The Arab World’s Scientific Desert describes how the Muslim world once valued science:
Eleven centuries ago an Islamic renaissance occurred in Baghdad, attracting the best scholars throughout the Muslim world. For the next five hundred years, Arabic was the lingua franca of science. Cutting-edge research was conducted in cities such as Cairo, Damascus, and Tunis. In the ninth century, algebra (al-jabr) was invented by a Muslim mathematician in Baghdad under the auspices of an imperial Arab court dedicated to scientific enrichment and discovery. Ibn Sina’s monumental Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the 12th century and dominated the teaching of the subject in Europe for four centuries.
Things have obviously changed. This stat says quite a bit:
No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.