It is not my area of expertise at all.
What would you say is more likely to have a major impact on scietific output?
The fragmentation of empire, frequent warfare and regime change, changing global balance of power, numerous factors causing economic decline and eventual conquest by the Mongols.
The work of a single scholar, read by a tiny proportion of the population, who has no formal authority in Islam or universal following, making some abstract philosophical points about the relationship between religious and secular knowledge that are perfectly compatible with most forms of scientific investigation that somehow influenced the entire Muslim world to stop scientific investigation (even though the Golden Age continued for 150 years after his death)?
Even the idea of an "Islamic" Golden Age is a bit odd. We tend to think of Golden Ages as being the product of a specific society, not that, after the society has ceased to exist, the Golden Age should continue in perpetuity in completely different societies simply because they share the same religion.
I was merely pointing out that quite a few, if not most, historians think that al Ghazali had a major negative impact on the Golden Age of Islam
Most? A handful of scholars whose focus is not Islamic history or philosophy.
If you would like an example of how AGs work wasn't this rabid denunciation of scientific enquiry:
Al-Ghazâlî, Causality, and Knowledge
Peter Adamson
University of Notre Dame
ABSTRACT: Few passages in Arabic philosophy have attracted as much attention as al-Ghazâlî's discussion of causality in the seventeenth discussion of
Tahâfut al-Falsafa, along with the response of Ibn Rushd (Averroës) in his
Tahâfut al-Tahâfut. A question often asked is to what extent al-Ghazâlî can be called an occasionalist; that is, whether he follows other Kalâm thinkers in restricting causal agency to God alone. What has not been thoroughly addressed in previous studies is a question which al-Ghazâlî and Ibn Rushd both see as decisive in the seventeenth discussion: what theory of causality is sufficient to explain human knowledge? In this paper I show that al-Ghazâlî's and Ibn Rushd's theories of causality are closely related to their epistemologies. The difference between the two thinkers can be briefly summerized as follows. For Ibn Rushd, the paradigm of human knowledge is demonstrative science; for al-Ghazâlî, in contrast, the paradigm of human knowledge is (or at least includes) revelation. Yet both remain committed to the possibility of Aristotelian science and its underlying principles. Thus, I suggest that al-Ghazâlî's stance in the seventeenth discussion sheds light on his critique of philosophy in the
Tahâfut: namely, philosophy is not inherently incoherent, but simply limited in scope. I also briefly compare this position to that of Thomas Aquinas, in order to place the view in a more familiar context.
20th WCP: Al-Ghazâlî, Causality, and Knowledge
Calling Tyson ignorant for repeating that claim would not make him ignorant. At worst he is listening to scholars that you appear to be ignoring.
It is indicative of someone not being sceptical but believing what conforms with his prejudices. It wasn't an off the cuff remark but one he made repeatedly in his role as a public intellectual.
He starts with a completely made up story about maths being the work of the devil, setting AG up as an anti-science zealot. False
Then continues to claim that after AG there was no scientific progress in the Islamic world - False. the Golden Age continued for another century and a half after his death and Islamic societies continued to make scientific progress for centuries after that.
