We're on the boundaries of my knowledge.
So I not an expert in the area.
Was all this supported by police state repression far and wide (including unfriendly clerics)?
I couldn't find a quick link discussing it, but many of the older libraries were protected by Muslims (or would have been, had not crusading christians burned them), so back then, Islam was by far more tolerant of other religions and writings, than say, the Church.
Islam's response to the citizens of a conquered city who begged that their library be spared: "If what is in these books is not in the Koran, than it is false. If it is in the Koran, then it is redundant".
Could be. Again, the distributed nature of Islam means its even harder than the middle age christian church to describe monotypically.
As for the Renaisance, note the predominance of pagan themes in Renaisance art, not Islamic themes. Contributions from the courts of the Islamic rulers seem to be mostly "hard science" (mathematics, chemistry) which would be relatively safe.
My dependancy was not that it was themed - but the fact that Islam was making discoveries that were potentially threatining, and they beat back the Crusades. The learning and discoveries spread from the east, westward.
Addison
