Western Science and Muslim Sources: Debt or Investment?

Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel

Sylvain Gouguenheim

(Image from amazon.ca)

In the April 28th issue of the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur had an interesting article that overlaps with my academic training and intellectual interests: "Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look."

Back in my history of science studies -- roughly, 1980-1985 -- we learned of an intellectual debt to the Islamic world on the part of Western science. Starting about the 12th century, or so we read, Western Christians in Spain began translating texts on natural philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics from Arabic sources into Latin.

At one point, this all sounded so interesting that I considered studying it . . . but the complexity of Arabic put me off, so I never followed the interest up.

Now, it seems, that was all rot anyway:

When Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today's historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe's reawakening from the Middle Ages.

He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy -- a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.

"This thesis has basically nothing scandalous about it, if it were true," Gouguenheim writes. "In spite of the appearances, it has more to do with taking ideological sides than scientific analysis."

For a controversy, here's a real one. Gouguenheim, a professor of medieval history at a prestigious university, l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, is saying "Whoa!" to the idea there was an Islamic bridge of civilization to the West. Supposedly, it "would be at the origin of the Middle Ages' cultural and scientific reawakening, and (eventually) the Renaissance."

In a new book, he is basically canceling, or largely writing off, a debt to "the Arabo-Muslim world" dating from the year 750 -- a concept built up by other historians over the past 50 years -- that has Europe owing Islam for an essential part of its identity.

"Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel" (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world's initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of "Islam" but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Moorish Spain.

So . . . everything that I learned was wrong, and Sylvain Gouguenheim -- in his Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel -- has proof.

Actually, I had already begun to question some of the thesis of the Western debt to Islamic science, for in my cursory readings in that field, I had begun to suspect that the Islamic "Golden Age" was golden because the 'Muslim' empire was still a largely non-Muslim, multicultural realm that allowed greater intellectual freedom than later was possible under more profound Islamization.

Even the achievements of Muslim scientists were erected on the scientific foundation laid by Greco-Roman science in the lands conquered by Islam.

Moreover, I wondered if Western Europe had really been so benighted in the Early Middle Ages as was often claimed -- were the 'Dark Ages' really so utterly dark?

As Vinocur remarks, this is "a controversy, . . . a real one," and Gouguenheim's book sounds interesting enough for me to attempt reading it in French . . . almost. Or I could read what Le Monde and Le Figaro have to say in their reviews . . . also in French.

But perhaps I'll wait for the book's English translation, which is certain to come soon.

Meanwhile, I have a few doubts about this book completely overturning what we 'know'. Some of Gouguenheim's critics argue "that he disregarded the mathematics and astronomy produced by the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries and painted the period's Islamic civilization exactly what it was not: obscurantist, legalistic, fatalistic and fanatic." The point is perhaps well taken. One cannot deny the achievements of Muslim scientists, nor can one ignore the fact that the translation of scientific texts from Arabic to Latin did take place in such places as Spain from about the 12th century until the Renaissance, when Westerners turned largely to the original Greek sources coming from Byzantium.

The issue, then, is not whether Western science owes an intellectual debt to the Muslim world but, rather, the amount of that debt . . . if "debt" is the right word.

My own view? I'd use an analogy other than debt. Let me suggest this scenario. Some of the Greco-Roman world's intellectual wealth was invested in Muslim intellectual enterprises during the Early Middle Ages, and the interest that accumulated from that investment was collected by the West in the High Middle Ages.

That's a type of usury, I suppose, and usury was condemned in both Islam and Medieval Christianity, but whoever said that civilizations are entirely consistent?

At any rate, that's my "Usury Thesis" on what the West obtained from the Muslim world.