The precedents
“These astronomers proceeded on completely scientific principles: they accepted nothing as true which was not confirmed by experience or experiment. One of them, Abul-Farghâni of Transoxiana, wrote (can. 860 A.D.) an astronomical text which remained in authority in Europe and Western Asia for 700 years. Even more renowned was al-Battani; his astronomical observations, continued for forty-one years, were remarkable for their range and accuracy. He determined many astronomical coefficients with remarkable approximation to modern calculations - the precession of the equinoxes at 54.5" a year and the inclination of the ecliptic at 23dg 55". Working under the patronage of the early Buwayhid rulers of Baghdad, Abul-Wafâ’ (in the disputed opinion of Sadillot) discovered the third lunar variation 600 years before Tycho Brahe.”[81]
The encyclopedists
“Abur-Rayhân Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Bayrûni (973-1048 A.D.) shows the Moslem scholar at his best. Philosopher, historian, traveler, geographer, linguist, mathematician, astronomer, poet and physicist - and doing major and original work in all these fields - he was at least the Leibniz and almost the Leonardo of Islam.”[82]
The zenith of Islamic culture
“His (Al-Bayrûni’s) multifarious production in the same generation with ibn Sîna, ibn al-Haytham and al-Firdausi, marks the turn of the tenth century into the eleventh as the zenith of Islamic culture and the climax of medieval thought.”[83]
In summary
“Avicenna was the greatest writer on medicine, ar-Râzi the greatest physician, al-Bairûni the greatest geographer, al-Haytham the greatest optician and Jâbir probably the greatest chemist of the Middle Ages. These five names, so little known in present day Christendom, are one measure of our provincialism in viewing medieval history.”[84]
Scientific research
“When Roger Bacon proclaimed that method to Europe, five-hundred years after Jâbir, he owed his illumination to the Moors of Spain, whose light had come from the Moslem East.”[85]
Only a morsel of a fraction of a fragment
“What we know of Moslem thought in those centuries is a fragment of what survives and what survives is a fragment of what was produced. So, what appears in these pages is a morsel of a fraction of a fragment. When scholarship has surveyed more thoroughly this half-forgotten legacy, we shall probably rank the tenth century in Eastern Islam as one of the golden ages in the history of the mind.”[86]
Beyond competition
“Probably no civilization or period - not even China in the days of Li Po and Tu Fu nor Weimar when it had "a hundred citizens and ten-thousand poets" - ever equaled Abbasid Islam in the number and prosperity of its bards.”[87]
A profuse delicate art
“From the Alhambra in Spain to the Taj Mahal in India, Islamic art overrode all limits of place and time, laughed at distinctions of race and blood, developed a unique and yet varied character and expressed the human spirit with a profuse delicacy never surpassed.”[88]
The graceful towers
Durant transmits Fergusson’s admiration of the Islamic minarets: "The most graceful form of tower architecture in the world."[89]
The art of ornament
“We probably owe this splendor of ornament to the Semitic prohibition of human or animal forms in art as, if in compensation, the Moslem artist invented or adopted an overflowing abundance of non-representational forms.”[90]
An art never achieved before
“No material was thought too obdurate for such ornament; wood, metal, brick, stucco, stone, terra cotta, glass, tile and faïence became the vehicles of such a poetry of abstract forms as no art, not even the Chinese, had ever achieved before.”[91]
The finest books ever issued
After showing the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy and written adornment, Durant comments saying: “When we add that such works were bound in the softest, strongest leather, tooled or stamped with unexcelled artistry and the cover itself in many instances adorned with an elegant design, we may without hyperbole rank Islamic books of the ninth to the eighteenth century as the finest ever issued. Which of ours can be published in such splendor today?”[92]
The Arabian brilliance
