Background and Significance

The Muslim conquests took place mainly in Byzantine and Persian territory. The first Islamic capital outside Arabia was established by the Omayyad dynasty (661–750) at Damascus, which had been a provincial capital in the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine culture was basically Greek, modified by Christian concepts. Because their religion forbade representation of the human figure, Muslims were not influenced by Byzantine pictorial art. The early mosques, however, were fundamentally Byzantine in architecture.

The Arabs retained their own literary tradition, but were strongly influenced by Aristotle in philosophy. As the foundation of their scientific study they adopted the scholarly work done at Alexandria, Egypt, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

With a shift in Arab leadership to the Abbasid dynasty in 750, Baghdad, at the borders of Persia, became the capital of the Muslim world (762). Exposed to the rich cultural heritage of the Persians, which included Hindu and Oriental as well as Hellenistic strains, the Muslim world experienced an extraordinary surge of intellectual activity. Starting in the Middle East, it spread across North Africa and into Moorish (Muslim) Spain, where much of the later achievement was centered.

Islamic culture flourished during an era when classical Greek and Roman learning, upon which it was in great part founded, had been almost forgotten in Europe. Cultural activity was at its lowest ebb in the western Christian countries. Eventually, through contact with Moorish Spain, Saracen Sicily, and the Muslim neighbors of the Crusader states, Europeans were introduced to their own cultural past as well as to the intellectual achievements of Islam. Latin translations of Arabic works were the textbooks of western Europe in the later Middle Ages; some were used until modern times. Other heirs of Islamic culture were the Turks, who were converted to Islam and founded an empire in Asia Minor and the Balkans.

The Islamic cultural heritage survives most strongly today in Iran and the Arab countries.