From Patricia Fara’s_ Science: A Four Thousand Year History_. She takes a historical and comparative approach to explore the diversity of scientific experience (similar to Karen Armstrong’s A History of God).
If you assume that todays science, along with its technological applications, represents the summit of human achievement, then Islamic philosophers do indeed appear to have ground to a halt after four hundred years [8th to the 12th century CE]. But for Muslims who believe that the quest for spiritual perfection is more important than dominating the material world through reason, then it is the science of Europe that took the wrong track….
Modern science places a great premium on originality. In contrast, [Abū Ali al-Husain] Ibn Sīnā’s [Latinized: Avicenna] writing was valued by his contemporaries not for its novely but for its throughness and systematic organization. Like Newton, Islamic scholars studied the world because they wanted to approach God—and also like Newton, whole swathes of their lives have been cut out of the history books to make them appear as proto-scientists. Ibn Sīnā preached the Islamic goal of striving for stability. For him, understanding nature was not an end in itself, since the physical, divine and spiritual worlds are inextricably twined together. The word islam means both submission and peace, or being at one with God. Ibn Sīnā’s aim was not to pick apart the structure of the universe, but to be led towards the unity of God.