I don't know, I think providing paper to the west was pretty significant. Without that there could have been no printing press and no enlightement.
Algebra has been mentioned.
Preserving alot of the classic period texts
The Public Hopsital
The Public library
Degree providing Universities
Where exactly do you think Europeans were learning many of the things they were learning from?
I already addressed algebra.
Paper existed even longer than algebra did, which means the credit goes to pre-Islamic people . . . by many centuries.
Muslims tend to be more likely to destroy valuable texts than to preserve them, and that's been true for their entire history. We know, for example, that countless works were lost for all time when Byzantium fell. In fact, most of the preservation of classical Latin works was done by the Christians.
Public hospitals should properly be credited to the Christians, as well. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that many religions were operating healing centers centuries before the birth of Christ, and our modern concept of the public hospital traces back to the Emperor Constantine, St. Basil of Caesarea, and St. Benedict of Nursia. During the Crusades, the Knights Hospitaler (note the similarity of name) established hospitals in the Middle East because disease was more dangerous than the enemy. The Arabs took the idea for hospitals from them.
As far as I can tell, public libraries as we know them are originally a European concept. Libraries in general, as repositories of written works, existed well before Islam did.
University degrees? A medieval European concept.
Where do I think Europeans were learning things? From the works preserved during the Dark Ages by the monks of the church and by the Byzantine Christians, from the Asians, and from their own studies and discoveries.
