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For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand. Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much "Western" culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.… (more)
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It would seem that the Arabs not only 'saved' the knowledge of the Greeks but developed it far beyond what we are usually taught here in the West. There were a number of great scholars in the various Islamic states whose work reached Europe via Sicily and Spain. Both were at one time Islamic and remained centers of Arab learning for some time after they became nominally Christian. For a number of centuries the rulers and clergy of the Islamic states were overall a very tolerant group that encouraged learning and philosophical inquiry and lived very peaceably with other 'people of the Book' within their borders.
More reading in this area is indicated. Recommended.
This part of the world of course was guided by Islam, yet the influence did not seem to curtail the progress of these early innovators in the same way. The reach of their knowledge was vast and advanced world progress starting with something as simple as the numeral system we incorporate to this day.
The story of this rather amazing history is presented in a chronologic way that ties in with western culture and led to the liberation of thought from the religious constraints, no easy task.