Actually, fragments of the Greek works were known inthe West, particularly in Spain, where Isidore of Seville included them in his compendium of all human knowledge (for the time), written about 75 years before the Islamic invasion of Spain and actually before the invention of Islam.
The Muslims conquered and destroyed numerous Christian and pagan Middle Eastern cultures that still possessed more complete copies of the Greek works, and some of these were preserved by scholars from those countries. While the countries were then islamicized, this was early enough for Islam not to have consolidated its full anti-intellectual impact, which has always resulted in the destruction of all art, music, literature and philosophy in any place that has remained under Islam for more than about 100 years.
Both the Syrians and the Persians, two of the dynasties that ruled Spain at various points, even ended up being considered near heretical by the the guardians of Islamic orthodoxy, the North African Muslims (the Arabs, from whom Mohammed originated), because they were influenced by the Jews and Christians of Spain and because they themselves had had strong intellectual traditions before their conquest by Mohammed and his Arab hordes.
Arabs had no intellectual culture and were nomadic raiders who lived in tents while the Syrians, Baghdadis and Persians lived in elaborate stone cities with gardens and fountains.
Islam is profoundly anti-intellectual. There’s nothing wrong with Arabs intellectually, but Islam stifles them.
Correct
>>There’s nothing wrong with Arabs intellectually, but Islam stifles them.
Actually, that’s not true, after centuries of cousin marriage. Do some searches on Middle Eastern consanguinity and read some of the abstracts of the scholarly papers on the subject.
Oh, and then you add in the Islamic stifling, and you get the modern Middle East.