[pimmen]

The point of bringing up algebra is not to somehow suggest that the Middle East today produces just as much good science and math as Europe or the US does today, or saying that it could only have been discovered in the Middle East, it's to educate people that the most dominant culture has shifted all the time throughout history and to somehow claim that Western culture is the apex of human history and that it could only have been the product of Europeans is extremely ignorant. The 250 years of rapid industrialization in the West is about 2.5% of the time from when humanity started the Agricultural revolution (which started in the Middle East).

What determines which culture will be the most dominant one is not one single factor, and some of them look completely random. For example, China invented movable type printing before Europe but Europe had an alphabet of discrete symbols that were optimized for stone engravings while China's alphabet was optimized for writing by hand quickly and with room for expression. That was one of the factors of why Europe could start the printing press revolution to democratize science and information.

I'm lucky to be living in Sweden in 2017, I would however want to move if this would've been 6th century Sweden.