>>7284391Depends what you mean. Technology is kind of a meaningless metric to measure progress by, and hard to define. The Byzantine Emperor had a barber's chair. Does that mean anything?
Socially they were way "ahead" in the sense that urban life wasn't really interrupted aside from the same plagues and economic decline that hit everyone else in Late Antiquity. They had cities and fluid, regular commerce, and Western Europe basically just didn't, aside from really debatable examples. The West had more intellectual life going on than people usually link, and people have pointed to about 37 different mini-"renaissances," but Classical Islam had a great cultural flourishing and lots of intellectual exchange based on conscious continuance of Greek philosophical and scientific thought.
Technologically they were probably better off, since they lived in cities a lot more, and had interesting things like public health buildings and infrastructure way beyond what a Carolingian monarch would have. But it's more the social technology that was ahead. Even Charlemagne would have been amazed by the kind of direct control and mobilising ability his penpal Harun al-Rashid had by comparison. Charlemagne built a dinky court in Aachen and just a few decades later the Abbasids decided to build Samarra. There's a dropoff.
