The quote:
Since Latin was the language of the Western Church and Greek was the language of the Eastern Church the bulk of Roman philosophical thought and scientific thought was preserved and disseminated by Catholic monastic orders where as Greek philosophical thought was originally preserved in the Byzantine Empire by Byzantine monastic orders. Arab exposure to Greek philosophy came about initially from geographic proximity to the Byzantine empire and late by conquest of Byzantine lands. It was the Ottoman invasions, ironically enough, that drive many of these monastic orders, along with their manuscripts and knowledge of Greek back to places like Italy where they were reintroduced to Europe. I am not discounting Arab influences on the Italian Renaissance but the modern narrative of the Renaissance being primarily Arab in origin is more a product of 20th century anit-Orientalism pushed by people like Edward Said than on any measured historiography.
I don’t think this idea holds much water.
Let us look at what we know happened. As part of the Arab expansion into Egypt Islamic forces captured Alexandria, still the intellectual powerhouse of the Greco-Roman world at the time.
By all accounts it was here Muslims discovered the works of Plotinus; what drew their attention was his idea that everything in the universe was connected like parts of a single organism, all culminating in the idea of a single mystical One. This, for some, seemed to be alluding to The Prophet’s insistence on the oneness of Allah, which led to a greater interest in these Greek writings.
From this the Muslims discovered that Plotinus was merely part of a longer tradition of thought going back a thousand years to the philosopher Plato, and a whole treasury of Greek thought from the Pre-Socratics to Aristotle and beyond.
As this interest was expanding the Abbasid Caliphs began looking also with interest into these texts and also others their far reaching Empire was coming across. Baghdad became THE place for professional translators; anyone who could translate Greek, Sanskrit, Persian or Chinese into Arabic could easily find high paying work.
Understand the Abbasid Caliphate was in a unique position- they were the first who could compare Persian and Chinese astronomy or Greek and Indian medicine and mathematics. They set about trying to see how a) these ancient ideas fit in with one another and more importantly b) how Islamic spirituality related to reason. They sought, as have many, to find a way to broadly explain everything in a single schema that would make sense of the universe.
Plato especially was revered, and his ideas of unchangeable and eternal ‘forms’, leading to some Muslims scholars proposing that each human being was a mixture of the real (the body) and the eternal (the soul) which was the realm of Allah.
But it was with Aristotle that most Muslim scholars found their role-model. His love of logic, his techniques of classification, his grasp of particularities- all of which inspired scholars to emulate and go beyond.
Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī, emulating Aristotle’s methods, described the material universe in terms of five governing principles: matter, form, motion, time and space. He then analysed each of these subcategories; so for example, motion, was defined as having six separate types of motion (generation, corruption, increase, decrease, change in quality and change in position). On and on he went categorising the whole of reality into digestible, easily manageable chunks.
There are no Orthodox monks producing anything even in the same league or even same concept in the 9th or 10th century I believe.
A whole strand of Muslim philosophers began who linked spirituality with rationality; you had the likes of Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al Fārābī; who recommended that a good student begins his study with an examination of nature, move on from that to the study of logic and then finally would they we skilled enough to move to that most abstract of all the disciplines, mathematics.
And it is in mathematics that the intellectual power of Abbasid Islam really shows itself I feel. While geometry was invented by the Greek, the idea of place value discovered by the Babylonian and treating zero as a number was Indian in origin, it was the Muslims who synthesised all these ideas, adding a few of their own, and invested algebra. The foundations of modern mathematics were laid in Baghdad not in Byzantine monasteries.
Beyond abstract philosophies and mathematics, the practical arts also received the benefit of this unique set of circumstances. Abu Ali Sina was able to reference catalogue and compile medicinal texts from across the world allowing him achieve a near-modern understanding of illness, anatomy and medical treatments. The strength of Muslim hospitals (especially the ones in Baghdad) are well testified to.
The Abbasid-era philosophers laid the foundations for chemistry; pushed the boundaries in geology, optics, botany and more. One could argue that they laid the very building blocks upon which science was built upon (although with the caveat that unlike what came later, these were Muslim scholars defined by their faith; science was never treated as a separate subject, rather merely a method to understand the works of Allah).
The closest one can find to the rationalist thinkers of the enlightenment were perhaps groups like the Mu’tazilites, but such ideas did not sit well with the Uluma and it was in the face of the radical new ideas such unfettered intellectual thought produced that brought Ahmed Ibn Hanbal to prominence and spawned the harsh and rigidly conservative Hanbali school of Muslim jurisprudence.
Bottom line? This knowledge was distributed across the lands of the Muslim, especially through Fatimid territory and eventually ending up in al-Andalus. The writer of that quote seems to utterly ignorant of the role played by great European Muslim centres of learning such as Córdoba, in reintroducing the Greek philosophers to Universities of Europe as well as many of these advances.
Sources: Online: https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200703/rediscovering.arabic.science.htm
In print: Sheikh, M. Saeed; Islamic Philopsophy Octogon Press; 1982 Kennedy, Hugh; When Baghdad ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty; DeCapo press 2005 Ansary, Tamin; Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes; PublicAffairs, 2009