"I always find it telling when anyone is arguing about how important Islamic civilization has been for the career of our species, that preserving the work of Aristotle, always appears at the top of the list. Aristotle was great, don't get me wrong, but he is a single non Muslim philosopher. And we wasn't perfect. He said many things that impeded the progress of science. I think his importance for future generations was primarily as a counter point for thousands of years of Abrahamic religious craziness that practically ruined human history. And I count Christianity as the main offender here. Yes it was true to say that a millennium ago, the Muslim world was ahead of the christian west, but that doesn't say anything good about Islam, it's just a reminder of how terrible christianity was. And as for the ultimate significance of Islamic civilization, yes, there were Muslims making advances in optics, Omer said that somewhere in his article, but they weren't using these advances to build telescopes and understand the cosmos. They were using them to design religious calenders to more accurately pinpoint the direction of mecca."
Leaving aside that it's a pretty grossly instrumental view of knowledge and that it's clearly polemical I would mark out a few points.
"when anyone is arguing about how important Islamic civilization has been for the career of our species, that preserving the work of Aristotle, always appears at the top of the list."
That's not at all true. If all that Islamic civilization did was preserve the works of someone else like some sort of dark ages safe deposit box then that's not very impressive. It completely ignores the independent and original philosophical tradition of the Islamic world of which Aristotle was only one of several launching pads.
[Aristotle] said many things that impeded the progress of science.
That's a horrifically anachronistic view of "science". The notion that there was such a thing as "the progress" of "science" did not exist.
Nevermind as well that any number of the Golden Age scientists that he's demeaning here would work to disprove some of those incorrect notions from Aristotle.
yes, there were Muslims making advances in optics, Omer said that somewhere in his article, but they weren't using these advances to build telescopes and understand the cosmos. They were using them to design religious calenders to more accurately pinpoint the direction of mecca."
That's not at all true. The astronomical work of the Islamic "Golden Age" certainly did have the practical effect of improving religious calendars and more accurately pinpointing the direction of Mecca (which is actually really complicated problem of spherical trigonometry known as the Qibla problem), but it's impossible, for me at least, to look at the astronomical work of Al-Hazen or al-Biruni and then trivialize their achievements in the way that he does. Unless you're a rather ignorant polemicist, like Sam Harris.