Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is the primer really. He gives some actual texts in translation – some medical and some philosophical and you get a taste of what was actually being translated and what it was like. Rosenthal considers the translations to be hugely important. Not just from a scientific aspect but also from the point of view of Islamic theology, the ability to reason, to use logic derived from Greek philosophical technique.
Your last book is Rosenthal’s The Classical Heritage in Islam.
This is the primer really. He gives some actual texts in translation – some medical and some philosophical – and you get a taste of what was actually being translated and what it was like. Rosenthal considers the translations to be hugely important. Not just from a scientific aspect but also from the point of view of Islamic theology, the ability to reason, to use logic derived from Greek philosophical technique. The ways in which argumentation and dialectic developed owes so much to the Greeks.
Apart from just being stupid, why do I not know about all this already?
Well, Western civilisation has tended to leave out Islam, even though the Islamic world inspired Europe as much as Greece and Rome did. Before colonisation Europe didn’t have a problem recognising Arab innovations, but Christianity’s view has always been that Islam is a heresy. The problem really arose with colonial imperialism and the idea that everyone non-European was inferior, and that has effected how other cultures are perceived. The Islamic world was written out for political reasons. Now we can see that not everything comes from the Middle East, but that the Islamic world has made a huge contribution to science and culture through the ages, and that culture was not only preserved by the Muslims but also built upon. The British school history curriculum focuses mainly on Hitler.
And Henry VIII. I did a lot of Henry VIII.
Yes. The Tudors and the Second World War.
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Deputy-Chair of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, and Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Dr Bennison has published widely on the medieval and early-modern Maghreb. She says that the scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpinned much of the European Renaissance, and that Muslim doctors were appalled by the brutal and primitive medical techniques of the early crusaders. Most Muslim towns had a hospital by the 10th Century.
