I'm having a conversation with my dad and he made the claim that most of the scientific advancements that characterize the Islamic Golden Age were not made by Muslims, but rather by minority groups that lived in the Islamic World at the time.
This runs contrary to everything that I have heard about this time period, but I don't have the hard facts to substantiate my suspicions. And frankly, it kind of smacks of Western Chauvinism.
I know that there were definitely Jewish and Zoroastrian scientists in the Islamic World who made large contributions, but it seems ridiculous to assert that there weren't also Muslim scholars who made large advancements alongside them.
Could y'all please give me some more info on this to let me know whether my dad or I am more correct?
So, your father is certainly wrong, or, giving the benefit of doubt, he confused "Muslims" with "Arabs".
The majority of the great scientists (an anachronistic term, but let's not be pedants) of the Islamic Golden Age were indeed Muslims. Al-Rhazi and Omar Khayyam were probably only nominally Muslim, we could call them "sceptics" (not atheists, though), but the rest of Muslim scientists were certainly devout, well, Muslims, and often wrote religious works as well (not differently from their late medieval and early modern European colleagues). There were of course a number of important Jewish and Nestorians Christian working chiefly as physicians and greatly contributing to physiology and medicine (such as Maimonides and Isaac Israeli ben Salomon, Hunayn Ibn Ishaq and the Bakhtyashu family). The most important contribution to the Islamic Golden Age that Christians and other "minority groups" (minorities only in terms of power, since the Islamization process took centuries) was their role of intermediaries between Greek philosophical and scientific tradition and Islamic culture. Unlike the Arabs (to be more specific, the Arabs from the Arabic Peninsula who led the Islamic expansion), these people had been exposed for centuries to Hellenic influence, and had a first-hand knowledge of Greek philosophy. Already in the early sixth century AD, the Syriacs had started the translations of a number of secular works from Greek to their own language, that was a regional variant of Aramaic. The principal authors translated were Galen and Aristotle, together with other important works like Porphyry's Isagoge, Late Antique Neoplatonic commentaries, minor medical and astronomical works. Since the Syriacs were already living in a heavily hellenized world, the most educated between them could read these works directly in Greek, but these Greek-Syriac translations created a distict Semitic tradition of such works. In the period after 750, under the Abbasid caliphate, this already existing tradition among Syriac Christians was instrumental in the great project financed by the caliphs. The translations of Greek scientific and philosophical works into Arabic had necessarily to be handled by people who not only knew these two languages, but were also acquainted with the cultural context and technical terms that are abundantly found in this kind of works. Translators had also to face the problem of how to translate a certain term who simply did not exist in Arabic, a language that still lacked the level of sophistication of Greek: they had to decide whether to use a word with a similar meaning, or to create a neologism, or to directly transliterate it, taking care of conveying the same concept such term had in the original. The translator had to have a deep knowledge of the Aristotelian corpus (for example), to understand what concept a certain obscure term indicated in a certain passage. Otherwise, the translation would turn out a distorted and pretty useless version of the original. For this reason the majority of translators were Christians (mostly Nestorians), but also Jews and Sabeans (like Thabit ibn Qurra, a great scientist on his own). Probably, around 3/4 of all translators in the period 750-900 were non-Muslim scholars. The aforementioned Hunayn ibn Ishaq, from the Christian community of al-Hirah, was the most prolific translator of the IX century, with more than one hundred translations made by him. In any case, most original contributions came from Muslims
However, it's possible that your father confused religion with ethnicity, and intended that most figures in the Islamic Golden Age were not Arabs. In that case, it's certainly true that a very large number (I don't know if "most") of them were ethnically Persian. Many came from Transoxiana, Corasmia, and other regions of Central Asia that now are part of the "-stan" countries and populated by Turkic people (among many others), but that back then were part of the Persian or Persianized world. This is an important thing to recognized not for nationalistic reasons of course, but because these scholars brought distictive pre-Islamic Persian traditions in Islamic philosophical and scientific thought. Just to make some examples of Persian scientists: Al-Khwarezm, Abu Mashar, Avicenna, Rhazes, Ibn Sahl, al-Sijzi, Al-Kashi etc. There were also some of Jewish descent, like Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi.
Hope this helps.
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