Contents
"He has taught you that which
[heretofore] you knew not." (Quran, Surah [2: 239])
Islam is a religion based upon knowledge
for it is ultimately knowledge of the Oneness of God combined
with faith and total commitment to Him that saves man. The text
of the Quran is replete with verses inviting man to use his
intellect, to ponder, to think and to know, for the goal of
human life is to discover the Truth which is none other than
worshipping God in His Oneness. The Hadith literature is also
full of references to the importance of knowledge. Such sayings
of the Prophet as "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave",
(Hadith)
and
"Verily the men of knowledge are the
inheritors of the prophets", (Hadith)
have echoed throughout the history of
Islam and incited Muslims to seek knowledge wherever it might be
found. During most of its history, Islamic civilization has been
witness to a veritable celebration of knowledge. That is why
every traditional Islamic city possessed public and private
libraries and some cities like Cordoba and Baghdad boasted of
libraries with over 400,000 books. Such cities also had
bookstores, some of which sold a large number of titles. That is
also why the scholar has always been held in the highest esteem
in Islamic society.
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As Islam spread northward into Syria,
Egypt, and the Persian empire, it came face to face with the
sciences of antiquity whose heritage had been preserved in
centres which now became a part of the Islamic world. Alexandria
had been a major centre of sciences and learning for centuries.
The Greek learning cultivated in Alexandria was opposed by the
Byzantines who had burned its library long before the advent of
Islam. The tradition of Alexandrian learning did not die,
however. It was transferred to Antioch and from there farther
east to such cities as Edessa by eastern Christians who stood in
sharp opposition to Byzantium and wished to have their own
independent centres of learning. Moreover, the Persian king,
Shapur I, had established Jundishapur in Persia as a second
great centre of learning matching Antioch. He even invited
Indian physicians and mathematicians to teach in this major seat
of learning, in addition to the Christian scholars who taught in
Syriac as well as the Persians whose medium of instruction was
Pahlavi. Once Muslims established the new Islamic order during
the Umayyad period, they turned their attention to these centres
of learning which had been preserved and sought to acquaint
themselves with the knowledge taught and cultivated in them.
They therefore set about with a concerted effort to translate
the philosophical and scientific works which were available to
them from not only Greek and Syriac (which was the language of
eastern Christian scholars) but also from Pahlavi, the scholarly
language of pre-Islamic Persia, and even from Sanskrit. Many of
the accomplished translators were Christian Arabs such as Hunayn
ibn Ishaq, who was also an outstanding physician, and others
Persians such as Ibn Muqaffa', who played a major role in the
creation of the new Arabic prose style conducive to the
expression of philosophical and scientific writings. The great
movement of translation lasted from the beginning of the 8th to
the end of the 9th century, reaching its peak with the
establishment of the House of Wisdom (Bayt alhikmah) by the
caliph al-Ma'mun at the beginning of the 9th century. The result
of this extensive effort of the Islamic community to confront
the challenge of the presence of the various philosophies and
sciences of antiquity and to understand and digest them in its
own terms and according to its own world view was the
translation of a vast corpus of writings into Arabic. Most of
the important philosophical and scientific works of Aristotle
and his school, much of Plato and the Pythagorean school, and
the major works of Greek astronomy, mathematics and medicine
such as the Almagest of Ptolemy, the Elements of Euclid, and the
works of Hippocrates and Galen, were all rendered into Arabic.
Furthermore, important works of astronomy, mathematics and
medicine were translated from Pahlavi and Sanskrit. As a result,
Arabic became the most important scientific language of the
world for many centuries and the depository of much of the
wisdom and the sciences of antiquity. The Muslims did not
translate the scientific and philosophical works of other
civilizations out of fear of political or economic domination
but because the structure of Islam itself is based upon the
primacy of knowledge. Nor did they consider these forms of
knowing as "un-Islamic" as long as they confirmed the doctrine
of God's Oneness which Islam considers to have been at the heart
of every authentic revelation from God. Once these sciences and
philosophies confirmed the principle of Oneness, the Muslims
considered them as their own. They made them part of their world
view and began to cultivate the Islamic sciences based on what
they had translated, analyzed, criticized, and assimilated,
rejecting what was not in conformity with the Islamic
perspective.
