[DCPatriot]

But I've read that the Middle East was a leader in mathemetics and science at one time.

Until Mohammed put the kabosh on it...ala Cambodia's Pol Pot, who would summarily execute a person for the "crime" of owning eye glasses.

[CatoRenasci]

It's a little more complicated than that, but suffice it to say that the "traditional" view (for the past 75 years or so) that the Arab world was the center of culture and science while Europe remained mired in the middle ages can be quite misleading. Indeed, some of the Greek corpus was preserved and made available to the West via Arabic translations of Greek work (which were then translated into latin), but much more was destroyed by the Arabs. The work in the sciences and the like was primarily done by the cultured subject peoples ruled by Islam and claimed by them. The very civilization of the Mediterranean world, and lack of military interest or strength made it easy picking for Islam.