[lady lawyer]

I don't have a huge understanding of this topic. But I believe the high point of the Muslim culture was in the 11th century, when Europe was in the Dark Ages. The Muslim culture preserved a lot of the Greek learning. They probably added things, too. Else, why do we use Arabic numerals?

[Tribune7]

Arabic numerals appear to come from India.

[MHGinTN]

Here is a link you will find very revealing regarding Mohammed's imagination in dictating the koran.

In essence, the Koran has some very interesting characters in it.

Legends say that IDRIS IS OSIRIS THE HERO OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LEGEND.
Egyptian god Osiris and Islamic prophet Idris/ the same!?The Quran claims that Osiris the Egyptian god is a prophet.

Wesir, also known as Ausar and the Greek Osiris, is the Kemetic Name of the Lord of the Dead. He is not to be confused with historical predecessors such as Wepwawet, Yinepu (Greek Anubis), Sokar or Sobek.

Wesir is the son of Geb and Nut. He is married to his sister Aset (Greek Isis) and they have a son Heru (Greek Horus). Much of what is commonly known about Wesir, Aset and Heru comes from the Greek myths of Isis and Osiris. In Kemetic text, Wesir's death is attributed to drowning, not the dismemberment myth created later by Plutarch. The dismemberment myth does not appear until a thousand years later and may not even be Kemetic in origin. Wesir, in fact, was never resurrected as many believe. Wesir is Lord of the Dead and dwells in the Blessed Fields of the Dead.

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/anubis9/page3/Wesir.htm

Here is more on Osirus:

The ancient Egyptian god of the underworld. In Egyptian mythology the god who was ruler and judge in the underworld and the brother and consort of Isis. He is identified with the Nile, and his annual death and resurrection symbolized the self-renewing vitality and fertility of nature. (The Reader's Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary, pg. 1203)

These two sources show that Idris, who is Arabic for Osiris is god of the underworld from Egypt! They might differ on whether Osiris was resurrected but they both agree on the origin of Osiris.

The Koran declares that Idris, or Osiris, who was the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, is:

... a man of truth [and sincerity], and a prophet. And We [Allah] raised him to lofty station. 19:56-57.

Is Osiris the god of the underworld, or a prophet? According to the Quran he is! Remember there is no evidence at all in Islamic history or the Quran to prove that Idris was Enoch. This idea came along later with Muslims who tried to equate Idris to Enoch. This is most embarrassing because it shows that the Quran has fictional characters (to make it even worse, pagan gods) as prophets!

[wideawake]

The Muslims did not have a monopoly on Greek learning nor did they preserve it. The true guardians of Greek culture were Greek Orthodox Christians. Western Christians were cut off from Greek learning by the Islamic invasions which separated Eastern Christianity from Western.

Muslim scholars prepared (faulty) Arabic translations of Aristotle (and little else) which Western Christians became aware of in 1190 A.D. By 1225 A.D. Christian scholars abandoned these texts as faulty and sought higher quality editions in the original Greek. Greek monks in Venice who ran the Muslim blockades provided Western priests with accurate texts. Starting in 1222 this project was underway without any Muslim involvement - and despite Muslim interference.

The myth of Islam as a preserver of Greek knowledge was an invention of the atheistical French Encyclopedists and their precursors like Rameau. They were antithetical to traditional Christianity and lived at a time when French explorers had rediscovered fragments of Aristotelian works translated into Arabic. Their theory became an accepted myth, since it served the rhetorical purpose of making the Roman Church seem backward.

The numerals we use are not actually Arabic - the number system used in Arabic is only vaguely similar. Our numerals are more Indo-Persian than Arabic. The significant difference between Roman and "Arabic" numerals is that the latter have zero as a placeholder, making multiplication and factoring much simpler. These were innovations discovered by Indian mathematicians, however, not Muslims. Indians also invented algebra, an insight that Islam absorbed but eventually abandoned.

The Muslims abandoned speculative mathematics after Al-Qarizmi died. No one followed him and mathematical research became unknown again in Islam. The next major breakthrough in mathematics occurred in Europe, not in Islam - the calculus invented by English and German thinkers.

And the eleventh century was not a "Dark Age". It saw the development of new principles of architecture, musical polyphony, advanced techniques in demography, important advances in legal theory, the growth of sophisticated trading centers in Italy and the Low Countries, the Cluniac revolution and the reorganization of the Church and the Empire.