ISLAMIC LITERATURE

The cultural flowering of Islam began at the time when Europe, except for the Byzantine Empire, was in a state of disintegration--the Dark Ages. When Europe at last began to emerge from the doldrums, it was in great measure due to the efforts of Muslims, who had collected and translated into Arabic many of the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works.

Although Europeans during the Middle Ages benefited from Islamic treatises on medicine, geography, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, they did not become acquainted with the original literary creations of the Muslim world. Even today, the rich heritage of Islamic literature is hardly known in the West, except for a few examples such as the Koran, the holy book of Islam; the `Thousand and One Nights' , or `Arabian Nights'; the `Rubáiyát' of Omar Khayyám; and the 20th-century works of Khalil Gibran. This unfamiliarity is due in part to the fact that almost all of this literature was written in languages that often were quite difficult to translate, in part because they used an alphabet in Semitic script. (See also ` Arabian Nights '; Gibran ; Koran ; Omar Khayyám .)

source: http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/islamlit.htm