Islamic scholarship excelled in the middle ages and preserved a lot of Greek science. The Islamic world in the modern era is quite schismatic and apparently subject to a lot of atrophy or disillusionment, or both.

The Islamic Middle Ages was pretty much finished off by Hulagu. If you put yourself in the position of a Christian scholar of Galileo's time: the world is full of intellectual products created or transmitted by the Islamic world - mathematics, astronomy, chemical technology, civil engineering, musical instruments, classical philosophy - but in the previous 300 years, what had the Muslims done for the Christian world except stomp around in threatening hordes? Somebody ought to have thought, what happened to them?

I have a photo on my website where I'm playing an electronic bagpipe sitting in the ruins of the university of Harran, which is still as the Mongols left it. It took Oxford a couple of hundred years before it was in the same league. And that was second division compared with Baghdad and Bukhara.