Maybe as population density increases in Syria, Iraq and Anitolia via railroads, modern medicine, etc they can eventually become factory suitable?
Well, they did OTL, just after the Ottoman period.
Why where Turks (and presumably other muslim ethnic groups) so uneducated compared to their Christian peers?
Bad timing and bad geography is the main reason I think.
I go into more detail below.
Writing and Arithmetic were secondary.
Then the memorization of Hadith. Once into the teens, other scholarly fields could be researched, but mostly into more study on the religious works and hiw they relat to Sunni Law. Church and State were/are inseparable under Islam.
And Oxford was until relatively recently Catholics/then Anglicans only and the vast majority of courses taught were theology of some kind.
The whole concept of what a country was and how the monarchy worked in Christian Europe was deeply entwined with Christianity. Even today, many ideas that we take for granted are based on foundations that have as an integral part medieval Christian ideas and assumptions. We in the West are so used to them that we rarely even realize they are there. (And for that matter, we have Roman religious concepts down there in the foundations - as did the Ottoman Empire. So it's not like either Christianity or Islam are special in the way they become integral in how certain things are shaped.)
So up until about 1600 the Christian and Muslim worlds weren't that different. I think where things change is that Christianity has an extremely violent schism during the Protestant reformation, which got thinkers looking for other options. There's not really anything quite as bad in Muslim history, and the Sunni-Shia split only gets real bad fairly recently in history. And there's a flood of resources into Christian civilization from plundering the Americas, especially plundering them of useful food crops that can allow European peasants to grow more food. And that of course means that at a time people are having questions there are new resources that can fund seeking answers to those questions so new universities that are much less theological and much more philosophical (and eventually technical universities) start popping up.
So Europe had been shaken up, but populations and resources are rising, but in the Middle East, something really bad happens (probably disease, but as I've said before, we don't really know) so resources contract extremely sharply just as Europe is starting to boom. In the Persian empire, the disaster is so bad that the clergy and their informal advice networks are quite literally the only pillar of civilization left standing, so in the 19th Century the advice networks congeal into one of the most hierarchical clergies on the planet. While people might be having questions, resources are contracting and Madrasas are closing or are being turned into hollow shells by corruption (which can't be fought as well because there are less resources for that too). By the time the Ottomans and Persians are starting to recover, they can't, because Europe is now so much further ahead that they are pushing into even places that enjoyed a prosperous 18th Century like China.
fasquardon