In school and later in media (this is northern Europe) I was/am always told that it was the Arabs/Muslim world that preserved the science, technology, literature, art, culture etc from the Greek and Roman civilization while Western Europe declined in all these areas during the medieval period. However, the more I read about Byzantium the more this description sounds counter-intuitive. East Rome was richer than West Rome (which should/could be one explanation of the failure of West and the relative success of East) and lasted well into the Renaissance period.
Wouldn't it be more logical if Greco-Roman culture was preserved in - duh! - a Greco-Roman empire such as Byzantium rather than in a completely different culture and language area such as the Arab (or Turkish/Persian) speaking Muslim world? And wouldn't it make more sense if this inheritance was transferred back to western Europe in languages the intellectual elite there read and spoke (that is, Latin and Greek)?
Was/is the explanation that the Greco-Roman culture survived in the Arab speaking world correct/a reasonable simplification/wrong (and maybe an example of history writing based on ideological bias)?