victories were easy, and the fighting was slight. Except possibly during the first few years, they
were not fanatical; Christians and Jews were unmolested so long as they paid the tribute. Very
soon the Arabs acquired the civilization of the Eastern Empire, but with the hopefulness of a
rising polity instead of the weariness of decline. Their learned men read Greek, and wrote
commentaries. Aristotle's reputation is mainly due to them; in antiquity, he was seldom
mentioned, and was not regarded as on a level with Plato.
It is instructive to consider some of the words that we derive from Arabic, such as: algebra,
alcohol, alchemy, alembic, alkali, azimuth, zenith. With the exception of "alcohol"--which
meant, not a drink, but a substance used in chemistry--these words would give a good picture of
some of the things we owe to the Arabs. Algebra had been invented by the Alexandrian Greeks,
but was carried further by the Mohammedans. "Alchemy," "alembic," "alkali" are words
connected with the attempt to turn base metals into gold, which the Arabs took over from the
Greeks, and in pursuit of which they appealed to Greek philosophy. * "Azimuth" and "zenith"
are astronomical terms, chiefly useful to the Arabs in connection with astrology.
The etymological method conceals what we owe to the Arabs as regards knowledge of Greek
philosophy, because, when it was again studied in Europe, the technical terms required were
taken from Greek or Latin. In philosophy, the Arabs were better as commentators than as
original thinkers. Their importance, for us, is that they, and not the Christians, were the
immediate inheritors of those parts of the Greek tradition which only the Eastern Empire had
kept alive. Contact with the Mohammedans, in Spain, and to a lesser extent in Sicily, made the
West aware of Aristotle; also of Arabic numerals, algebra, and chemistry. It was this contact
that began the revival of learning in the eleventh century, leading to the Scholastic philosophy.
It was much later, from the thirteenth century onward, that the study of Greek enabled men to
go direct to the works of Plato and Aristotle and other Greek writers of antiquity. But if the
Arabs had not preserved the tradition, the men of the Renaissance might not have suspected
how much was to be gained by the revival of classical learning.
* See Alchemy, Child of Greek Philosophy, by Arthur John Hopkins, Columbia, 1934.