Actually, meritocratic characteristics such as government exams and professional careers occur in China and Rome at about the same time, with the Han Dynasty and the Imperial/Late Republican army.
True! But then Europe went Dark and forgot about it all. Not until the Renaissance did those values re-appear. Until then, the scourge of divine right and heritable titles.
Well, Arabia was never any kind of intellectual hub. You're confusing it with Persia and the Old Roman territories. There is no question that the Islamic world was less backward than the Old Roman West for most of the Early and High Middle Ages, but it must be remembered that most of the individuals we'd credit for this were either 1) Persian 2) Jewish or 3) Christian. Actual Arab Moslems aren't as prominent as one might guess!
Arabs advanced more slowly, but without the manuscripts they preserved Europe would have been starting literally from scratch. There's a reason Italy started the scientific and literary Renaissance: they were the only Western Europeans interacting meaningfully with the Arabs [at the same period, the Spaniards were massacring them]. Salerno and Bologna [the first medical school and university] had large Jewish and Arab populations. Wasn't Salerno allegedly founded by a Greek, an Arab, a Jew, and an Italian? Even if that was a legend, it was testimony to the intersection of cultures. Constantine the African may have been a Christian, but the manuscripts he brought with him were Arabic translations of Greek thinkers like Hippocrates, manuscripts that had been lost in the Fall. What about another great figure who laid the grounds for the Renaissance, Frederick II of Sicily? He may have been a result of Hohenstaufen-Norman interbreeding, in other words, a Northern European, but he learned Greek and Arabic in addition to Latin. He patronized Fibonacci, but he also invited al-Hanifi, the greatest Egyptian mathematician of the time, to his court. Both helped introduce Arabic numerals [which were really Indian]. He was an atheist and he kept a harem of Eastern dancing girls. He founded a university and endowed it with a huge collection of Arabic manuscripts. He was responsible for the Constitutions of Melfi which were the greatest legal documents of the age, on a level with the Justinian Civil Code before and the Magna Charta which came about the same time. Unlike either, it laid the foundations for European religious tolerance. Minorities fared better in Fred's Sicily than anywhere else in Europe. All that in the thirteenth century, Calcagus!
All this is leading up to my point, which is that maybe it took the Europeans to recognize the full value of or make use of [as Nicator said] this new knowledge, but to claim that it was a purely European phenomenon is folly. It is exactly at this intersection of cultures exemplified by Fred II that ENABLED the Renaissance. So, again, John Rhys-Davies is either deliberately oversimplifying the situation, or he just doesn't know what he's talking about.
I mean, the West intellectualized it, but trade was practised since the dawn of time.
What about the
commenda contract system, the first full-service banks, letters of exchange, sea loans, the first insurance companies, and double-entry bookkeeping? Amazingly enough, these are all European innovations, specifically Italian [again!]. Luigi Pacioli for example invented the last of these in 1494. These are the foundations of modern capitalism.
What is unique about Western Christendom is the Church-State conflict which so dominates much of our history. Our form of secularism is a response to that, I think.
Indeed. The greater the conflict, the more severe the reaction. The English are still pretty laid-back about religion, but just look at the French and the Germans!
Also, you've got to face the fact that China did fall behind. Chinese society was simply less adaptable than W. Xdom.
They grew arrogant and
decided they didn't have anything to learn from the rest of the world, and so they closed their borders. And stagnated.
Isn't
that an interesting lesson for the subject we're debating?
Albeit to be perfectly honest, if I was Gimli I'd be more worried about making sure my acting career stayed relavent after my only lucky break.
Actually he acted in a few Indiana Jones movies as well. First Harrison, now Tolkein. No wonder his political views, eh?
I'll be brief, especially since I clearly have nowhere near as much knowledge of this time period as you do 
