At RealClearWorld Peter Adamson explains the service to the world performed by Arab scholars of the 9th century CE:
In the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Greek-speaking Byzantines could continue to read Plato and Aristotle in the original. And philosophers in the Islamic world enjoyed an extraordinary degree of access to the Hellenic intellectual heritage. In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Arabic had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today.
This was thanks to a well-funded translation movement that unfolded during the Abbasid caliphate, beginning in the second half of the eighth century. Sponsored at the highest levels, even by the caliph and his family, this movement sought to import Greek philosophy and science into Islamic culture. Their empire had the resources to do so, not just financially but also culturally. From late antiquity to the rise of Islam, Greek had survived as a language of intellectual activity among Christians, especially in Syria. So when Muslim aristocrats decided to have Greek science and philosophy translated into Arabic, it was to Christians that they turned. Sometimes, a Greek work might even be translated first into Syriac, and only then into Arabic. It was an immense challenge. Greek is not a semitic language, so they were moving from one language group to another: more like translating Finnish into English than Latin into English. And there was, at first, no established terminology for expressing philosophical ideas in Arabic.
Unfortunately, the story did not end there and Mr. Adamson does not go on to explain the sequelae. A tragedy occurred. In 1238CE the Mongols laid siege to Baghdad, eventually overthrowing it and sacking it. That had repercussions for the entire Arab world. It was thrown into despair. How could it have happened? How could the caliph have been defeated? The Arab world was shaken to its core. Far-reaching and, particularly, secular scholarship was abandoned, turning to a study of the Qur’an and haditha alone. Empiricism and enlightenment were abandoned. For the next 700 years, until the middle of the 20th century, Arabs did not rule themselves. That is the state of things as they come to us today. Today in the entire Arab world with a population greater than that of the United States there are about as many books published in a year as there are in Spain.
There is also another part of the story. The 9th century Arabs weren’t the only ones translating the Greek classics. Irish monks, too, preserved and translated the Greek classics into Old Irish, sometimes called the “fourth classical language” (after Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). Their scholarship has been generally dismissed. You see, Celtic people are peasants, incapable of scholarship.
But that story, too, may have a happy ending. Following the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in the early part of the 20th century, Celtic people have found new hope, not just in Ireland but in Scotland, Wales, France, and Spain. There are burgeoning nationalist movements in all of those and I suspect that one of the outcomes of that will be new-found interest in the contributions of medieval Celtic scholars.
The picture at the top of this post depicts Aristotle teaching astronomy. It is from a manuscript preserved in the Topkapi Palace.
The Mongols had a similar effect on China. Before the Mongols China had the outward looking Tang and Song dynasties (inventors of mericratic bureaucracy, gunpowder, paper, etc). After the devastation of Mongol rule, China turned inward looking, stagnated, and the Ming and Qing dynasties never matched the innovations in technology and culture of the previous era. And under the Qing, China was ruled by “foreigners” for 300 years.
The reality is only in the last 30 years has China turned outward again and contributing to the world like it did 1000 years ago.
The 3rd area of profound impact the Mongols had was on Russia but I’m not familiar with how Russian culture was shaped by them.
The Tang dynasty was so vigorous it had profound influence on all of the surrounding countries, particularly Japan.
I believe I can offer you a brief answer on how the Mongols affected Russia. The impact was profound. Prior to the invasion there was one Slavic people. Afterwards there were many. Not only did the Mongols disperse the Slavs, they inhibited communication among them resulting in differentiation of language and culture over time.
Russia was largely cut off from the rest of Europe from the time of the invasion in the 13th century until the 15th century. That was the period of Mongol rule. Some attribute the introduction of despotism to Russia to Mongol rule.
A persistent result of the invasion was cultural paranoia.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that during this period, Muslims were not the majority religious group in the Fertile Crescent region. To focus on scholastic activity centered around Constantinople and Baghdad overlooks the numerous monastic groups writing and translating works in Armenia, Syria and Egypt (Copts). There is some circumstantial evidence that a copy of Syriac illuminations of the Gospels made its way to Ireland to inspire the illuminations of the Book of Durrow. Not to take anything away from the Abbasids, but they very likely were retaining people to translate who would have been doing so anyway. Multiple sources were ultimately necessary to preserve what little was preserved from time and invasions.
Note that on the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map, cultures that highly rate on “survival” values are Russian, Chinese and Islam. I’ve always assumed this had to do with proximity to the Eurasian steppe.
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali
“Al Ghazali c. (1058 – 18 December 1111) has been referred to by some historians as the single most influential Muslim after the Islamic prophet Muhammad.”
“Besides his work that successfully changed the course of Islamic philosophy—the early Islamic Neoplatonism that developed on the grounds of Hellenistic philosophy, for example, was so successfully criticised by al-Ghazali that it never recovered”