In Muslim vs. Christian arguments, I’ve heard it said that Muslim societies were much more advanced than medieval Western cultures. Also, it’s claimed that we should thank Muslim scholars for preserving the classics of Greece for us. Philip Jenkins has a different view. In The Lost History of Christianity, Jenkins reminds of the history we never knew. In particular, he writes:
“It is common knowledge that medieval Arab societies were far ahead of those of Europe in terms of science, philosophy, and medicine, and that Europeans derived much of their scholarship from the Arab world; yet in the early centuries, this cultural achievement was usually Christian and Jewish rather than Muslim. It was Christians–Nestorian, Jacobite, Orthodox, and others–who preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world–the science, philosophy, and medicine–and who transmitted it to centers like Baghdad and Damascus. Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian, and Coptic, and it was not necessarily Muslim. Syriac-speaking Christian scholars brought the works of Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac into Arabic, at the behest of the caliph. Syriac Christians even make the first reference to the efficient Indian numbering system that we know today as ‘Arabic,’ and long before this technique gained currency among Muslim thinkers,” (The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died, 18).
Studium et Liturgica 
You and Jenkins are conflating “Muslim societies” with “Arab societies.” The early caliphates, especially the Abbasids, were melting pots of cultures, always under an Islamic umbrella, but welcoming knowledge from wherever it came. Arabic may have been the language of state, but the bureaucracy and intelligentsia, especially under caliph Al-Mansur were heterogenous, a tradition that continued through the Umayyad caliphate in Spain.