The falacy of Islam “preserved” classical knowledge

“The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times. As Michael Harris points out in his History of Libraries in the Western World:

'The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece … were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.… Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.'

The Muslim intellectuals who served as propagandists for Caliph Al-Mamun (the same caliph who started the famous Islamic Inquisition to cope with the rationalism that had begun to infiltrate Islam upon its contact with Greek knowledge), such as al-Gahiz (d. 868), repeatedly asserted that Christianity had stopped the Rum (Romans—that is, the inhabitants of the Greek Roman Empire) from taking advantage of classical knowledge. This propaganda is still repeated today by those Western historians who not only are biased against Christianity but also are often occupationally invested in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic cultural influence. Lamenting the end of the study of ancient philosophy and science upon the presumed closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy by Emperor Justinian I in 529 is part of this narrative. Yet this propaganda does not correspond to the facts, as Speros Vryonis and others have shown, and as evidenced by the preservation and use of ancient Greek knowledge by the Christians of the empire of the Greeks. The Christian Greeks themselves were aware of their own civilizational superiority as well as the medieval Muslim propaganda against it.

In the West several works of Aristotle were available to Roman Catholic medieval scholars in Latin translations from Greek dating back to Boethius in the sixth century and Marius Victorinus in the fourth century. By the end of the twelfth century, the Columbia History of Western Philosophy reminds us, “authors of the Latin West were quite “familiar with the logical works (Organon) of Aristotle.” As the historian Sylvain Gouguenheim has shown, with the translations made at the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, medieval scholars hardly needed translations of Aristotle from Arabic into Latin. Moreover, we know that Saint Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle translated directly from the Greek texts into Latin by William of Moerbeke (1215–1286), a Dominican who was Latin bishop of Corinth—that is, a Roman Catholic bishop of a city in largely Christian Orthodox Greece. William produced more than twenty-five translations of Aristotle in addition to translations of Archimedes, Proclus, Ptolemy, Galen, and many other Greek thinkers. In fact, as will be shown, it was Christian scholars who were responsible for bringing Greek knowledge to Islam, and this knowledge came to Islam only because Muslim forces had conquered areas (the Middle East and North Africa) where a rich Greek Christian civilization had developed...

Christian Europe, including the Christian kingdoms in Spain, could not benefit more from its commerce with the superior civilization of the Christian Greek Roman Empire because, as Henri Pirenne pointed out long ago, Islamic warriors’ attacks had turned the then-Christian Mediterranean sea into a battlefield, and eventually into an Islamic lake, and had consequently short-circuited the direct cultural exchange between Europe and the empire of the Greeks. Therefore the Islamic empire was arguably the cause of the relative slowing down of European development in the early or “dark” Middle Ages...of course cultural and especially commercial exchange between West and East continued to occur, and now largely via the Islamic empire, but this happened not because of the civilizational properties of medieval Islam but because medieval Islam had interrupted the direct communication in the first place.

Therefore the torrent of Islamocentric academic publications; television documentaries from PBS, the History Channel, and the BBC; declarations by UNESCO; and the National Geographic traveling exhibits extolling the “transmission of Greek science and technology” by Islam to the backward West overlooks that, whatever the actual degree of this transmission, the transmission not only of Greek science and technology but also of Greek sculpture, painting, drama, narrative, and lyric, which could not and did not take place via Islam because of religious barriers, would equally have taken place without Islam, if Islam had not interrupted with its military conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the direct communication between the Christian West and the Christian East.

In fact, when Greek scholars began to arrive in Italy escaping from the final destruction of the Christian Greek Roman Empire by Islam in the fifteenth century...they brought Greek drama, narrative, lyric poetry, philosophy (significantly Plato), and art to the West. They decisively contributed to (and perhaps even started, as many scholars have argued) what would be the Italian Renaissance. This massive cultural transmission showed the sort of impact the Christian Greeks could have had on western Europe centuries earlier, perhaps as early as the seventh century, without the Islamic interruption.

Moreover, in Constantinople alone, we know from contemporary testimonies that the medieval Islamic conquest was responsible for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Greek manuscripts during the capture and sacking of this Christian Greek city by the Ottoman sultan (and caliph of all Muslims) Mehmet II in 1453. We will never know how much of Greek literature and art and scientific knowledge was lost with the destruction of the Christian Greek Roman Empire. To this damage caused to European civilization should be added the demographic disaster resulting from the millions of European men, women, and children captured or bought as slaves by Islam throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The historian Robert Davis has estimated that more than a million white slaves were traded in Islamic lands between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries alone.”

Excerpt From: Darío Fernández-Morera. “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.”