Not really true. The Greek were much more influential - which the Arabs helped spread from their military conquests.
There was a 1000 year period where Greek was the lingua franca of math/astronomy/engineering in the Mediterranean, from about 500 BCE to 500 CE. There was a lot of contemporaneous science done in Persia, with knowledge shared back and forth. But calling these “Greeks” is sort of like calling anyone publishing science in English in 1990 (including Chinese, Russians, Brazilians, ...) “Americans”.
Many of those “Greek” ideas were originally developed during the 3000 years prior, when the centers of mathematics and technical culture were Egypt and Mesopotamia, written in Egyptian, Sumerian, or Akkadian.
Then from about 500 CE to 1500 CE, the centers of scholarship were in India and throughout the Islamic World (Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, ...). The first couple hundred years of Western European mathematics is basically republication of stuff that had been developed by the Arabs hundreds of years earlier.
At some point about 500 years ago Christian Western Europeans (Germans, French, English, Dutch, Italians, ..) got their mathematical shit together, and dominated science for about 400 years. More recently, science and technology happen around the world.
Clearly it some eurocentric revisionist got triggered after knowing more about their academic heritage.
Look up your favourite mathematician here and follow the tree up: http://www.genealogy.ams.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15545122
There are too many references, but here is one to start with: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/islamic-science-and-making-eu...
This is more accurate. But I think their influence was much more far reaching than just passing on Greek literature:
- Before paper, parchments were used. A bible took 3000 sheep or goat to print.
- They adopted Indian numerals and adapted them to the form we use today. Imagine Copernicus calculating trajectories of planets with Roman numbers.
- Nicolaus Copernicus started his studies using almanacs and tables such as the Alfonsine tables, the tables were originally in Arabic and were collected/translated by Alfonso X of Castile in Toledo. They included observations ranging from the days of Ptolomy onwards.
- Many Western discoveries came from innovations in optics (e.g: telescope, microscope). The Islamic empire did great contributions to the field of optics. They experimented with reflection, refraction, lenses, etc... and that is original work with literature to support it.
- Medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Islam...
- Algebra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam#...
For French speakers out there, I saw a great documentary called something like 'History of the world from a middle eastern point of view' in 2 parts that discusses the islamic golden age and its downfall to the mongols. Apparently Bagdad was the place to be before the Mongols destroyed it.
The mongol invasion of the Islamic empire had as an objective made an example out of any nation that did not agree to pay tribute to the mongols. They did this by razing the cities to the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...
The Siege of Baghdad resulted in the death of many scholars, the destruction of the Great Library of Baghdad, etc.
Curiously enough, their most important cultural achievements have survived in our own culture, after the Spanish reconquista and the Latin translations of the 12th century in Toledo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...
The European Reinassance was essentially the assimilation of the cultural wealth amassed by the Islamic empire. Once the Roman Catholic church was influenced by philosophy (e.g: Saint Thomas Aquinas, who studied from translated material), they stopped prosecuting science so severely.