Western Renaissance: The Ungrateful Child Of Islamic Scholarship
Johnathan Lyons worked as a correspondent and editor for the Reuters news network. His career with the network spanned more than 20 years and sent him throughout the Middle East. Currently he studying for a Ph.D in the sociology of religion at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
In his newly released book entitled “The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization,” Lyons relates how medieval European scholars travelled far in order to gain Arab knowledge in subjects such as medicine and philosophy.
In a claim that will cause anti-Islam bigots to froth at the mouth Lyons predicates European progress in the Renaissance upon learning derived from the Islamic world:
“When Baghdad opened its gates as the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the prime site in the city was occupied by the royal library. Both the city and the library, completed around 765, were built by Caliph al-Mansur, who devised a method for measuring the circumference of the Earth….
…The library was officially called “the House of Wisdom”. It was a monumental structure, accommodating translators, copyists, scholars, scientists, librarians and the swelling volumes of Persian, Sanskrit and Greek texts that flooded into Baghdad….
..Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who suppor-ted it and the people who worked there…..In quick succession we meet scholars such as al-Khwarizimi, the illustrious Muslim mathematician and founder of algebra, the geographer al-Masudi, who described major sea routes to Persia, Cambodia and as far as the Malay peninsula in The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, and al-Kindi, the first Arab philosopher…
….[Lyons] focuses on a string of colourful translators and scholars who travelled to the Muslim world and took its knowledge and discoveries back with them.
Adelard of Bath, for example, travelled to Antioch and Sicily in his dogged pursuit of what he called studia Arabum, the learning of the Arabs. An early pioneer of Arab teaching, he translated numerous works of spherical and theoretical astronomy, including al-Khwarizimi’s astronomical tables, which introduced a new body and vocabulary of mathematical knowledge to the West. His translation work enabled Adelard to write his treatise on the use of the astrolabe, which revolutionised the way Western man understood the Universe. Another Briton, Michael Scot, could not get enough of Muslim learning. His extensive translations of the works of ibn Rushd and ibn Sina, undertaken during the 13th century, introduce philosophy, and the Greek philosophers, to the West. Widely regarded as Europe’s first expert on Aristotle, Scot was the model for Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest….
..Islamic thought and learning transformed medieval Christendom beyond recognition, Lyons writes. A key import was natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science, and the idea that came with it: the notion of a university as an intellectual, cultural and social institution. Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English scientist and philosopher, travelled through Muslim Spain dressed as an Arab and was among the first to teach natural philosophy in Paris. Without these imports, Lyons says, the Renaissance would not have been possible and European “progress” as we know it would have been inconceivable. The Arabs gave Europeans their ideological and intellectual identity – indeed, Lyons suggests, “the West” itself is a Muslim invention….” (Source: The Times)
It is amazing that science as it taught throughout the western world today would never dream of using knowledge gained from an outside source without accrediting that source. So it is all the more surprising, that western scientists throughout history have “conveniently” forgotten to accredit the Islamic world for the knowledge that they gained from it.
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