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Intellectually, the first few centuries after the Muslim conquests were a kind of golden age. Drawing from Greek, Persian, and Indian sources, Muslim thinkers made broad advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine that would eventually be adopted by the west. The use of Arabic numerals and the Arabic names of the stars are examples of this influence. Western medicine, too, was based largely on the translation of Arabic texts until the "anatomical" revolution of the sixteenth century.

Philosophy reached its highest development later, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries. Muslim thinkers had better access to Greek sources than their western counterparts, and the works of such men as al-Kindi or Ibn Sina (Avicenna) were rooted firmly in the Aristotelian tradition. When they were translated into Latin in the twelfth century, their impact forced a major transformation in western thought.

The arts also flourished. The Arab elite cultivated an image of sophisticated refinement that is reflected in their poetry and in the elegant calligraphy that dominated the visual arts. The Koran forbids the representation of human or animal figures. Muslim artists excelled in calligraphic, geometrical, and floral decorations that were an integral part of both architecture and illuminated manuscripts.

Muslim architecture, based ultimately on late Roman and Byzantine technology but with a character all its own, was a great achievement that influenced builders in Spain, Italy, the Balkans, and Central Europe. The pointed arch favored by Muslim builders became a standard feature of gothic architecture in places as far away as England.

Throughout most of the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was richer and more sophisticated than the Christian west. Its technology, military and otherwise, was generally superior. While not escaping the limitations imposed by epidemic disease, marginal food supplies, and the other miseries of life before the industrial revolution, it probably offered a more comfortable standard of living as well. Yet westerners perceived that world as implacably hostile and tended to define themselves in opposition to its religious and cultural values. They knew little or nothing about either, while Muslims, if they thought about westerners at all, regarded them as ignorant barbarians useful primarily as slaves.

From the eleventh century onward, the economic and military balance between the two cultures began to shift slowly in favor of the west. The advent of the Crusades and the revival of western trade increased contact between the two civilizations at every level, but the hostility remained. Europeans borrowed Muslim ideas, Muslim technologies, and Muslim tastes while waging war against Islam on land and sea. These borrowings were rarely acknowledged even though they became an important component of western culture.

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