Since you are a Muslim I will ask you the question then...
What has led to the Islamic world being the hotbed for anti-technology and "anti-everything" which involves critical thinking?
The level of ignorance in those parts of the world is at an all time high.
Surely the Islamic world today cannot progress if they keep doing what they are doing today?
There HAS to be a change. Looking back at history as your "proof" doesn't help Islam today progress.
Israel has the smallest yet most powerful military in the middle east. They can shut the whole place down in a matter of days if they want.
See the 1967 Israeli-Arab war.
Arabs should focus more on being technological genius than making cheap bombs and firing cheap rockets over Gaza which is now even ineffective thanks to another technological advancement by US and Israel.
The " Iron Dome" 
Hamas little joy of firing cheap rockets over Israel is now not even effective :obama3:
You have a good question.
Sadly, we have fallen to these lower depths because we have allowed subversive alien thinking to infiltrate Islam. Thinking that was not present with the generations before.
Of course Muslim society was successful initially because of its openness to ideas but sometime in the 13th century we lost the ability to filter out these subversive influences and they have taken root since then. (Probably due to the Mongol catastrophe)
Anexample of this alien thinking is something practically all of us have adopted from birth due to our education and upbringing here now.
It is the separation of knowledge into religious and secular. In fact religion is separated from most subjects and is put in another package, this is something new something that came after the 13th century..
All of our great Muslim minds, Ibn sina, Al Farabi, Ibn Rushd etc etc, started their education in a madrasa memorizing the quran and learning hadith,
most of the muslim scientists were also experts on fiqh and hadith as well as the other areas of science that they became famous for. That could be math, could be inventions, philosophy... there were a lot of advancements during the golden age in these fields. The Muslims acknowledge the contribution of the Greeks and Indians, but the West has not shown the same courtesy.
And the muslims built on and expanded on the previous cultures and made new discoveries.
Even as late as Newton's time, his education consisted on textbooks copied verbatim from Muslim sources as early as the 10th century.
The separation of thought and learning of everyday life into secular and religious was more of a Western thing due to the Church limiting progress. In Islamic history, the people of Islamic knowledge were actually the ones at the forefront of technology and innovation.
After the 13th century, the scholars withdrew dogmatically into religion and study and left the world.. while in Europe the people were rebelling against the stifling influence of the church while feeding in the lost knowledge that flowed into Europe from the Muslim world via the reconquista, the fall of Muslim sicilly and Spain i.e. Al-Andalus and the crusades.
Now look at us today, our scholars are just specialists on the quranic memorization, tafseer and fiqh etc..
while most have no idea about economics, sociology, political science etc etc, they cannot thus function properly in todays world and are of minimal use to the ummah...This right here is why you see the issues in the Muslim world where ignorance now reigns and the paranoia of science is seen as some sort of conspiracy in a lot of places.
This is a phenomena that isn't from religion but from the attitudes of people who crept up in a shell and thought living in that shell and keeping people ignorant would somehow save them. When on the contrary, studying and learning about the world was and a lot of people still see it as a form of worship in studying God's creation.
God willing, when our scholars are also scientists in the forefront of scientific research and are also doctors and engineers then we can see a new fruition of power in the Muslim world, we need to go back to the past, for US modernity is backwards and the past IS modernity... intellectually speaking of course.
We need to go back when the Muslim world produced goods and manufactured items that had no equal in the world in terms of quality, back to when the Muslim craftsman working in his guild was not only working to create but was also performing WORSHIP and remembrance of God with his work.
Those scientists were also not only motivated by curiosity, as Muslims they were also performing worship to allah by studying his creation.
So, thats why you see the Muslims being ignorant and being takers... instead of being thinkers and makers which they used to be.
Colonialism and all that didn't help, especially in Africa... other political BS sidetracks that too as well... plus the disregard for respect between each other in these countries where civil strife is happening is a loss of character, morality and this also comes from a lack of Islamic principles.
We may have a lot of Muslims today but our sheer numbers doesn't mean a thing.
