"A World Without Islam"

Graham E. Fuller has an article in the current Foreign Policy magazine by this title. He makes that point that ethnic Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Palestinians, Jews, Berbers, Kurds, and other ethnic groups would probably still share the lands they now occupy, and that the institutional legacy of Persian, Byzantine, and other empires would still be found in the region had there not been an Islamic empire. He does not say, but perhaps should say that there would still be a physical geography that makes the Nile critical to Egyptian and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers critical to Iraqi civilizations; there must be huge effects of the Mediterranean and Red Sea geography, and the climatology of the world occupied by Islam. There would be an influence of the physical culture that evolved in the region,

It also occurs to me that Fuller does not reflect on the saving and elaboration of Greco-Roman culture that occurred in the golden age of Islam, that in turn reached and affected cultures in the East and the West.

The golden age of Islam made trade and the flow of ideas possible from Asia to the Atlantic. Would Europe have developed as it did without those flows? Would the European explorers have been financed to develop an alternative path to Asia after the fall of Constantinople had there never been a golden age of Islam? How would the world have developed had those explorers delayed a few decades or centuries in discovering the existence of the Americas, and triggering the Columbian exchange?

I have no answers, but the questions are interesting.