First some background.
I don't know much about Islam. But in graduate school my officemate was a muslim from Pakistan, and we talked a little. So what I know is heavily influenced by that.
His claim is that Islam is a faith which repeats time and time again the message that knowledge is valuable. Believers should seek to learn, and seek to understand. In fact he quoted the Koran as part of his inspiration for why he wanted to learn more about math, and he said that the reason why Islam preserved so much knowledge from Roman times was that it held knowledge to be valued.
It is true that there are branches of Islam today which believe that all which is worth knowing is in the Koran. However his belief is that those branches are false both to what the Koran says, and to the history of Islam. (And they are false in other ways as well. For instance Islam preaches that believers are to respect and protect other "believers in the book". This is a duty which is inconsistently followed.)
For more on the specifics of what we owe to Islam, [link|http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/introduction/woi_knowledge.html|this page] seems to have a decent summary.
Cheers,
Ben