The Golden Age and Decline of Islamic Civilisation - S. E. Al-Djazairi [Hardcover]

This book will not specifically address the issue of the Islamic impact on the Christian West, but will touch upon it in many instances, showing how Islamic learning was transferred to the Christian West. In doing so, this work will highlight one particular inanity generalised amongst Western history that the science and learning the Christian West recuperated from Islam (in the 12th century, above all) was Greek, and the reason why it was recovered in Arabic was because ‘Greek science had been lost to the Christian West, and was recuperated in Arabic from its Muslim guardians.’[33]Yet, we also find that whenever there was any revival elsewhere, or any other time in the Christian West, it was due to the Greek legacy. Hence, in this latter respect, we learn, for instance, ‘that the mother of all Western universities, Salerno in southern Italy, owes this status thanks to the Greek legacy; that Sicily played its leading role in the rise of modern science and civilisation, again thanks to its Greek heritage, that Amalfi, also in the south of Italy, did the same, that the later Renaissance (16th century) was due to the flow of Greek learning to the Christian West from deceased Byzantium (following its taking by the Turks in 1453), and so on and so forth.’[34]Hence, we have two contradictory arguments held by nearly every single Western historian, that on one hand Greek learning was lost to the Christian West, which explains its recovery from Arabic, and on the other, that such Greek learning, in its pristine Greek form, was responsible for the flowering of science and civilisation, whether before the 12th century, or after, or during the 16th-17th century Renaissance (From The Introduction)