The Golden Age is a myth. Just because The Louvre contains Napoleon’s theft of every piece of art in europe that wasn’t nailed down, doesn’t mean the French contributed to the arts – the evidence is the opposite. Just because the remaining minds of the ancient world collected in one place, adopted islam and wrote in arabic to escape punitive taxation, doesn’t mean arabs or muslims invented anything. If you capture the main trade routes between the continents and tax them you will generate wealth. Unfortunately the arabs destroyed the wealth production of the ancient world, and the ottomans only survived by doing the same to old europe (byzantine europe). The problem for all other cultures is that they strove for monopoly and circumvented truth in order to preserve it, while europe invented truth, organized everything by markets, and generated ideas so much faster than all other civilizations combined. Particularly once the low hanging fruit had been originated. Europe was far ahead of the islamic world in everything that mattered: farming, and tool development, and caloric consumption despite harsh winters, lack of flood river valleys, and lack of international trade.