And No Religion, Too?

One-thousand years ago, Baghdad was a city in which frontiers of scientific discovery were opened.  A couple-hundred years past the advent of enlightenment, religion took off and deemed algebra a product of the devil.  Move forward to this day, we need to ask ourselves: had the knowledge-based society proceed unchanged, or at least free from oppression in the hands of faith, what staggering discoveries could have been developed there?  What valuable scientific insight, or astounding intellectual breakthrough have we lost? And, would the city have suffered the same injustice and economic strife, in the way that it continuous to do so today, had scientific curiosity grown unsuppressed, had evidence based reasoning etched the fabric of its government?