Is the Wikipedia page on that book wrong in saying that “Al-Ghazali also stated that he did not find other branches of philosophy including physics, logic, astronomy or mathematics problematic,” and attacked only “metaphysics, in which he claimed that the philosophers did not use the same tools, namely logic, which they used for other sciences”?
As so often happens among philosophers, it’s hard to be sure just how much Al-Ghazali was himself an Al-Ghazalite. But whatever his personal beliefs, he seems to have nudged Islamic thought in a nonproductive direction.
I wonder: What was the impact of al-Ghazali’s book? How was it received? How was it interpreted? Was it influential, in the first place?
And - to bring things back to the OP - did it indeed contribute to an non-productive / non-aggressive Islamic world, compared to the all-conquering Europeans?
Science makes it possible for a country to develop more effective weapons. The scientific method requires that assertions be tested experimentally. As long as people thought Aristotle was the ultimate authority they would accept his assertions, rather than finding out for themselves if the assertions were true.
War is an unsentimental judge of the difference between what is true and what is false. It is better to learn the difference in a laboratory than on a battlefield.
We agree on all that.
You were only wrong about one detail - when you claimed, in an earlier post, that the Arabs “never questioned Aristotle’s assertions.”
As I have shown, some Arabs - some prominent Arabs, in fact - did indeed question his assertions. This just never translated into rockin’ the scientific method, developing badass weapons, and conquering the planet.