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The Muslim mind has always been attracted
to the mathematical sciences in accordance with the "abstract"
character of the doctrine of Oneness which lies at the heart of
Islam. The mathematical sciences have traditionally included
astronomy, mathematics itself and much of what is called physics
today.
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In astronomy the Muslims integrated the
astronomical traditions of the Indians, Persians, the ancient
Near East and especially the Greeks into a synthesis which began
to chart a new chapter in the history of astronomy from the 8th
century onward. The Almagest of Ptolemy, whose very name in
English reveals the Arabic origin of its Latin translation, was
thoroughly studied and its planetary theory criticized by
several astronomers of both the eastern and western lands of
Islam leading to the major critique of the theory by Nasir
al-Din al-Tusi and his students, especially Qutb alDin al-Shirazi,
in the 13th century. The Muslims also observed the heavens
carefully and discovered many new stars. The book on stars of 'Abd
al-Rahman al-Sufi was in fact translated into Spanish by Alfonso
X el Sabio and had a deep influence upon stellar to pony my in
European languages. Many star names in English such as Aldabaran
still recall their Arabic origin. The Muslims carried out many
fresh observations which were contained in astronomical tables
called zij. One of the acutest of these observers was al-Battani
whose work was followed by numerous others. The zij of al-Ma'mun
observed in Baghdad, the Hakimite zij of Cairo, the Toledan
Tables of alZarqali and his associates, the ll-Khanid zij of
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi observed in Maraghah, and the zij of Ulugh-Beg
from Samarqand are among the most famous Islamic astronomical
tables. They wielded a great deal of influence upon Western
astronomy up to the time of Tycho Brahe. The Muslims were in
fact the first to create an astronomical observatory as a
scientific institution, this being the observatory of Maraghah
in Persia established by al-Tusi. This was indirectly the model
for the later European observatories. Many astronomical
instruments were developed by Muslims to carry out observation,
the most famous being the astrolabe. There existed even
mechanical astrolabes perfected by Ibn Samh which must be
considered as the ancestor of the mechanical clock. Astronomical
observations also had practical applications including not only
finding the direction of Makkah for prayers, but also devising
almanacs (the word itself being of Arabic origin). The Muslims
also applied their astronomical knowledge to questions of
time-keeping and the calendar. The most exact solar calendar
existing to this day is the Jalali calendar devised under the
direction of 'Umar Khayyam in the 12th century and still in use
in Persia and Afghanistan.
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As for mathematics proper, like astronomy,
it received its direct impetus from the Quran not only because
of the mathematical structure related to the text of the Sacred
Book, but also because the laws of inheritance delineated in the
Quran require rather complicated mathematical solutions. Here
again Muslims began by integrating Greek and Indian mathematics.
The first great Muslim mathematician, al-Khwarazmi, who lived in
the 9th century, wrote a treatise on arithmetic whose Latin
translation brought what is known as Arabic numerals to the
West. To this day guarismo, derived from his name, means figure
or digit in Spanish while algorithm is still used in English.
Al-Khwarazmi is also the author of the first book on algebra.
This science was developed by Muslims on the basis of earlier
Greek and Indian works of a rudimentary nature. The very name
algebra comes from the first part of the name of the book of al-Khwarazmi,
entitled Kirah al-jahr wa'l-muqabalah. Abu Kamil al-Shuja'
discussed algebraic equations with five unknowns. The science
was further developed by such figures as al-Karaji until it
reached its peak with Khayyam who classified by kind and class
algebraic equations up to the third degree.
