The Enlightenment started before the Protestant Reformation when scholars from the Byzantine Empire started bringing in the Greco-Roman learning into Western Europe along with what the Crusaders brought back from the Middle East. In fact, you might say the Enlightenment started the Protestant reformation or at least was one of the causes of it. New technologies, like gunpowder caused a lot of the skilled mechanics developed during Medieval times to experiment and this empiricism fused with the scholarship of Classical Greco-Roman civilization to get a lot of folks to thinking independently.
You're confusing the Renaissance with the Reformation, and in saying that the "Enlightenment started the Protestant Reformation", you're starting the Enlightenment almost 200 years before it actually happened. The Reformation started when Luther put his 95 Theses on the door of the University of Wittenberg in 1517. The Enlightenment, as it is generally understood, didn't begin until the 1700's.
As your post notes, the Islamic/Orthodox Middle East were technologically ahead of Europe for a time. Yet, the Renaissance did not skip them, but the subsequent Enlightenment did. And the major historical/philosophical happening that separated Europe from the Orthodox/Islamic east was the Reformation.