Well, if you want to go way back to when the various islamic states preserved the works of western culture after the fall of rome, I could grant them that, but they only preserved what islam would allow and it wasn't done to preserve western culture, rather to cull from it what would work for them.
Other than that, I can't think of any real influence that muslim thought had on the enlightenment or the founding fathers,
wouldn't that have been the business of the press to make them explain such a radical statement? guess not