Arab Transmission of the Classics: Difference between revisions

The '''Arab transmission of the classics''' is a common and persistent myth that [[Arabic]] commentators such as Avicenna and [[Averroes]] 'saved' the work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European dark age between fifth and the tenth centuries, had the [[Islam|Islamic]] philosophers not preserved them by translating them into Arabic, to be passed on to the Latin philosophers in the West after the [[Reconquista|reconquest]] of Spain from the Muslims during the twelve and thirteenth centuries.<ref>The myth persists even on 'scholarly' websites.  See e.g. [http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/pabacker/history/islam.htm here]. "It was only through the transfer of Greek knowledge (including Aristotle's philosophy, Ptolemy's geography, Hippocrates' medicine) by Islam Spain that this information ''ever'' got to Western Europe." [Our emphasis]</ref> This is incorrect. It was actually the Byzantines in the East who saved the ancient learning of the Greeks in the original language, and the first Latin texts to be used were translation from the Greek, in the 12^th century, rather than, in most cases, the Arabic, which were only used in default of these.

It is nevertheless true, and no myth, that the work of the Arabic commentators, particularly Averroes, had a profound influence on the scholastic philosophers of the Latin West in the thirteenth century. Aristotle's Greek is terse and difficult to understand. The work of the Arabic commentators helped in explaining and clarifying Aristotle's dense and apparently obscure thought. Thus Western intellectual tradition owes a great debt to the Arabic scholars in terms of ''understanding'' Aristotle's thought. In terms of the ''texts'', however, these would have survived had the Arabic commentators never existed.

What we know as the ''Western Intellectual Tradition'' began in ancient [[Greece]] in the fifth century, with the work of mathematicians such as Euclid, philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, and scientists such as Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth around 240 BC). The main principle underlying this tradition is naturalistic, humanistic and rational, emphasising the role of human reason in arriving at truth, rather than reliance on supernatural or revealed 'truth'.   

Greek science and philosophy was inherited by the ancient Romans, but their culture was lost after the collapse of the Roman empire in the West during the fifth and sixth centuries. Ancient learning was not 'recovered' in the West until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The recovery was a result of the transmission both of Greek ''ideas'' which had been preserved and developed in the Byzantine and Arab world in the early middle ages, and also of the ''texts'' themselves, which had been almost completely lost in the West. These texts had to be translated into Latin, the language of educated people in that period, because few scholars understood Greek.