Arab scholars absorbed conquered peoples’ learning while Christian Rome rejected it

Evidence

While the spiritual and most often the temporal authorities of Christendom shunned much of the learning amassed by pre-Christian civilizations, the Arabic-speaking scholars took to this knowledge as a legitimate booty of the wars won by Muslim armies. Arabic culture now began the absorption of the more developed scientific and philosophic thought of the defeated, just as earlier, the Persian and Syriac cultures had absorbed like elements of Greek culture once it was finally proscribed officially in the Christian Rome of the sixth century, and the Greeks before them took to the intellectual produce of Egyptian and Babylonian cultures. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 454

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the cultural logic of Islamic intellectual absorption versus Christian rejection as distinct civilizational orientations.