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The Muslims also excelled in geometry as
reflected in their art. The brothers Banu Musa who lived in the
9th century may be said to be the first outstanding Muslim
geometers while their contemporary Thabit ibn Qurrah used the
method of exhaustion, giving a glimpse of what was to become
integral calculus. Many Muslim mathematicians such as Khayyam
and al-Tusi also dealt with the fifth postulate of Euclid and
the problems which follow if one tries to prove this postulate
within the confines of Eucledian geometry.
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Another branch of mathematics developed by
Muslims is trigonometry which was established as a distinct
branch of mathematics by al-Biruni. The Muslim mathematicians,
especially al-Battani, Abu'l-Wafa', Ibn Yunus and Ibn al-Haytham,
also developed spherical astronomy and applied it to the
solution of astronomical problems.
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The love for the study of magic squares
and amicable numbers led Muslims to develop the theory of
numbers. Al-Khujandi discovered a particular case of Fermat's
theorem that "the sum of two cubes cannot be another cube",
while alKaraji analyzed arithmetic and geometric progressions
such as: 1^3+2^3+3^3+...+n^3=( 1+2+3+...+n)^2. Al-Biruni also
dealt with progressions while Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid al-Kashani
brought the study of number theory among Muslims to its peak.
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In the field of physics the Muslims made
contributions in especially three domains. The first was the
measurement of specific weights of objects and the study of the
balance following upon the work of Archimedes. In this domain
the writings of al-Biruni and al-Khazini stand out. Secondly
they criticized the Aristotelian theory of projectile motion and
tried to quantify this type of motion. The critique of Ibn Sina,
Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, Ibn Bajjah and others led to the
development of the idea of impetus and momentum and played an
important role in the criticism of Aristotelian physics in the
West up to the early writings of Galileo. Thirdly there is the
field of optics in which the Islamic sciences produced in Ibn
al-Haytham (the Latin Alhazen) who lived in the 11th century,
the greatest student of optics between Ptolemy and Witelo. Ibn
al-Haytham's main work on optics, the Kitah al-manazir, was also
well known in the West as Thesaurus opticus. Ibn al-Haytham
solved many optical problems, one of which is named after him,
studied the property of lenses, discovered the camera obscura,
explained correctly the process of vision, studied the structure
of the eye, and explained for the first time why the sun and the
moon appear larger on the horizon. His interest in optics was
carried out two centuries later by Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi and
Kamal al-Din al-Farisi. It was Qutb al-Din who gave the first
correct explanation of the formation of the rainbow.
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It is important to recall that in physics
as in many other fields of science the Muslims observed,
measured and carried out experiments. They must be credited with
having developed what came to be known later as the experimental
method.
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The hadiths of the Prophet contain many
instructions concerning health including dietary habits; these
sayings became the foundation of what came to be known later as
"Prophetic medicine" (al-tibb al-nabawi). Because of the great
attention paid in Islam to the need to take care of the body and
to hygiene, early in Islamic history Muslims began to cultivate
the field of medicine turning once again to all the knowledge
that was available to them from Greek, Persian and Indian
sources. At first the great physicians among Muslims were mostly
Christian but by the 9th century Islamic medicine, properly
speaking, was born with the appearance of the major compendium,
@Rhazes Anatomy Smallpox Antiseptic Psychosomatic Medicine The
Paradise of Wisdom (Firdaws al-hikmah ) by 'Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari,
who synthesized the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions of
medicine with those of India and Persia. His student, Muhammad
ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi (the Latin Rhazes), was one of the
greatest of physicians who emphasized clinical medicine and
observation. He was a master of prognosis and psychosomatic
medicine and also of anatomy. He was the first to identify and
treat smallpox, to use alcohol as an antiseptic and make medical
use of mercury as a purgative. His Kitab al-hawi (Continens) is
the longest work ever written in Islamic medicine and he was
recognized as a medical authority in the West up to the 18th
century.
