Egyptians were rather clever before they got the moslem disease....
This slur indicates a complete lack of historical perspective.
The Alexandrian educational complex although in Egypt, was Greek. The next educational leap actually came out of the Islamic conquest.
Your own Western thought sprang from Arab scholorship discovered during the Crusades.
Source?
The great scholarship of the Mohammedans was almost all due to Christians, Jews and converts. The caliphs and sultans took Christians and Jews and a few Zoroastrians to be their advisers and viziers. Most, not all, were converted to Islam or feigned conversion. Some of these stars were children of the original converts. The scholarship consisted mostly of translation into Arabic of the Greek texts from Alexandria and Antioch and Edessa, etc. that preserved much before the Islamic destruction of originals.
What "Arab" scholarship would that be? Plato and the Eliatics were merely rediscovered; Arab philosophic "scholarship" is still defined by a single person - Alfarabi.
Nope, not even close.
I believe the mohamedan invaiders burned the library to the ground.
"Your own Western thought sprang from Arab scholorship discovered during the Crusades."
What complete b*ll*cks.
Um, make that Western thought re-discovered. The Arabs of that era were still intellectually living off the plunder of Christian Civilizations they had overrun. It did help snap us out of the 'Dark Ages,' as did the Byzantine refugees from Islam who flooded into Europe, particularly the Italian City States.
The Muslims are owed a debt for preserving such Classical Knowledge as they did, and should also properly be castigated for that which they destroyed or forgot. Note I say "Muslims," not Arabs. Many of the "Muslim Best and Brightest" were actually forcibly converted Christians, and especially Jews.
Intellectually speaking, Islam has been an intellectual curse and a civilizational retrograde movement in those countries unlucky enough to have fallen to Arab conquest.