As I understand it, the “intellectual scholarship” of Islam was merely permitting the intellectuals of the subjugated nations to continue to practice their professions. It had nothing to do with anything Islam brought to the equation. Much like “Islamic architecture” and “Islamic engineering” and “Islamic art” were merely coopted from the conquered peoples.
Colonel, USAFR
You are absolutely correct, and the reporter of this piece from the Baltimore Sun is as ignorant of history as that lady who was head of HP before being fired, who gave a major speech about this very same subject. Why don’t the Christians of the United States know about the evil and the destructive power of Islam, instead of hearing it praised for the actual achievements of those whom it had enslaved?
There was a little more to it than that: because the Muslims conquered both provinces of the (Eastern) Roman Empire where classical Greek and Roman learning was preserved, and India, intellectuals in the Caliphate(s) could combine the fruits of those intellectual traditions.
There was a resulting brief attempt at a birth of empirical science in Muslim lands during the Middle Ages, but it was cut short.
Many of the vaunted Arab intellectuals were Christians, some were Muslims, but the latter ceased to provide any scientific contributions of any note when the occasionalist epistemology and ontology of Al Ghazali won out over the Aristotelian views of Avicennia and Averroes: If Allah is an arbitrary tyrant, and all things, even each instance of water boiling or ice freezing, happen by the direct will of Allah, then there is no basis for empirical science. And that, was the view of Al Ghazali, which is now the dominant view in all of Muslim thought.
Post Ptolemaic Egypt and the largely Hellenic intellectual community at Alexandria is one example.
Much of that scholarship had been flowering under the Byzantine (or eastern Roman) empire until the Muslim conquerers took their libraries and best minds.
Sort of like us asking the Germans to thank us for the flowering of American rocketry under Werner von Braun.
The Islamic "Golden Age" occurred during their period of expansion, where there was a steady influx of loot and slaves who knew how to run a civilization. As soon as their expansion was stopped, and they had to survive on their own productivity, Islamic "civilization" went into steep decline. It was only resurrected when a new source of unearned wealth (oil discovered and drilled by Western companies) came along.