I think that the term westernize does only reference technological and scientific process and though in terms of military strength and wealth Western Europe overtook China only after the timeframe there are several strands of technology and science which started to progress at a more rapid pace in the west than in the east. For example, it has been argued that the great gunpowder armies that unified Japan into the Tokugawa shogunate was a European influence and there must have been a reason that European influence was strictly controlled in Japan. Chinese calendar and astronomy was influenced by Jesuits, especially Johann Adam Schall in the early 17th century. Join-stock companies and banks come to mind as well. And of course European conquests in the east started in the 17th century as well and inside the time frame of EUIII Europeans had established themselves in India as well as Indonesia. This is not to claim any sort of superiority, but there were many signs of European influence making a difference in technology and science in Asia and Africa.
On the other subject, the influence of the islamic world on Europe was huge and it is not really a disputable question. They passed arithmetic and arabic numbers to the west, which were originally imported by Fibonacci and without which the development of economics would have been next to impssible. Most inventions from China and India were transferred by the islamic world, among these paper, compass and gunpowder. With the collapse of Western Roman empire most knowledge and thought of the ancients were lost in western Europe, not necessarily because of christian prejudice, but simply because the institutions that took care of that tradition disappeared and the whole literary culture of the Roman empire with it. For example Galenos or ancient medicine in general was known only as fragments and traditional remedies, at times gathered by a learned monk or scholar(same thing really) into a compilation, but without any structure or theoretical understanding. It was only through the golden age of islamic culture 10th to 12th century, which coincided with the scholastic revival of the high middle ages, which enabled the west to reacquire greek and roman knowledge, among these the corpus of Aristotle, Platon, the Hippocratic Corpus and Galenos, which in time led to the development of the empirical method and the scientific method as the centuries passed. The importance of thinkers like Ibn Rushd(Averroes) and Ibn Sina(Avicenna) should not be underestimated, they not only worked to preserve greek philosophy and learning, but also developed it and made it their own and through their annotations made possible the achievements of Aquinas, Albert the Great, Duns Scotus and Occam. Newton once said that he stood on the shoulders of giants. If you go down the tower of bodies, at one point you will find only islamic and jewish scholars there. So dissing the arabs ain't wise. They're solid.
