Over the last few years I've been very interested in poking holes in the popular idea of the "dark ages", and one of the things that struck me was how awfully Eurocentric that idea was. That just because European society fared a bit worse than the Roman Empire, suddenly the whole world was doom and gloom.
Looking in my school history book, it made the claim that one of the main steps backwards from Roman times was the decline of "city culture" in Europe. The economy became agrarian, there were less coins and money circulating, the roads were ill maintained, trade and travel plummeted, et cetera. In short, Europe became a lot less 'urban'.
So, knowing that the dark ages were a very Eurocentric concept I asked myself: Well, how 'urban' was the Middle East then? They're often cited as one of the great civilizations of the early and high middle ages. Did they also have a very agrarian economy where taxes were paid in geese and wheat, and were their roads comparably ill-maintained? Did their cities also decline after the Romans left?
In short, assuming my history book is correct in that Europe became less urbanized, how did the caliphates of the Islamic Golden Age compare?
So the term that gets used to describe the medieval Islamic world, a term that I think was invented by Marshall Hodgson is that these were "agrarianate" societies. What he meant by that is that most of the Islamic world was focused and depended upon agriculture and that this would have been the primary economic activity but that because the social, cultural and religious structures in place, the life of medieval Islamic society would have been directed towards cities rather than rural areas.
One example of such a structure is the Iqta, which is sometimes described as a sort of Islamic version of feudalism. But that's not at all the case. The key difference was that the Iqta did not involve any kind of liege/lord relationship between the holder of the Iqta and anyone above or below him. It was a system entirely based on tax collection and administration of an area (which may not have actually have required the holder of the Iqta to carry out these activities as some of the Iqta grants were simple cash rewards from the produce of the lands entitled.)
The result of this was that even if this ruling class derived its wealth from the land they were free to spend their time in cities, which they did. They were joined there by a thriving religious scholarly and judicial class, administrators, the military classes, merchants and craftsmen. These cities by all accounts seem to have been prosperous, populous, clean, religiously and culturally diverse, and apparently with moderate levels of literacy as exemplified by the wide circulation of books and number of libraries both public and private.
Because the Arab/Islamic conquests in the 7-8th centuries weren't particularly destructive this meant that cities that had flourished in Roman or Persian times like Alexandria or Antioch continued to do so, although there was also massive urban expansion as well as cities like Cairo and Baghdad were either founded from scratch or prospered into major urban centers.
There was great patronage of art and architecture, literature, medicine, science and philosophy in medieval Islam. Though much of the art and architecture has been lost to time, wars or for other reasons we can tell from the fragments of what's left and by written accounts that the builders and artists of the Islamic middle ages were extraordinarily talented and well-supported by the wealthy state. The Ummayad mosque in Damascus, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and the Grand Mosque of Cordoba are all early examples (circa 8th century) of a tradition of epic building that would continue and develop further throughout the medieval period.
I can't speak as much to what was going on in Europe during these centuries but my understanding is that the situation was markedly different. There might be push back against "dark ages" but from my understanding the situation in Western Europe wasn't nearly so bright as what you'd have found in the Islamic lands for much of this period. One illustration of that is that whereas the trade from Islamdom to Christendom prospered in this era with the silk and spice routes and the various finished goods traded throughout the mediterranean world, the only goods that Western Europe produced in the 8th century that garnered any interest in the Islamic east were swords and slaves.
Source wise: Marshall Hodgson's three volume The Venture of Islam includes much on life and society in Islamdom in the medieval period. Medieval Persia by David Morgan is likewise excellent on that particular and critical region. For a sample of the writing and literature of the period, including science and scholarly learning, see the relevant volumes of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. For art and architecture, the two volumes of the aptly titled Islamic Art and Architecture covering 650-1250 and 1250-1800 have great descriptions of the art of the period along with helpful diagrams and some lovely full-page color photographs and illustrations.