Beginning almost immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D., within the lifespan of a single generation the Islamic religion began a "jihad" (holy war) of expansion that was to embrace the whole of the Middle East outside of the core Byzantine Empire. Within two centuries that expansion would extend west to the Iberian Peninsula, deep north into Central Asia, and east into the borderlands of the Indian subcontinent. It was an expansion driven, at first, by the Arab tribes allied directly to Muhammad. Very shortly, however, as those desert nomads absorbed centuries-old cultures into their new Muslim faith, a synthesis of dynamics developed to create the "Golden Age" of Islam. That synthesis was to become dominated by Persian culture (Saunders 187-198).
Reaching their height of home-grown achievement with the pre-Hellenic Persian Empire, the ancient civilizations of the Middle East had constructed a strong cultural foundation for the new-arriving Arabian-inspired Islam to build upon. The Islamic civilization that emerged was to surpass its humble desert origins with a glory of achievement - scientific, mercantile and cultural - that put its feudal counterparts in Western Europe to shame. It was a Golden Age that would continue into the 1200s - when Mongol invaders first conquered, then were absorbed into, the Islamic cultures of Central Asia and the Middle East.
The Golden Age of Islam in the Middle East is often referred to as the "renaissance" period of Persian culture by historians from that region. The reason is simple: while Islam was the dynamo powering a previously unsophisticated, nomadic Arabian culture, Persians had a history of long-standing. Twelve hundred years earlier, Cyrus the Great was commanding an empire while the Greeks were still little more than village-sized city-states. Centuries later, after the Macedonian Alexander the Great injected Greek influence into the region, the Pe...