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The Canon of Medicine and Meningitis
The greatest of all Muslim physicians,
however, was Ibn Sina who was called "the prince of physicians"
in the West. He synthesized Islamic medicine in his major
masterpiece, al-Qanun fi'l tibb (The Canon of Medicine), which
is the most famous of all medical books in history. It was the
final authority in medical matters in Europe for nearly six
centuries and is still taught wherever Islamic medicine has
survived to this day in such lands as Pakistan and India. Ibn
Sina discovered many drugs and identified and treated several
ailments such as meningitis but his greatest contribution was in
the philosophy of medicine. He created a system of medicine
within which medical practice could be carried out and in which
physical and psychological factors, drugs and diet are combined.
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Pulmonary Circulation
After Ibn Sina, Islamic medicine divided
into several branches. In the Arab world Egypt remained a major
center for the study of medicine, especially ophthalmology which
reached its peak at the court of al-Hakim. Cairo possessed
excellent hospitals which also drew physicians from other lands
including Ibn Butlan, author of the famous Calendar of Health,
and Ibn Nafis who discovered the lesser or pulmonary circulation
of the blood long before Michael Servetus, who is usually
credited with the discovery.
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Gynaecology
As for the western lands of Islam
including Spain, this area was likewise witness to the
appearance of outstanding physicians such as Sa'd al-Katib of
Cordoba who composed a treatise on gynaecology, and the greatest
Muslim figure in surgery, the 12th century Abu'l-Qasim al-Zahrawi
(the Latin Albucasis) whose medical masterpiece Kitab al-tasrif
was well known in the West as Concessio. One must also mention
the Ibn Zuhr family which produced several outstanding
physicians and Abu Marwan 'Abd al-Malik who was the Maghrib's
most outstanding clinical physician. The well known Spanish
philosophers, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd, were also outstanding
physicians. Islamic medicine continued in Persia and the other
eastern lands of the Islamic world under the influence of Ibn
Sina with the appearance of major Persian medical compendia such
as the Treasury of Sharaf al-Din al-Jurjani and the commentaries
upon the Canon by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi.
Even after the Mongol invasion, medical studies continued as can
be seen in the work of Rashid al-Din Fadlallah, and for the
first time there appeared translations of Chinese medicine and
interest in acupuncture among Muslims. The Islamic medical
tradition was revived in the Safavid period when several
diseases such as whooping cough were diagnosed and treated for
the first time and much attention was paid to pharmacology. Many
Persian doctors such as 'Ayn al-Mulk of Shiraz also travelled to
India at this time to usher in the golden age of Islamic
medicine in the subcontinent and to plant the seed of the
Islamic medical tradition which continues to flourish to this
day in the soil of that land.
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Major Hospitals
The Ottoman world was also an arena of
great medical activity derived from the heritage of Ibn Sina.
The Ottoman Turks were especially known for the creation of
major hospitals and medical centres. These included not only
units for the care of the physically ill, but also wards for
patients with psychological ailments. The Ottomans were also the
first to receive the influence of modem European medicine in
both medicine and pharmacology. In mentioning Islamic hospitals
it is necessary to mention that all major Islamic cities had
hospitals; some like those of Baghdad were teaching hospitals
while some like the Nasiri hospital of Cairo had thousands of
beds for patients with almost any type of illness. Hygiene in
these hospitals was greatly emphasized and al-Razi had even
written a treatise on hygiene in hospitals. Some hospitals also
specialized in particular diseases including psychological ones.
Cairo even had a hospital which specialized in patients having
insomnia.
