I mean the Muslims and Syria in particular aren't that industrial or creative. They lucked into it before and wouldn't understand it now.
They didn't understand it then. All they did was know that if you did such and such when making the steel it came out better. They didn't know why it came out better, they just knew it did.
Sure, they lucked into it but many technological breakthroughs are lucked into. Not many are actually the result of folks saying, "This could be done.", and then putting in the sweat and research to find a way to do it.
Oh, come on. They at least have 17th century technology and techniques and that's all we're talking about here. They actually have 21st century technology available to them under the right circumstances, much of it gained in the universities of Europe and the US. The folks in Pakistan are no more advanced than those in Syria, yet they have built and tested functioning nukes.
"... What is the work of genius the first time is the work of a tinsmith soon thereafter. It required genius the first time because it was the first time, and also because technology was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the first primitive computers - Eniac, I think it was called. But today?" Ghosn laughed. It really was absurd. "A videogame has more computing power than Eniac ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model..."
Damascus steel isn't something they invented. Like almost everything else in the Arab / Persian / Muslim world it came from someplace else by way of trade. Notice the article mentions that the swords were made from steel from India, called "wootz." Carbon nanotubes are a variation of carbon spheres, or Carbon 60, popularly known as Buckminsterfullerene or "Buckballs," was accidentally discovered and occurs naturally in candle soot. It's a naturally occuring form of carbon, just one we didn't know about until very recently. Our own engineers stumbled across the nanotube and "wire" variants through largely random trial and error. It's not surprising that it has cropped up in materials like this.
Returning to the idea that they "aren't that industrial or creative," there are Afghan gunsmiths working in the backwater tribal areas who can fabricate, from scratch, a viable replica of an AK-47. We must not make the mistake of underestimating people because they happen to be bloodthirsty psychos or don't own a car. That makes us more vulnerable to them. They have every resource that any other human living today has availble, just a lot less inhibition about using it.