themselves helps stop some of the Enlightenment and Renaissance, which is really when Europe pulls ahead.
 
At least 'development' wise, Europe didn't pull ahead until the 18th century. Militarily I'd say it was sometime in the 17th.

And having a Muslim Europe doesn't fulfill the criteria of the OP. You can still have a more developed Europe, it'll just be a Muslim more developed Europe.

The best way is to find some way to keep the Mongols out of Mesopotamia. They completely wrecked the infrastructure in the area, infrastructure that had been building up for thousands and thousands of years. Even then there's no guarantee, there's simply far more arable land in Europe than in the Middle East. Someone is eventually going to take advantage of that. I mean, the problem in the Dark Ages in Europe wasn't that Europe was backward and ignorant, those were just symptoms. The problem was that Europe experienced a substantial economic and demographic collapse towards the end of antiquity. As the Crusades proved, Europe could still throw its weight around once it started to recover.

You'd need a geographic or climatic PoD to do this.
 
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