Going to r/worldnews to learn about Islam is a bit like going to stormfront to learn about Judaism.

The Arabs, before the advent of Islam, were considered to lack such value that neither the Romans nor the Persians even bothered to invade them. On the other hand, the Arabs looked at them as being invincible superpowers, never to be provoked.

The Arabs really cared about 2 things:

• Genealogy: Your relations made the difference between life & death, it defined loyal lines.
• Poetry: The Arabs mastered arabic. Language was their honey. It was how they recorded their history, how they influenced public opinion, how they built (or destroyed) reputations (or tribes), how they bragged or loved or satirized.

Anyway, my point is that only after the advent of Islam did these same pagans spawn an intellectual explosion of trade, research in countless disciplines & sciences, art, etc. In Knowledge Triumphant, Franz Rosenthal observes that:

"the Islamic civilization is one that is essentially characterized by knowledge ('ilm), for knowledge is one of those concepts that have dominated Islam and given Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion"

p.s. In case you want more ==> [Subdivisions of Knowledge in Islamic History] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I722oPzk8) via Abdal Hakim Murad (7 min.)

Obviously characterizing the ethno/religious character of several centuries of a rather amorphous "Golden Age" is difficult, but a few features are worth bringing up:

1. the extraordinary role that the region around Bukhara/Khurasan played in this era. Politically, culturally, and religiously people from that region keep popping up in huge roles. Nizam al-Mulk, Omar Khayyam, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Al Farabi, etc. are all coming out of what would today be eastern Iran. This east Persian characteristic of the era also extends to those who didn't leave behind writings, as Persians were apparently the most sought after teachers for the newly built madrasas across the Islamic world.
2. Nonetheless, the output of the most prominent works was still in Arabic.
3. As far as an Islamic character goes, many of the writings of these philosophers might be characterized as a proto-scholasticism. They are, as Aquinas would with Catholicism a few centuries later, attempting to apply rationalist neo-Platonist philosophy onto an Islamic framework. Also, one of the major vehicles for this golden age was the founding, often credited to Nizam al Mulk, of madrasas (i.e. schools of higher education, usually teaching religious law) throughout the middle east. Within a century of their introduction the number of madrasas had exploded, such that a major city that at the start of the 11th century might have one or two by the middle of the 12th would have almost a hundred.
4. The importance of urban centers, particularly Baghdad. Marshall Hodgson describes Islamdom in the middle periods as "agrarianate." That is, wealth is primarily created by agricultural production but political/cultural life is focused on urban centers. This is for a number of reasons, but the effect was that although much of the "Golden Age" was overseen by Turkic dynasties the cultural drivers in society remained the Arab urban classes of scholars, merchants, bureaucrats, etc.

All of that said, I would emphasize once again the difficulty in making simple characterizations of the era, as your assessment will depend in large part on what criteria you're looking at. If you look at the major architectural works they tend to be mosques, and they remain extraordinary examples of cultural production, but are obviously religious. The poetry of the Abbasid era on the other hand, exemplified by Abu Nuwas, is downright irreligious, describing the poets love for pederasty and wine (often at the same time.) Then you have the philosopher scientists, forming, as I've mentioned, a sort of scholastic accommodation between Greek philosophy and Islam. However you could also look at the often Christian early figures in the Translation Movement as being the really instrumental figures in that their work preceded everything else. On the other hand, they didn't introduce anything nearly as innovative as al-Ghazali, or Ibn Sina, both clearly writing as Muslims.

So it all depends. Basically that ISIS thread you mentioned was a total mess. A lot of bad history there.

edit: dangling modifier.

The Islamic Golden Age is unique because it can be almost entirely attributed to Islam itself.

As u/AndTheEgyptianSmiled mentioned, the Arabs, pre-Islam were nomadic desert people who couldn't care less for knowledge beyond poetry. With the rise of the caliphate in the 600s and 700s, Arabs were now part of the same polity as Greeks, Persians, Indians, Copts, Berbers, etc. The combined knowledge of all those previous nations and empires could then be centralized at one location (The House of Wisdom in Baghdad). Before Islam, an Indian would have no reason to go to Constantinople to study Aristotle's works, but in the new order that Islam brought about, borders were gone and interactions between previously distant people became commonplace. Most scientists of the Golden Age were in fact not Arab, but Persian. True, they wrote mostly in Arabic, but that was because it was the lingua franca of science. Similarly, most scientific research today is conducted in English, but we wouldn't call it English science or an English golden age.

More importantly however, Islam itself hugely emphasizes gaining knowledge. The Prophet Muhammad spoke numerous times about the importance of gaining knowledge as a method of gaining the pleasure of God.

Examples:

*"Whoever travels on a path seeking knowledge, God causes him to travel on a path towards Heaven."

*"Seeking knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim."

*"Knowledge from which no benefit is derived is like a treasure out of which nothing is spent in the cause of God."

So for the Muslims, advancing fields like science, math, and astronomy was more than just a secular endeavor for the sake of knowledge. It was seen as an act of worship directly from Islam itself. It would be very difficult to argue that the giant outpouring of knowledge from around 750-1258 would have happened without the unity that Islam provided coupled with the emphasis Islam places on knowledge itself.

Up into the 3rd Caliphate, the Abbasids, one of the few dynasties sympathetic to Shi'ism.

