1. The classical world and its learning was still intact throughout the Mediterranean and Europe prior to Islam. Literacy was the norm.
2. Islamic civilization did not begin to produce anything until three centuries after the conquest.
#1. Classical civilization was severely messed up well prior to Mohammed. The limited civilization still hanging on in the Eastern Empire was severely damaged during and following the reign of Justinian by: J's attempt to reconquer the West, which destroyed the West while bankrupting the East; a massive plague under J, probably worse than the Black Death; repeated civil wars in the Empire; decades-long war between the Empire and Persia which utterly exhausted both combatants morally and physically, leaving both vulnerable to Muslim conquest. During this war the Persians conquered Egypt, leaving them as at least possible causes of the destruction of the library.
It is reasonable to consider the Muslim conquest of these two civilizations not so much a conquest but more an occupation of two civilizations that had already killed each other. It is highly relevant that there was apparently no resistance by the people in most areas the Muslims conquered, but only by the State and its armies. The State had quite apparently already lost its people's allegiance.
#2. This one is just weird. I've never seen anything similar proposed. We have extensive contemporaneous accounts from Byzantine and Western sources of the glories of Muslim civilization. PC doesn't go back that far. No references are provided to back up these amazing assertions. Here's a link to an article about a major mosque built starting in 670. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosque_of_Uqba
The author makes some potentially valid points about the presently-accepted narrative being aimed at glorifying Islamic history so as to denigrate the West, but I think he leans too far in the other direction and falls off his horse.
Disagree. The cities of the West were much decayed, their nobility fled into the countryside with their wealth, to hide it from the imperial tax collectors and the trading class taxed into near-nonexistence. The high-cultural appurtenances of civilization will have suffered disproportionately, surviving mostly as private libraries and Kunstzimmer kept by rusticating sub-Roman nobles like Sidonius Apollinaris and other remnants of the plutocratic Late Roman senatorial class.
Viticulture and olive orchards continued in the early Dark Ages, but so to say, is not to say that they flourished, or that they enjoyed anything like the prosperity and security of 300 years before, much less the 200 years before that; and tellingly, land-use patterns in sub-Roman Spain show a marked shift toward locations near water, indicating possibly a need to escape up or down rivers at a moment's notice. Similar land-use changes are seen in Britain, where some villas continued to be "occupied" -- but by task-oriented activities, while actual occupation (as in, I live and sleep here) moved to hilltop settlements.
“The state had apparently already lost its people’s allegiance.”
I was reading a history of Cairo. Apparently there was so much internal fighting, that they were glad to have the Muslims come in and settle things down.