Watt, W.Montgomery. The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1972.
ARABIC PHILOSOPHY, INFLUENCE
OF
. Less than a century after the death of Muhammad in 632, most of Spain had come under
Muslim jurisdiction, while inroads had been made into the areas of Narbonne and
Carcasonne and even into south-central France, until Charles Martel turned the tide at
Poitiers and Tours in 732. As the Muslims were consolidating their power, they were also
changing the lingua franca of the Byzantine and Roman-Visigothic empires that they had
superseded. Arabic, however, had no religious and philosophical texts of its own besides
the Qur’an. Thus, Arabic intellectual activity in the sciences and in philosophy began
with translation of the Greek writings of the very civilizations that had been overrun. The
ensuing work helped make Arabic into a medium for absorbing and developing originally
non-Muslim scientific and scholarly concepts and ideas and for transmitting this new
synthesis to Latin Christendom.
In the East, this intellectual work was stimulated by the ‘Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad
in the second half of the 8th and the 9th centuries, beginning with al-Mansur and Harun
al-Rashid and finding its culmination in the rich patronage of al-Ma’mun. Al-Ma’mun
scoured libraries in the formerly Hellenistic Middle East and even in Byzantium for
Greek scientific and philosophical works that were then translated into Arabic. Especially
for this purpose, he instituted at Baghdad the influential Bait al-Hikmah (“House of
Knowledge” or “Wisdom”); here worked for a time Hunain ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian
Christian, who besides putting many Greek texts into Arabic also developed a
methodology for precise translation. In the course of a century and a half, much of the
work of Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, Hippocrates, Galen, Nicolaus, Albinus, Nemesius of
Emesa, and parts of Plotinus and Proclus were made available to Muslim scholars. The
intensive contacts between the East and the West of the Muslim sphere of influence soon
ensured the availability of these texts throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Many were
translated again, this time into Latin, and in the late 12th and the 13th centuries they
entered western Europe—at first Italy and especially France—via Sicily and Spain for the
use of Latin Christian scholars.
In the Spanish West of the Arabic world, interest in scholarship and learning began in
earnest under the Umayyad rulers at the end of the 9th century, but it was not until the
end of the 10th century that Cordova became a center of Muslim culture and learning that
could rival Baghdad. Caliph al-Hakam II’s library at Cordova in the third quarter of the
10th century is said to have contained around 500,000 volumes. Toledo, too, was a
repository of learning, especially of the sciences (including astronomy) and medicine.
Thus, philosophy came relatively late to Muslim Spain. But, once it arrived, it exerted
enormous influence on western Christianity. In the East, crusading Franks tended to
destroy the cultural infrastructure—for example, after the fall of Tripoli they destroyed
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