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I think what waylaid Islam was the fundamentalist Wahabi religious movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th Century. Indeed, much of what we know about the philosophy of Islamic extremists in 2014 came from understanding this person's work.

I also disagree that Islam created nothing. After all, modern mathematics was pretty much created by Islamic scholars, including our decimal number system, much of modern algebra (after all, the very word algebra came from the Arab word Al-Jabr), and trigonometry. Why such interest? The Arabs wanted to know which direction was the holy city of Mecca was located anywhere in the world so they could face the city in daily prayers, and created a lot of sophisticated mathematics to determine the direction. Indeed, they created the astrolabe--the predecessor to the modern sextant--as an aid to find the direction of Mecca. And that very research became the basis for modern map making and navigation as we know it today.