There has been greater concentration on the Medieval Middle Eastern and Central Asian Science but so far insufficient exploration of its roots and what it owes or does not owe to Islam. Few, if any, early Islamic scholars were Arab but emerged from Persia, the old cultures of Central Asia, etc. Is this then a Persian Renaissance for example or equally likely a global event?
The explosion of European science in the 17th century can be seen as the result of globalisation, not integral to Europe, so can the earlier Middle Eastern and Central Asian one be viewed in the same fashion?
I have not used Christian or Islamic as, certainly in the West Christianity, was not the driving force for the phenomenon.
The origin of European science is Greek thought; concerning Asia, Sumerian cultural techniques are the foundation of scientific thought, be it accounting, script or astronomy, which is the most ancient of all sciences. As your question also seems to imply a religious dimension, deities in Sumerian temples were believed to safeguard the assets of a community, e.g. keeping a ratio of silver and barley. I am tempted to conclude, that science as research into single working principles of and in nature, evolved with the proclamation of a single deity, e.g. the workings of prophet Zoroaster. Zoroaster found very great reception in the Greek world, and I do think that these is the link to the birth of science as human activity.
Hebrew thought is also pre-essential, in terms of cognitive transmission, from the East to the West, as early as 300BCE, concerning Europe (Greek islands, Roman Empire, even Pannonia).
Stephen I. Ternyik, there is not the religious connotation you seem to imagine but an attempt to avoid it. This opposing cultural tenets seems the normal form and I see it as nonsense. With Islam for example there would have been a number of scholarly centres outside of the religion's uniformity. Religion may in fact not come into it at all.
The link to the Greeks may have arrived via the Persians into Anatolia where many of their most sophisticated societies were, and where their seers or wise men came from fleeing to the mainland. Zoroaster was brought to Greece by Xerxes who was fanatical about the religion (the first perhaps to embrace such a mindset). It is to Zoroaster we owe monotheistic morality, angels, etc. The link to physics is as likely to be Egyptian religious thinking, which evolved as a kind of philosophy.
I would suggest that the procession of Judaic thinking into the West is simplified as there are early simililarities between Greek and Jewish literature. Ulysses and Gilead stories and Abraham stories have narrative tropes in common. Samson and Hercules, were nevertheless both commected to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. A number of Hebrew stories were taken from the Philistines, who were from the west originally.
The point of the question concerns later transmission and there is evidence for borrowing of Persian thinking during the Islamic period by the West, with claims to originality. But the earliest Arab/Islamic incursions sent many Syrian and North African scholars into Greece and Italy amongst whom were the priests Hadrian from North Africa, then a cauldron of scholarly activity, and Theodore of Tarsus. Both ended up in England and started scholarship and philosophy there.
Clues to possible answers to your question are found during the twenty plus years The Recitation (Al-Qur'aan) was revealed to Prophet Muhamad (pbuh) by the angel Gabriel (Jibril) - a time when continuous conflict between Byzantium (al-Rum) and Persia is periodically referenced in the oral transmission. As to what it owes or does not owe to Islam, this conflict between East and West preceded Muhammad and his Qur'aanic Islam. Both Ternyik and Wilkin note origins must older than that.
Robert, thanks, but not really my concern. I do however appreciate the contribution. I think though you would have immense problems finding many who actually knew there was an East and West and separation between the two at the time of the Arab/Islamic (more Arab than usually understood) invasions with after 600 AD migration of large numbers between the Near East and Africa and Europe, not dissimilar to the present. Those who took ancient Greek ideas (preceded by ideas from Mesopotamia in the first place) into Europe after the Arab invasions were North Africans (most of the great Christian fathers and writers were from North Africa -Tertullian, Augustine) and the Near East. They probably had no genuine concept of being from either. Although Augustine emphasised Rome, he did not separate himself from the people there.
I nevertheless suggest that the Islamic bloc was a mirage hiding dynamic thinking related to and not related to Islam.
The evidence for identification is included in Greek thinking but had no place in Persian thinking. Distinct differences between the two are hard to find, although extrapulated in early forms of racism by Herodotus. The Greeks nevertheless admitted their cultural beginnings lay in both Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. The only differences noticable are monogamy (from Europe and picked up by Judaism), and superior weaponry. Greek aminosity towards the East was based on fear and envy. Celts were long settled in Anatolia. Mithridates had the centre of his empire in Pontus and extended it to the Crimea. Anthony established a temporary empire in Egypt. Although yes, the Greeks established an artificial separation of East and West in their writings, Greece had been as much an eastern as western (sic) culture. While Greece built its identity in writing, small but dynamic cities, and its highly successful armies, Gaul, Britain and Germany were in tribal cultures without genuine cities, without writing, without armies as such, just warriors. Was Greece western? Hardly.
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