Another e-mail:

…you in my opinion ignore major historical factors that go well beyond an internal failure of Islam to make good on its impressive early advances in science and philosophy.
The historical catastrophe of the Mongol invasions was one very concrete problem that reinforced a culturally defensive interpretation of Islam. The unwelcome destabilizing effects of technological innovation on well-developed pre-industrial handicrafts-based economies were another. But the most glaring absence in most conservative critiques may be any recognition of the Islamic world’s own mixed results following strenuous, often frenetic efforts to catch up: the attempted forced marches to “secular modernism” in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, historical centers of Islamic culture. In many instances, the role of the West, broadly defined, has been arguably rather more deleterious than helpful, especially in more recent decades where modernization was seen as uncomfortably socialistic or in any other way favoring or potentially favoring the wrong side of the Cold War. In other instances, especially through Saudi Arabia since World War 2 and Iran since 1979, Western/secular economies have been directly and munificently financing Islamism at its most anti-modern.
In short, the notion that “the East” has developed its diseases all on its own is absurdly myopic. Islamist fundamentalism has been in crucial respects a collaborative effort of the West and East.
Incidentally, these and related ideas are interestingly and accessibly discussed by Tamim Ansary in his recent book DESTINY DISRUPTED – The History of The World through Islamic Eyes, which I believe should be required reading for those who wish to criticize Islam from a perspective that isn’t purely self-serving, ideological, and unintentionally Islamophobic/Orientalist.