“They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.:
In fact, most of what they “did”, they borrowed from the Hindus.
A couple of books (by Ward-Perkins and Emmet Scott) propose that the decline of western Europe in the Middle Ages was not really due to the barbarian invasions; but to the end of trade in the Mediterranean,
which was a direct result of the Islamic conquest.
The books also note the decline of agriculture and urban life in the entire area from Anatolia to Spain, from, they assert, the same cause.
And Europe recovered once they developed sea routes the muslims didn't control back to Asia and discovered the new world.
It’s also true that what scholarship there was in the Muslim world during that time was only in the more “moderate” parts of the Muslim world, where reformist leaders encouraged tolerance and intellectual curiousity, despite the general Islamic prohibitions against those things.
-——A couple of books (by Ward-Perkins and Emmet Scott) propose that the decline of western Europe in the Middle Ages was not really due to the barbarian invasions; but to the end of trade in the Mediterranean,
which was a direct result of the Islamic conquest.——
Amazing what you don’t learn in our education system....
The Mohammedans had Aristotles writings many centuries before Christendom, yet made little progress with his teachings.
Once Aristotle's writings made their way to the West, medieval scholars, like Aquinas, synthesized his teachings with Church dogma, resulting in the historical apex of scholarship --Scholasticism.
The Muslims who are celebrated for preserving or transmitting and in some cases improving this knowledge were, IIRC, heretics who’d be killed by todays radicals.