I disagree with this. If the editorialist means recently, I can see it...but many advances have come from past Islamic empires...mathematical advances for one...
Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Johann Gauss, Albert Einstein were Muslims?
True. I have heard, however, that the Mohammedans ripped off the "zero" concept from India.
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Especially important were Moslem contributions to mathematics, without which the science we take for granted could not have developed. "Arabic numerals" and the concept of zero, both learned from India and dispersed to the world, revolutionized math in the West, as did algebra, a Moslem invention. Moslem medicine was the best in the world, and Moslem alchemy led to modern chemistry. A Moslem musician set out the elements of musical notation. Moslem navigators invented the astrolabe and perfected the quadrant and mariner's compass that made possible the great voyages of the Age of Discovery — as, for instance, the one by Columbus that eventually led to the formation of the United States.
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Once we take that from them they'll get really mad.... (snort!)
Most scientific advances by the Arab world were Pre-Mohammeddan. In astronomy, for example. And also in medicine. These advances and the advancement of science in general, came to a grinding halt under the intellectual oppression of Islam.
Islam was the worst thing which ever happened to the Arab world, and guaranteed they would have no place among the great modern civilizatons.
IMO, their gene-pool has retrogressed into the Cro-Magnon larval stage.