Western scholarly and scientific development was, of course, eminently indebted to Islamic civilization in fields from medicine (Avicenna's Qanun was used as the standard medical textbook in Europe through the seventeenth century) to scholastic theology (Thomas Aquinas admitted relying heavily on Averroes to understand Aristotle). Yet Renaissance heralds of Europe's newfound scientific promise could not admit their vast indebtedness to the hated, infidel Saracens. Avicenna, Averroes and other undeniably prominent Muslims in the western scholarly pantheon had to be uprooted completely from their 'Islamic' environment. Avicenna the physician was not recognized as Ibn Sina the Islamic philosopher and mystic.
Europeans embraced the Andalusian philosopher Averroes, who wrote such illuminating commentaries on Aristotle and Plato. They ignored that Ibn Rushd, as he was actually called, was the chief Shariah judge of Cordoba and a luminary of the Ulama who spent two decades writing comprehensive manual of Islamic Law. To their own detriment, Europeans also neglected Ibn Rushd's ground breaking reconciliation of religion and philosophy. The credit that Muslim scholars would receive from pioneers of modernism like Henri de Saint-Simon and even numerous National Geographic issues would not go beyond their role in 'transmitting Greek learning' to the west. When Western scholars have evinced an appreciation or admiration for Islamic scholarship, it is never for the religious sciences of law, language theory, exegesis, scriptural criticism or theology, which formed the voluminous core of the ulama's world.
[Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, pp.12-13]