Mouood Mouood English Edition
Islamic Civilizations’ Impact upon Europe
Western writers have often used the word Arabs or Muhammadans for Muslims and Arabic civilization for Islamic Civilization. In other instances, the words Saracen and Moor are also used for Muslims (Arabs and non-Arabs) from various parts of Europe, Africa, Arabia and Asia. During 800-1500 C.E. essentially all scientific works were written in Arabic. It is only after colonization of Muslim lands that this practice became less prevalent and in many instances was eliminated.
During the Middle Ages, the Islamic World had a very significant impact upon Europe, which in turn cleared the way for the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. In the Medieval age, Islam and Muslims influenced Europe in a number of different ways. One of the most important of these subjects was Science.
Ever since Islam was born, Muslims had made immense leaps forward in the area of Science. Cities like Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba were the centers of civilization. These cities were flourishing and Muslim scientists made tremendous progress in applied as well as theoretical Science and Technology. In Europe, however, the situation was much different. Europe was in the Dark Ages.
Islamic contributions to Science were now rapidly being translated and transferred from Spain to the rest of Europe. Ibnul Haitham’s works on Optics, (in which he deals with 50 Optical questions put to Muslim Scholars by the Franks), was translated widely. The Muslims discovered the Principle of Pendulum, which was used to measure time. Many of the principles of Isaac Newton were derived from former Islamic scientific contributions. In the field of Chemistry numerous Islamic works were translated into Latin. One of the fields of study in this area was alchemy. The Muslims by exploring various elements, developed a good understanding of the constitution of matter. Jabir ibn-Hayyan (Geber) was the leading chemist in the Muslim world, some scholars link the introduction of the ‘scientific method’back to him. A great number of terms used in Chemistry such as alcohol, alembic, alkali and elixir are of Islamic origin.
Medicine was a key science explored by Muslims. Al-Rhazes is one of the most famous Doctors and writers of Islamic Medicine. Every major city had a hospital; the hospital at Cairo had over 8000 beds, with separate wards for fevers, ophthalmic, dysentery and surgical cases. Al-Rhazes discovered the origin of smallpox and showed that one could only acquire it once in one’s life, thus showing the existence of the immune system and how it worked. Muslim doctors were also aware of the contagious qualities of diseases. Hundreds of medical works were translated into Latin.
All of this knowledge transferred from the Muslims to the Europeans was the vital raw material for the Scientific Revolution. Muslims not only passed on Greek classical works but also introduced new scientific theories, without which the European Renaissance could not have occurred. Thus even though many of the Islamic contributions go unacknowledged, they played an integral role in the European transformation.
While historians have written many books on the high level of sophistication and learning of the Muslims compared to the Europeans during the dark ages, few have thought to make the connection between Muslim science and the scientific explosion that was to occur later in Europe. The dependence of the latter on the former, however, is immense. It is proved that the scientific revolution that took place in 17th Europe could not have occurred without the help of the Muslims.
The maelstrom brought upon Europe by the intellectual tradition taken from the Muslim world had far-reaching consequences on European life. Slowly as education spread throughout Europe, with Universities arising in the major cities, the authority of science grew exponentially. Even the powerful Church of Rome would soon go down as it foolishly tried to challenge rationality and scientific proofs with superstitions and the fading doctrine of papal authority. [2]The crusades, in terms of human losses, were one of the most lopsided military campaigns in history, with the exception of the savage massacres of Muslim civilians by the Christian armies. However, the crusades, initially being a crushing defeat for the Christian World, would introduce them to the enormity of the gap between them and the Muslims.
At the same time, Europeans scholars were learning at the hands of the Muslims in Spain. The translated Greek works would introduce the Europeans to an indigenous intellectual tradition they never knew existed. This helped spark a new self-confidence among the scholars of Europe. Unfortunately, the scholars of Europe were torn between their intellectual loyalty and the strong hatred of their teachers present in their culture. Karen Armstrong explains:
“The Arabs in particular were a light to the Christian West and yet this debt has rarely been fully acknowledged. As soon as the great translation work had been completed, scholars in Europe began to shrug off this complicating and schizophrenic relationship with Islam and became very vague indeed about who the Arabs really were… There is an unhealthy repression and doublethink about people who are at one and the same time guides, heroes, and deadly enemies. This is very clear in the scholarship about Islam”. [3]Another factor that plays alongside the long-standing hatred of Islam in Europe is the phenomenon known as Orientalism. This concept was first articulated by Edward Said in his landmark book Orientalism, which is now considered required reading for anyone studying Middle Eastern culture or history. Orientalism is the result of the elaboration of the imaginary distinction between East and West: geographically, culturally, morally, and intellectually. The result of Orientalism are claims that go along the lines of ” ‘We’ are like this, but ‘they’, for unexplainable reasons, are fundamentally different, and in due course, inferior.” This in turn serves as justification for “Us” to rule “Them”, to exploit “Them”, to guide “Them” to our enlightened ways. Academic Orientalism gave rise to arrogant, seemingly humanistic ideals which drove imperialism, whose effects are felt very painfully in the Muslim, as well as most of the Third World. [4]While the “occidental-oriental” dichotomy of recent centuries identifies the World of Islam as separate and `Eastern,’ that world, is inextricably linked with the West. In general, however, “Westerners – Europeans – have great difficulty in considering the possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Arab [Islamic] world, or that the Arabs [Muslims] were central to the making of medieval Europe” [5]“No historical student of the culture of Western Europe can ever reconstruct for himself the intellectual values of the later Middle Ages unless he possesses a vivid awareness of Islam looming in the background.” [6]“The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe, as, before long, Christendom will have to confess; he has indelibly written it on the heavens, as anyone may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe.” [7]“Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens [Muslims] and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world” [8]“One of the hallmarks of civilized man is knowledge of the past – [including] the past of others with whom one’s own culture has had repeated and fruitful contact; or the past of any group that has contributed to the ascent of man. The Arabs fit profoundly into both of the latter two categories. But in the West the Arabs are not well known. Victims of ignorance as well as misinformation, they and their culture have often been stigmatized from afar” [9]“Too often science in Arabia has been seen as nothing more than a holding operation. The area has been viewed as a giant storehouse for previously discovered scientific results, keeping them until they could be passed on for use in the West. But this is, of course, a travesty of the truth. Certainly the Arabs did inherit Greek science – and some Indian and Chinese science too, for that matter – and later passed it on to the West. But this is far from being all they did” [10]
