[Rivkin]

Chis:

Thank you for your praise.

Concerning "oriental" armies there are two opinions that one can find in most of contemporary literature:
In the "orientalist" period easterners where often seen as people whose purpose was to prolong the 7th century lifestyle as much as possible. They would spend their life walking around, beating themselves with chains, screaming "la allahu ilh Allah". Their weapons were inept, their tactics was savage. Typically this is attributed to the racism of victorian englishman, but one can sometimes find much harsher words in the works of ataturkists.
Then in 80's everything was reverted - christian were now seen as dirty people who burned the jews and lived in huts, while muslims became great philosophers who fought for poetry, tolerance and preservation of classical studies. Each and every invention of the western world was seen as stealing of something eastern - american constitution was seen as an inept copy of Cyrus' cylinder, universities a flawed imitation of great medreses and so on.

I think that one should read as less as possible recent literature and direct his/her attention to the original sources. You will find that "orientals" and "westerners" actually respected each other and were quite able to find numerous flaws (perceived or real) both in their own society/military and that of their opponents.
Here is my personal opinion:
There were numerous differencies between east and west - east had a poweful export of spices, opium, sugar, silk, precious stones and so on, while west was in general more poor. In the east the money spending and power was more concentrated in the hands of the military elite (as Macciavelli points out among turks one just has to be liked by the military). As a result eastern military was much more expensive than their western counterparts. Mail, decorated with gold, beautiful swords, numerous horses was a typical pocession of a warrior in the east, but far more scarce in the west. Easterners praised bow and horse above all and had little infantry, while it was the opposite in the west. Even in XIXth century a frenchman who would kill a mamluk typically would gather 2000-10000 franks worth of gold and weapons from the body, an outstanding sum. Easterners also had far better intelligence - they were used to Steppe warfare where cities would move overnight and the victory was achieved by knowing where your enemy is, while in the west everyone knew where is the castle and where is the bridge.
However while in the west the military balanced between local militia, professional nobleman and foregin mercenaries (Macciavelli "History of Florence" tries to illustrate the whole fragility of such balance), eventually resulting in a formation of an army which to some extent incorporated all these elements, imbued with not nessesary the best, but common training and tactics, in the east the situation was radically different. The history of the east is that of power of usually nomadic "savages" over settled communities. Iranic hordes destroyed Assyria, arab nomads devastated now "culturized" Iran, Turks replaced "culturized", but per Ibn-Khaldan now "lazy and decadent" arabs and caucasian "savage" tribes de facto replacing or at least partially substituting turks.
As a result islamic army consisting mostly of two parts - kochari, tribal nomads who were paid per operation and given the spoils and mamluks/ghulams/yanissarians who were taken mostly as slaves from "martial nations", i.e. turks, caucasians, later - balkans, given more or less standard training and formed their own, usually somewhat elite units. There was time during early mamluk reign or among mongols where islamic armies would be highly disciplined, but this typically did not last for too long being replaced by "tribalism", for example among mercenary units of different origin or commander.

There is a very good book by Ibrahim Muteferrik, "Usul al-fikam fi nizam al-umam", loosely translated as "the basics of nations", which tells about the inability of Ottoman army to reform - it is a long book so I will not quote but it tells that in old time arabs, turks, franks (i.e. westerners), hindus all would just bring the whole bunch of people who essentially never trained with each other before (since being taken from different lords or, in the east, tribes) split them roughly in three, put some officers over them and march onto each other. Now westerners have an army, i.e. units which train together with the same tactics, with well defined "line" and so on, but in the east besides yanicheri (ochagi) units the rest of the army is still tribal, with no perception of cohesiveness. He says that firearms are not as important as that these tribals are unreliable and see their tribal interests above all, live by plundering the settled people (btw a lot of areas in the middle east became nearly completely unpopulated by the end of XVIIIth century since the "tribals" lived by spoils, i.e. would kill all the cattle, burn cities and sell locals into slavery). The "tribals" are brave and vicious, they despise danger and therefore always charge the enemy, even if it is a stupid thing to do. They can not coordinate their forces and have no idea during the battle what other units are doing (interestingly the ancient persian army seems to suffer from the same flaw - some of their units could break Alexander's line but spent their time plundering his camp, while the rest would be slaughtered on the battlefield). He also says that in the army one should not rely on quality of armour or weapons, since the most needed things are discipline and organization.The book is filled with curses towards christians, but yet praises them for their thought and knowledge. It ends up with a typical late ottoman phrase that Osman family instead of studying sceinces spends time fueling ignorance and religious fanaticism.

Concerning "pattern" swords - one can find some uniformity in the weapons of eastern armies since very old time, however patterns per se is a "modernization" phenomena and mostly occur as a blind imitation of western weapons (i.e. XIXth century).

All related here is my personal opinion.