Quote:
Originally Posted by Gladstone
I always get a bit of a kick out of the claim made that Islam preserved European science and culture, ie Greek writings etc. It was the Islamic world itself of course which from its beginnings out of Arabia made unprovoked wars of aggression on Europe, particularly on Byzantine, and which finally resulted in the destruction of Constantinople in 1453. Byzantium, being the Hellenic oriented continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, had been doing a fine job of preserving its own history till then.
It would be about the same difference if an arsonist burned down a citys' fine arts museum, rescued a few of the pieces from the flames they themselves set, and then forever after boasted they were a benefactor and preserver of the arts.  |
Yes, they preserved something, I say something, not much. But that was the merit of Nestorian Christians in the first place. Greek writings were first translated into Aramaic, then Nestorian translators from Baghdad (in 9th century) translated it into Arabic. So the Arab world got to know them. Then there was the School of Toledo which translated these writings from Arabic into Latin. So Aristoteles came to Europe in a distorted form, through the cribble of three translations! This Arabicized Arsitoteles had a certain influence on the European medieval culture, along with Arab philosophers and Aristoteles' commentators like Averroes, Avicenna and Avempace.
It wasn't until the humanism and renaissance that Europe came in touch with the Greek originals of Aristoteles and other Greek authors. It was mainly due to the influx of Greek intellectuals who fled Byzantium, which was conquered by Turks.
It is a very odd thing to me. Why did medieval Europeans translate Aristoteles and other Greeks from Arabic? Why didn't they just learn Greek and translate it from the original? The Greek-speaking world was not geographically much more distant from the medieval Catholic Europe than the Muslim-occupied southern Spain. In spite of that, Greek was largely unknown in Europe at that time. There was even a proverb:
Graecum est, non legitur. (It is in Greek, so no-one reads it.)