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Islamic medical authorities were also
always concerned with the significance of pharmacology and many
important works such as the Canon have whole books devoted to
the subject. The Muslims became heir not only to the
pharmacological knowledge of the Greeks as contained in the
works of Dioscorides, but also the vast herbal pharmacopias of
the Persians and Indians. They also studied the medical effects
of many drugs, especially herbs, themselves. The greatest
contributions in this field came from Maghribi scientists such
as Ibn Juljul, Ibn al-Salt and the most original of Muslim
pharmacologists, the 12th century scientist, al-Ghafiqi, whose
Book of Simple Drugs provides the best descriptions of the
medical properties of plants known to Muslims. Islamic medicine
combined the use of drugs for medical purposes with dietary
considerations and a whole lifestyle derived from the teachings
of Islam to create a synthesis which has not died out to this
day despite the introduction of modern medicine into most of the
Islamic world.
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The vast expanse of the Islamic world
enabled the Muslims to develop natural history based not only on
the Mediterranean world, as was the case of the Greek natural
historians, but also on most of the Eurasian and even African
land masses. Knowledge of minerals, plants and animals was
assembled from areas as far away as the Malay world and
synthesized for the first time by Ibn Sina in his Kitab al-Shifa'
(The Book of Healing). Such major natural historians as al-Mas'udi
intertwined natural and human history. Al-Biruni likewise in his
study of India turned to the natural history and even geology of
the region, describing correctly the sedimentary nature of the
Ganges basin. He also wrote the most outstanding Muslim work on
mineralogy.
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As for botany, the most important
treatises were composed in the 12th century in Spain with the
appearance of the work of al-Ghafiqi. This is also the period
when the best known Arabic work on agriculture, the Kitab al-falahah,
was written. The Muslims also showed much interest in zoology
especially in horses as witnessed by the classical text of al-Jawaliqi,
and in falcons and other hunting birds. The works of al-Jahiz
and al-Damiri are especially famous in the field of zoology and
deal with the literary, moral and even theological dimensions of
the study of animals as well as the purely zoological aspects of
the subject. This is also true of a whole class of writings on
the "wonders of creation" of which the book of Abu Yahya al-Qazwini,
the 'Aja'ih al-makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation) is perhaps
the most famous.
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Likewise in geography, Muslims were able
to extend their horizons far beyond the world of Ptolemy. As a
result of travel over land and by sea and the facile exchange of
ideas made possible by the unified structure of the Islamic
world and the hajj which enables pilgrims from all over the
Islamic world to gather and exchange ideas in addition to
visiting the House of God, a vast amount of knowledge of areas
from the Pacific to the Atlantic was assembled. The Muslim
geographers starting with al-Khwarazmi, who laid the foundation
of this science among Muslims in the 9th century, began to study
the geography of practically the whole globe minus the Americas,
dividing the earth into the traditional seven climes each of
which they studied carefully from both a geographical and
climactic point of view. They also began to draw maps some of
which reveal with remarkable accuracy many features such as the
origin of the Nile, not discovered in the West until much later.
The foremost among Muslim geographers was Abu 'Abdallah al-Idrisi,
who worked at the court of Roger II in Sicily and who dedicated
his famous book, Kitab al-rujari (The Book of Roger) to him. His
maps are among the great achievements of Islamic science. It was
in fact with the help of Muslim geographers and navigators that
Magellan crossed the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.
Even Columbus made use of their knowledge in his discovery of
America.
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The very name alchemy as well as its
derivative chemistry come from the Arabic al-kimiya'. The
Muslims mastered Alexandrian and even certain elements of
Chinese alchemy and very early in their history, produced their
greatest alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan (the Latin Geber) who lived
in the 8th century. Putting the cosmological and symbolic
aspects of alchemy aside, one can assert that this art led to
much experimentation with various materials and in the hands of
Muhammad ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi was converted into the science
of chemistry. To this day certain chemical instruments such as
the alembic (al-'anbiq) still bear their original Arabic names
and the mercury-sulphur theory of Islamic alchemy remains as the
foundation of the acid-base theory of chemistry. Al-Razi's
division of materials into animal, vegetable and mineral is
still prevalent and a vast body of knowledge of materials
accumulated by Islamic alchemists and chemists has survived over
the centuries in both East and West. For example the use of dyes
in objects of Islamic art ranging from carpets to miniatures or
the making of glass have much to do with this branch of learning
which the West learned completely from Islamic sources since
alchemy was not studied and practiced in the West before the
translation of Arabic texts into Latin in the 11th century .
