There's a interesting book I read called The House of Wisdom: How The Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Johnathan Lyons. That goes a lot into what you are talking about and more. Though I will say, while the Arabic numeral system and the zero were transferred to Europe through contact and trade with Muslim Arabs, the Arabs got the numerals and the zero from India. Arabic numerals are a modification of Sanskrit numerals (which is why you see them sometimes called Sanskrit-Arabic numerals). But yes, they are vastly more practical for doing math than Roman numerals. I am sometimes astonished that the Romans achieved what they did while doing math with those things.

And when the Christian West abandoned the "pagan" knowledge of the Greeks, for centuries, because of St. Augustine's arguments against secular reasoning, it was the Arab Muslims who were translating and maintaining and even updating the manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers. The tendency for using Aristotelian reasoning (First Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc.) to argue in favor of a monotheistic God (something I don't agree with but is nevertheless a step above using faith alone) was something first developed by Muslim clerics, and Thomas Aquinas was shamed by the Catholic church for trying to do the same thing. It was only after his death and posthumous elevation to sainthood that the Greeks suddenly became in vogue again in the Church.

Also the court of Roger II, the "Christian Sultan of Sicily", scandalized the church by being full of Muslims. A geographer in his court, Muhammad al-Idrisi, produced one of the most accurate world maps seen up to that point (in the 1100s).

Medieval Muslims actually improved the Astrolabe by introducing angular scales to the design, and adding circles indicating azimuths on the horizon. It was widely used throughout the Muslim world, chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way of finding the direction of Mecca, regardless of location, so that prayer could be performed properly.