Islamic education system did not collapse; it imploded in the 17th century, leading to a catastrophic shift in knowledge production that ultimately led to the collapse of the three apparently powerful empires, which controlled the traditional lands of Islam: the Ottomans (ca. 1299–1922), the Mughals (1526–1857) and the Safavids (1501–1736), who at that time held more global wealth than all other empires together. As that transforming century traversed its course, another massive transformation started to take shape in Europe—a phenomenon that would further accelerate the collapse of institutions, and the decline of economic and political power of the Muslim world: Europe woke up from its slumber of centuries to a resounding blast that would untie its connection with the vestiges of its civilization with Christianity. This revolt would, within a century, result in the pronouncement of “death of God.”

The century is, however, more important for understanding the shift in global power through the work of the first scientists of the Scientific Revolution, which included Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Pierre Fermat, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It was also a period of some of the greatest inventions which began to transform the world: electricity, telescope and microscope, higher-order calculus, laws of universal gravitation, Newton’s Laws of Motion.