“Half the brilliance of Norman Sicily was an Arab echo, an Oriental legacy of crafts and craftsmen to a young culture willing to learn from any race or creed. The Norman conquest of Sicily (1060-91 A.D.) helped time to efface the vestiges of Islam in the island. Count Roger was proud that he had leveled "Saracen cities, castles and palaces built with marvelous art." But Moslem style left its mark on the Palace of La Zîza and on the ceiling of the Capella Palatina. In this chapel of the palace of the Norman kings Moorish ornament serves the shrine of Christ.”[93]
Richness and luxury
“The revenues of the Cordoban caliphate under ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân III reached 12,045,000 gold dinars ($57,213,750), probably more than the united governmental revenues of Latin Christendom. But these receipts were due not so much to high taxes as to well-governed and progressive agriculture, industry and trade.”[94]
Cordoba, the city of scholars
“Cordoba in the tenth century was the focus and summit of Spanish intellectual life, though Toledo, Granada and Seville shared actively in the mental exhilaration of the time. Moslem historians picture the Moorish cities as beehives of poets, scholars, jurists, physicians and scientists. Al-Maqqari fills sixty pages with their names.”[95]
Cordoba, the resort of Europeans
“Cordoba was in this period the favorite resort of Europeans for surgical operations.”[96]
Monuments of Seljuks
“Such monuments laugh out of court the notion that the Turks were barbarians. Just as the Seljuq rulers and viziers were among the most capable statesmen in history, so the Seljuq architects were among the most competent and courageous builders of an Age of Faith distinguished by massive and audacious designs.”[97]
Wonders of manufacturing
About the handicrafts in medieval Islam (1058-1250 A.D.), Durant says: “In general, the minor arts in Islam hardly deserved so slighting a name. Aleppo and Damascus in this period produced frail marvels of glass with enamel designs and Cairo made for mosques and palaces enameled glass lamps which are among the prizes of art collectors today. The Fatimid treasury dispersed by Saladin contained thousands of crystal or sardonyx vases whose artistry seems beyond our skill today. The old Assyrian art of metalwork reached now an unprecedented height in Syria and Egypt, whence it passed to Venice in the fifteenth century.”[98]
The age of Islam
“For five centuries, from 700 to 1200 A.D., Islam led the world in power, order, extent of government, refinement of manners, standards of living, humane legislation and religious toleration, literature, scholarship, science, medicine and philosophy. In architecture, it yielded the palm in the twelfth century to the cathedrals of Europe and Gothic sculpture found no rival in inhibited Islam. Moslem art … has never been surpassed. In Islam, art and culture were more widely shared than in medieval Christendom. Kings were calligraphers, and merchants, like physicians, might be philosophers.”[99]
The peaks of history
After Durant spends about 250 pages talking about Islam and Islamic civilization, he states with eloquently pleasant sentences that “The general reader will marvel at the length of this survey of Islamic civilization and the scholar will mourn its inadequate brevity. Only at the peaks of history has a society produced, in an equal period, so many illustrious men - in government, education, literature, philology, geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, philosophy and medicine - as Islam in the four centuries between Harûn ar-Rashid and Averroes. Part of this brilliant activity fed on Greek leavings but much of it, above all in statesmanship, poetry and art, was original and invaluable.”[100]

________________________________________
[81] Ibid. vol. 4, 317.
[82] Ibid. vol. 4, 318.
[83] Ibid. vol. 4, 320.
[84] Ibid. vol. 4, 326.
[85] Ibid. vol. 4, 327.
[86] Ibid. vol. 4, 337.
[87] Ibid. vol. 4, 345.
[88] Ibid. vol. 4, 354.
[89] Ibid. vol. 4, 356.
[90] Ibid. vol. 4, 357.
[91] Ibid. vol. 4, 357.
[92] Ibid. vol. 4, 363.
[93] Ibid. vol. 4, 380.
[94] Ibid. vol. 4, 389.
[95] Ibid. vol. 4, 397.
[96] Ibid. vol. 4, 399.
[97] Ibid. vol. 4, 414-415.
[98] Ibid. vol. 4, 415.
[99] Ibid. vol. 4, 445.
[100] Ibid. vol. 4, 448.

https://islamstory.com/en/artical/25714