islamic culture cultivated and gathered lots of knowledge, includign that of roman, indian, some african and other cultures. in my opinion their translation efforts have saved a lot of, and furthered a lot of science and research. As europe was plunged into the dark ages, the islamic culture saw an age of light where knowledge was power and there was a big effort for about 1000 years to cultivate and improve understanding of the world around us. alchemy, algebra, algorithm, a lot of words which came from there. though some of the underlying knowledge was gained from translating texts of other cultures, credit goes to these islamic scientists for recognising the importance of these works and improving upon them.
1000 years is a stretch. Most of it occurred during the Abbasid Caliphate, which promulgated a school of Islamic scholarship and practice that supported and even promoted the development of worldly knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbasid_Caliphate#Islamic_Gold...
Importantly, this school of Islam accepted or at least was tolerant of the idea that God controlled the world indirectly through what we now call natural laws. It's in this age that you saw the theological state financially support philosophy, the collection of foreign philosophic works into libraries, and their study and extension.
But an anti-intellectualist school very quickly rose to dominate the landscape, both the scholarship and lay practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso... Subsequently, the preservation and advancement of philosophy was a mere echo of the earlier, short-lived era and occurred at the periphery of Islamic power rather than at its center as in the Abbasid Caliphate.
The same conflicts played out in Christianity, but fortunately orthodox (small-o) Christianity adopted a natural laws perspective. It's worth pointing out that there was never really a Dark Age in Europe. Rather, the political upheaval merely disrupted Europe's collective memory and severed its rich connections to the rest of Eurasia and Africa. Philosophical and scientific advancements proceeded, but without the benefit of well-understood context about the sources of received knowledge, and with a much diminished inflow of novel advancements.
FWIW, I hesitate to refer to the rise of the school which rejected natural laws as "anti-intellectualism". The school has its own internally consistent logic, and I understand why it would be appealing. You can see the appeal by recognizing the similarity with similar movements in Christianity. I don't think it's a coincidence that what we would call anti-intellectualism in the Christian world also coincides with, e.g., iconoclasm, another point of divergence between orthodox scholarship in Islam and Christianity. There's an appealing intellectual purity in reducing everything to a singular axiom that effectively says everything is as God wills it to be and that attempts to systematize his will is (like iconography) an intermediation and a rejection of his agency and presence. But that manner of viewing the world is not hospitable to the nurture of scientific rationalism, which is largely how we understand intellectualism today.
Note that I'm not trying to make the claim that Christianity is somehow better or more logical than Islam. As non-orthodox Christian denominations (i.e. the ones which, among other things, lean to biblical literalism) are happy to point out, the pro-intellectual characteristics of orthodox Christianity owe more to its inheritance from Greek and other sources largely orthogonal to the foundational doctrines of Christianity. In other words, orthodox Christianity was more hospitable to science despite itself. Islam shared many of the same influences, it just rejected them where orthodox Christianity syncretized them.
