It is not a compliment to Arabs, and it is not the point. I commented specifically because of this sentence "Islam is more Persian than Arab" (which wasn't by you).
Arabs don't have a special place, and the role that Persians played is very well known, BUT, a sentence like this usually comes from people who want to dismiss Arabs completely. And the problem feels undecidable too. There were a lot of scholars. A lot of them spoke Arabic better than most Arabs today. You could find a lot of them have mixed parents and were raised in Arabs culture. How will you decide exactly?
