Both of you make persuasive arguments.
FWIW, in my [limited] understanding it was a strain of Sunni Islam that became enamored with learning and preserving Greek and Roman scholarship. This backfired, though, and a strain of theology which very intentionally rejected empiricism and logical deduction emerged to dominate Sunni religious scholarship. At that point the preservation and further development of Western thought decreased significantly; the works produced--those which hadn't been burned--wait for discovery by Europeans centuries later.
Which is why today there are, supposedly, marked differences in the way a society like Iran finances human and physical sciences domestically versus, say, Saudi Arabia where financing of science education is vulnerable to the ire of religious leaders who see it as more of a threat than they otherwise might, similar to many strains of Christian theology which perceive a conflict between scientific scholarship, and acceptance and adherence to their religious creed. Individual adherents can remain oblivious to these esoteric distinctions, but they can matter hugely in terms of the development and atrophy of institutional support within a society.