That dynasty tried to borrow from the learning of the past, which was mostly Greek and Persian (i.e. Byzantine & Sassanian). A lot of science/jurisprudence/philosophy/civil administration/military; so intimidating was this legacy from the past that the Arab/Muslim scholars had to come up their own local versions (e.g. Hanafi jurisprudence) to counter the influence from the past and to have "legitamacy"

One of the things that the Abbasids tried to borrow from the Greek was the pursuit and investigation of 'Reason' as a basis of interpreting the world.

While this was all happening, the Caliphate was using all the legacy inherited from their non-Islamic 'predecessors' to prosper and expand.

Agriculture, technology, literature, law, government/administration, the sciences, military sciences; all advanced under the Abbasids.

This was not to last however, the dynasty was overthrown by traditionalists who rejected 'reason' as un-Islamic and untraditional.

Then w/ a state of civil war over who secession caused a great decline in the known world of Islamic civilization.

But why ?

In the Koran, it says that Islam is immutable, that it cannot 'change'. This is interpreted as innovation in Religion is forbidden and I guess this ends up applying to everything else. So the seeds of decline in Islamic Civilization is thus 'built-in' and inevitable.

Which explains why, Islamic civilization has been doing so poorly since the 15th century. They have never had a Renaissance nor the Age of Enlightenment ("islam is immutable).

They are however allowed to borrow w/o question from the Kaffir/Ferangi, hence the use of IEDs, AK47s, cell phones, and the Internet.

Read up on your Bernard Lewis about all this stuff

Not very.

The golden era came about because of the embrace of Islam, there's no question of that. By taking over so much territory, the Islamic Arabs, as a military force, created the preconditions for the onset of the golden era. But after that, things are more complicated, and not contingent on Islam at all.

Once the Abassids rose to power they had this leader, al-Mansur, who was obsessed with Persian culture (a region they controlled at the time). He wanted to Persianize himself and his comparatively uncultured Arabic brethren. But the Persians had derived much of their culture from their absorption of the Greek intellectual culture. The Persians themselves had an influx of intellectuals in the 5th and 6th century due to the early Byzantine empire exiling pagans, Nestorian Christians, and closing down Pagan schools, such as the Neo-platonic academy of Athens. I.e., all the smart guys from the nearby Byzantine empire had fled and made a new home in the adjacent Persia who welcomed them with open arms.

Anyway, back to al-Mansur: basically, he was very successful in lots of border skirmishes with the Byzantine Empire, but rather than gaining territory, he picked up a lot of loot as a condition from the peace treaties he forced the Byzantines to sign. With this he basically funds the Caliphate. He had so much money left over he decided to buy up books of any intellectual value from all over the Byzantine Empire, bring them back to the Caliphate and have them translated. Apocryphally, this is said to have taken place in Baghdad in a place called the House of Wisdom (bayt al-Hikma), however, the real purpose of this place and its scope of existence is reasonably disputed (see: "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society"). Also many works had already been translated in Persia (though into Pahlavi and Syriac, instead of Arabic). Though, apparently it is known that the translations did take place in Baghdad. Another factor is that the Arabs had suddenly gained access to the Chinese technology of paper. With this they were not resource limited in the production of books; they could make them as fast as they could be written.

Anyhow, both the act of performing these translations, and the product of these translations caused an intellectual culture to spark. At this point, this phenomenon isn't really connected to Islam specifically. It was just being practiced by people whose official religion was Islam. Of course, astronomy was used to figure out where Mecca was from any position in the world (in Islam you have to pray in that direction). And Al-Khwarizmi's algebra was used to deal with Islamic inheritance laws. But these were fairly minor uses of the rather massive intellectual material they had at their disposal at this time. Those more steeped in Islam tended to come to different conclusions about the material world. Fortunately, those people didn't hold sway as far as the intellectual culture was concerned.

Over in the western side of the Caliphate, the Spanish territory was taken over by the older Umayyad lineage (the ones that the Abassids deposed in their rise in the east). Their early legacy is noted for being extremely tolerant of other religions (oddly not true of the prior Umayyad leaders of the east). They too were making a mint from border skirmishes to the North of Spain. But they became envious of the rising intellectualism occurring in the east, so they bribed intellects to come and bought up books from the east for their own libraries. They started from behind but, over time, numerous intellects flourished in Arabic Spain as well. But these intellects were represented by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It should also be noted that Arabic Spain basically claimed independence from the East; so technically it wasn't part of the Caliphate, but rather a Caliphate all on it's own. As you can imagine, a strong enough culture of intellectualism (i.e., one based on books, teaching, and a common language) ignores such capricious border claims.

I would say that on balance, the Arab scholars were probably mostly Muslim, but they almost certainly were not motivated solely by some sort of extreme piety towards Islam. It would be hard to call it solely Arabic as well, since Persians and Spanish people were well represented in this culture. I think the story of the Golden Era is a story about the success of multiculturalism, not Islam and not the Arabic lineages themselves.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional historian by any stretch of the imagination, but I have read extensively on this particular issue.

It wasn't Islamic. In fact, many of the philosophical views of some Persian philosophers would have gotten them decapitated in the Muslim world as they were suggesting belief in rationality over belief in god without question.

The "Islamic golden age" was built on the back of the most advanced civilizations in the world like the Mesopotamians (Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc..), Persians, Syrians, Jews, Anatolians and others who were always superior in knowledge to the Arabs who invaded, stole and pretended that this golden age was somehow perpetuated by their superior intellect.

The middle east was the center of the civilized world for 6000 years starting with Mesopotamia... with greek philosophy having been translated and studied by Christians such as the Assyrians, Nestorians, long before the Arabs ever made an appearance with Islam.