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Islam inherited the millennial experience
in various forms of technology from the peoples who entered the
fold of Islam and the nations which became part of Dar al-Islam.
A wide range of technological knowledge, from the building of
water wheels by the Romans to the underground water system by
the Persians, became part and parcel of the technology of the
newly founded order. Muslims also imported certain kinds of
technology from the Far East such as paper which they brought
from China and whose technology they later transmitted to the
West. They also developed many forms of technology on the basis
of earlier existing knowledge such as the metallurgical art of
making the famous Damascene swords, an art which goes back to
the making of steel several thousand years before on the Iranian
plateau. Likewise Muslims developed new architectural techniques
of vaulting, methods of ventilation, preparations of dyes,
techniques of weaving, technologies related to irrigation and
numerous other forms of technology, some of which survive to
this day.
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In general Islamic civilization emphasized
the harmony between man and nature as seen in the traditional
design of Islamic cities. Maximum use was made of natural
elements and forces, and men built in harmony with, not in
opposition to nature. Some of the Muslim technological feats
such as dams which have survived for over a millennium, domes
which can withstand earthquakes, and steel which reveals
incredible metallurgical know-how, attest to the exceptional
attainment of Muslims in many fields of technology. In fact it
was a vastly superior technology that first impressed the
Crusaders in their unsuccessful attempt to capture the Holy Land
and much of this technology was brought back by the Crusaders to
the rest of Europe.
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One of the major achievements of Islamic
civilization is architecture which combines technology Treatises
on natural and art. The great masterpieces of Islamic
architecture from the Cordoba Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem to the Taj Mahal in India, scientists were often
display this perfect wedding between the artistic illustrated
with detailed principles of Islam and remarkable technological
know-how. Much of the outstanding medieval facilitate teaching
of the architecture of the West is in fact indebted to the
techniques of Islamic architecture. When one views the Notre
Dame in Paris or some other Gothic cathedral, one is reminded of
the building techniques which travelled from Muslim Cordoba
northward. Gothic arches as well as interior courtyards of so
many medieval and Renaissance European structures remind the
viewer of the Islamic architectural examples from which they
originally drew. In fact the great medieval European
architectural tradition is one of the elements of Western
civilization most directly linked with the Islamic world, while
the presence of Islamic architecture can also be directly
experienced in the Moorish style found not only in Spain and
Latin America, but in the south-western United States as well.
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The oldest university in the world which
is still functioning is the eleven hundred-year-old Islamic
university of Fez, Morocco, known as the Qarawiyyin. This old
tradition of Islamic learning influenced the West greatly
through Spain. In this land where Muslims, Christians and Jews
lived for the most part peacefully for many centuries,
translations began to be made in the 11th century mostly in
Toledo of Islamic works into Latin often through the
intermediary of Jewish scholars most of whom knew Arabic and
often wrote in Arabic. As a result of these translations,
Islamic thought and through it much of Greek thought became
known to the West and Western schools of learning began to
flourish. Even the Islamic educational system was emulated in
Europe and to this day the term chair in a university reflects
the Arabic kursi (literally seat) upon which a teacher would sit
to teach his students in the madrasah (school of higher
learning). As European civillization grew and reached the high
Middle Ages, there was hardly a field of learning or form of
art, whether it was literature or architecture, where there was
not some influence of Islam present. Islamic learning became in
this way part and parcel of Western civilization even if with
the advent of the Renaissance, the West not only turned against
its own medieval past but also sought to forget the long
relation it had had with the Islamic world, one which was based
on intellectual respect despite religious opposition.
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