In a file at this Website, quotations from George Sarton ("The father of the history of science") give teestimony to the thesis of my title. Others agreed.
John William Draper in the Intellectual Development of Europe:
"I have to deplore the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has continued to put out of sight our obligations to the Muhammadans. Surely they cannot be much longer hidden. Injustice founded on religious rancour and national conceit cannot be perpetuated forever. The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe. He has indelibly written it on the heavens as any one may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe."
The British anthropologist, Robert Briffault wrote, in his book, Making of Humanity:
"It was under the influence of the arabs and Moorish revival of culture and not in the 15th century, that a real renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and Toledo, were growing centers of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of new life."It was under their successors at Oxford School (that is, successors to the Muslims of Spain) that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Sciences. Neither Roger Bacon nor later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of apostles of Muslim Science and Method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Sciences was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge. Discussion as to who was the originator of the experimental method. ... are part of the colossal misinterpretation of the origins of European civilization. The experimental method of Arabs was by Bacon's time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout Europe.
"Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab civilization to the modern world; but its fruits were slow in ripening. Not until long after Moorish culture had sunk back into darkness did the giant, which it had given birth to, rise in his might. It was not science only which brought Europe back to life. Other and manifold influence from the civilization of Islam communicated its first glow to European Life.
"For Although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic Culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory, natural science and the scientific spirit.
"... science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The Astronomy and Mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture. ... detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament.... What we call science arose in Europe as a result of new spirit of enquiry, of new methods of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of mathematics, in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs.
"It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would never have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution."
De Lacy O'Leary in Arabic Thought in History:
"The Greek material received by the Arabs was not simply passed on by them to others who came after. It has a very real life and development in its Arabic surroundings. In astronomy and mathematics, the work of the Greek and Indian scientists was coordinated and there a very real advance was made. The Arabs not only extended what they had received from the Greeks but checked and corrected older records."
Joseph Hell in the Arab Civilization:
"In the domain of trigonometry, the theory of Sine, Cosine and tangent is an heirloom of the Arabs. The brilliant epochs of Peurbach, of Regiomontanus, of Copernicus, cannot be recalled without reminding us of the fundamental and preparatory labor of the Arab Mathematician (Al-Battani, 858-929A.D.).""The adoption of the sign of 'Zero' (Arabic Sifr or Cipher) was a step of the highest importance, leading up to the so called arithmetic of positions. With the help of the Arab system of numbers, elementary methods of calculations were perfected; the doctrines of the properties of, and relations between, the equal and the unequal and prime numbers, squares and cubes, were elaborated; Algebra was enriched by the solution of the third degree and fourth degrees, with the help of geometry, and so on. About the year 820 A.D. the mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, wrote a text book of Algebra in examples, and his elementary treatise - translated into Latin - was used by Western scholars down to the sixteenth century."
French Orientalist Dr. Gustav Lebon:
"It must be remembered that no science, either of chemistry or any other science, was discovered all of a sudden. The Arabs had established one thousand years ago their laboratories in which they used to make experiments and publish their discoveries without which Lavoisier (accredited by some as being the founder of chemistry) would not have been able to produce anything in this field. It can be said without the fear of contradiction that owing to the researches and experimentation of Muslim scientists modern chemistry came into being and that it produced great results in the form of great scientific inventions ..."
During the Dark Ages of Europe, much learning was preserved for the world through the Arab