Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

"This again stresses that it’s not just that the Arabs were so nice for translating and preserving a lot of ancient Greek texts, but that there was a great deal of selectivity in the translations and a lot of building on what had been translated. The thriving scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpins a lot of things that happen in the European Renaissance. Yes. Everything was preserved in Baghdad – the empire was controlled from Baghdad and there was a lot of Greek spoken throughout the empire, so a lot of the texts were in Byzantine monastic libraries originally, and people like the Banu Musa brothers travelled around trying to locate the documents they were interested in. The texts were later translated back, mostly at the Mediterranean contact points in Spain and Sicily, often by Jews who knew Arabic. The texts sometimes went into Hebrew before being translated into Castillian or Italian. Cities like Taledo, in Spain, had big translation movements in the 11th and 12th centuries, as Christians were becoming interested in the scientific knowledge of Muslims. I often tell my students that Arabic was being taught at Oxford in the 17th and 18th century as a normal part of the curriculum. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A lot of scientific material on engineering re-entered Europe via the Arabic, and even some of Aristotle’s work came back to Europe in this way. One of the most important Muslim philosophers, Averroes (that’s the Spanish form of his name) commented on Aristotle and much of that commentary arrived in Europe and Latin scholars engaged with it. Averroes died in 1199. The other big name is Avicenna, a Persian, who wrote a compendium of medicine that was still taught at the Sorbonne in Paris until the 17th century. It’s an encyclopedic summation of Arabic and Islamic medical knowledge. They were already doing complex surgery at this point. Arabic physicians looked on in horror at the Christians’ lack of knowledge during the Crusades, apparently: ‘No, don’t chop that leg off! We could mend it!’ The Knights of St John [also known as the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights of Malta] who founded a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem in 1080 were modelling their idea on the Muslim hospitals they had seen. Most towns in the Islamic world would have had a hospital by the 10th century. To be completely blunt, there was always an economic aspect for the support of science and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The early Abbasid caliphate was very wealthy, so that money could be put into scientific knowledge. But when you see Baghdad ceasing to be a centre of knowledge it’s also a time of economic difficulties, a huge recession if you like. It often is simply more about whether patrons have enough money. This aspect often gets ignored because people want to put an ideological spin on it. I hate to be cynical but at the end of the day if you are not paying a scientist they are not going to be doing science."