People will point to the first 500 years of Islam as a "golden age" full of scientific and cultural advances in the Muslim world. A closer look reveals most of the advances of this golden age were the achievements of the peoples the Muslims had conquered. Once those civilizations died out and Islam had completely taken over the "golden age" ended.
Indeed. Jews and Aramaeans and Persians, who had a long history of scientific discovery. They were Arab-speakers long before they were “Arabs” in any cultural sense. The culture of the region had been a kind of blend of Greek and Semitic thought. Islam, or at least the fundamentalist strain, seems to strip out the Greek influences and to leave the people nothing but the poetry of the Koran and Islamic law. It is always looking backward to the golden days of conquest, nd what the jihadists today are trying to accomplish is to restart the fires so they can consume everything else.