. . . we have underestimated the importance of 800 years of Islamic
society and culture in Spain between the 8th and 15th centuries. The
contribution of Muslim Spain to the preservation of classical learning
during the Dark Ages, and to the first flowerings of the Renaissance,
has long been recognised. But Islamic Spain was much more than a mere
larder where Hellenistic knowledge was kept for later consumption by the
emerging modern Western world. Not only did Muslim Spain gather and
preserve the intellectual content of ancient Greek and Roman
civilisation, it also interpreted and expanded upon that civilisation,
and made a vital contribution of its own in so many fields of human
endeavour - in science, astronomy, mathematics, algebra (itself an
Arabic word), law, history, medicine, pharmacology, optics, agriculture,
architecture, theology, music. Averroes and Avenzoor, like their
counterparts Avicenna and Rhazes in the East, contributed to the study
and practice of medicine in ways from which Europe benefited for
centuries afterwards.
Islam nurtured and preserved the quest for learning. In the words of the
tradition, 'the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the
martyr'. Cordoba in the 10th century was by far the most civilised city
of Europe. We know of lending libraries in Spain at the time King Alfred
was making terrible blunders with the culinary arts in this country. It
is said that the 400,000 volumes in its ruler's library amounted to more
books than all the libraries of the rest of Europe put together. That
was made possible because the Muslim world acquired from China the skill
of making paper more than 400 years before the rest of non-Muslim
Europe. Many of the traits on which modern Europe prides itself came to
it from Muslim Spain. Diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the
techniques of academic research, of anthropology, etiquette, fashion,
various types of medicine, hospitals, all came from this great city of
cities.
Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time,
allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited
beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for
many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the
extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in
Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed
so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of,
wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present,
in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe.
It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.
The project supported by the Home Office and the Department for Trade
and Industry, uncovers the Islamic civilisation's overlooked
contribution to science, technology and art during the dark ages in
European history.
Michael Hamilton Morgan, Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists
"Lost History delivers a missing link to the story of an interconnected
world: the achievements of Muslim civilization and its influence on East
and West."--President Jimmy Carter
Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How The Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
This was no mere "recovery" of classical wisdom by medieval Latins, with
the Arabs cast in the role of benevolent guardians, as most Western
histories of the period tell us, it represented the enormous transfer -
some might even say cultural theft - of invaluable Arab knowledge and
technology directly to the Christian West. -- p. 196
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
[It] is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously call
'Western' culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian
enlightenment....This book partly restores to us a world we have lost, a
world for which our current monotheistic leaderships do not even feel
nostalgia.--Christopher Hitchens, The Nation
David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
"Rationalism," declared the great French intellectual historian Etienne Gilson in his
authoritative Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (1938), "was born in Spain
in the mind of an Arabian philosopher as a conscious reaction against the theologism
of the Arabian divines." -- p. 374
Before the continent started banning hijab, European aristocrats used to
change their names to Abdullah and Muhammad, and going to the local
mosque was the latest trend.
Akbar S. Ahmed, Living Islam
It is well to recall that Islam not only caused Islamic
civilization to develop but also enabled the European
Renaissance to take root and grow. The time when Islam was most
strongly established was also the time when art, culture and
literature flourished, whether in Spain or, later, under the
Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals. Christian Europe was
enveloped in darkness until Islam came to the Iberian peninsula.
For centuries Islam fed Greek, Sanskrit and Chinese ideas into
Europe. Slowly and steadily Europe began to absorb those ideas.
In England, France, Germany and Italy society began to explore
literature and art with a new perspective; thus the seeds of the
Renaissance were sown. -- p. 15
The manuscript stands as a uniquely important monument to the
central role of Jews and Muslims in the spread of knowledge and
learning throughout medieval Europe, as well as being possibly
the earliest known example of Latin script of any kind written
on paper. Sotheby's says that only four other copies of this
work are known.
An extensive compendium of literature on Islamic civilization, this book
presents more than mere annotations - it details over 600 books and
articles in detailed and focused "literature briefs" that provide a
springboard to extensive readings for any student or teacher of Islamic
culture.
Washington W. Irving, Tales Of The Alhambra
As conquerors [Muslims], their heroism was equaled only by their moderation, and in both, for a time, they excelled the nations with whom they contended. Severed from their native homes, they loved the land given them as they supposed by Allah and strove to embellish it with everything that could administer to the happiness of man. Laying the foundations of their power in a system of wise and equitable laws, diligently cultivating the arts and sciences, and promoting agriculture, manufactures and commerce, they gradually formed an empire unrivaled for its prosperity by any of the empires of Christendom . . .
The cities of Arabian Spain became the resort of Christian artisans, to instruct themselves in the useful art. The Universities of Toledo, Cordova, Seville, Granada, were sought by the pale student from lands to acquaint himself with the sciences of the Arabs and the treasure lore of antiquity. -- p. 52
While the barbarians smashed and burned in western Europe, the
Arabs and Persians used the libraries of Alexandria and Asia
Minor, translated the scrolls and took them to Baghdad and far
beyond. In distant Bukhara on the Silk Road to China, a teenager
called Abu Ali Ibn Sina was engrossed in Aristotle's Metaphysics
at the age of 17. The year was AD997 and the text - central to
the subsequent development of philosophy - had long been lost
and unknown in western Europe.
We are indebted to the Arabic world not only for arithmetic but also for
algebra and trigonometry. Logarithms were invented by a mathematician
called Al-Khwarizmi in the 7th century. Test tubes, the compass and the
first surgical tools were all pioneered by Muslim inventors. A thousand
years ago, it is said, Baghdad had 60 hospitals.
This scientific flowering was accompanied by the establishment of the
first universities - or madrassahs. In a madrassah, the sheik or
professor taught, literally, from a chair. He was assisted by readers.
When the west eventually replicated such places of learning, we borrowed
such terms.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
In the Middle Ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly
from Islam to Europe, rather than from Europe to Islam as it is
today. Only around A.D. 1500 did the net direction of flow begin
to reverse. -- p. 253
Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations
The major landmarks in this process of expolitation were: in the
sixteenth century, the arrival of 'treasures' (gold and silver
ingots) from America; the brutal opening-up of India after the
battle of Plassey (23 June 1757), at which the British defeated
the nawab of Bengal; the forced expolitation of the Chinese
market after the First Opium War in 1839-42; and the partition
of Africa at Berlin in 1885. -- p. 388
Susan Spano, Revealed: Muslim Traveler Who Rivaled Marco Polo
I had studied medieval Europe ethnocentrically but now can only conclude
that during Battuta's time, it was a cultural, political and
technological sideshow. In the 14th century, the main event was Dar
al-Islam.
John Edwards, History Today
On the second day of January [1492] I saw Your Highnesses' royal
banners placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra .
. . and in the same month . . . Your Highness, as Catholic
Christians and princes devoted to the holy Christian faith and
the furtherance of its cause, and enemies of the sect of
Mohammed and of all idolatry and heresy, resolved to send me,
Christopher Columbus, to the . . . regions of India. -- vol. 42
