>He cannot possibly have been the patron of the Almagest as Ptolemy lived centuries before he did. Maybe you mean of a translation.

The Almagest version of the Galileo notes in the OP article is the Latin translation of the Arabic translation by Gerard of Cremona in Toledo around 1175. This makes Al-Ma'mun the patron of Almagest [1].

I've also mentioned that according to history he accepted the offer of the original copy of Almagest (Almajisti) in Greek from the Roman (Byzantine) emperor the time for a truce.

>Heliocentric models had been proposed by ancient Greeks, but the Copernican model was a huge advance. There is big difference between just speculating that the sun was the centre of the the universe and an actual mathematical mode.

The Islamic scholars were not speculating they were the original and earlier researchers of the heliocentric model that Copernicus and Galileo were famous for. It's not even an exxageration to say that both of them were very highly dependent of Islamic scholars work on the required mathematics and the earlier astronomy works (translations, original books contributions, cellestial tables like al-Zij the 11th-century Toledan Tables) as the OP article indicated. Most of these original works by Islamic have been lost and many have not throughly studied. I will argue that Copernicus himself most probably plagiarated some if not all his works from the Islamic scholars wothout properly attributing the original Islamic scholars' sources. Heck the so called telescope invention by Galileo was invented by Islamic scientists several hundreds years before him [2].

>There is a lot more to the scientific method than al-Haytham's minor contribution

Al-Haytham or Alhazen is father of scientific methods, nothing minor about that. One of his famous work of hundreds of books was his seven volumes work in the form His most influential work is titled Kitāb al-Manāẓir (Book of Optics), written during 1011–1021, only survived in a Latin edition. Guess what, Isaac Newton did not even bother to cite and refer to these seminal books by Al-Haytham when he wrote his masterpiece three volumes book on optics namely Opticks: A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light published in English in 1704. For this I will confidently say that Newton of plagiarism since he definitely know about these books in Latin since he's highly proficient in Latin. Heck, Isaac he wrote his greatest masterpiece, the Principia Mathematica, entirely in Latin.

The will and audacity to whitewash Islamic scholar contributions are beyond believe. They even had to change the name from Ibnu Sina to Avicennia, Al-Haytham to Alhazen, Ibnu Rush to Averroes, etc. These Arabics name can be represented in Latin easily. Imagine renaming Ramanujan as Rothman.

[1] Gerard of Cremona’s Latin translation of the Almagest and the revision of tables

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00218286221140848

[2] How a Muslim invented the Telescope centuries before Galileo:

https://www.secondgoldenage.com/p/how-a-muslim-invented-the-...