A History of Western Society: Printed Page 227
A History of Western Society, Value Edition: Printed Page 213
A History of Western Society, Concise Edition: Printed Page 227
Despite growing suspicions on both sides, the Islamic world profoundly shaped Christian European culture in Spain and elsewhere. Toledo, for example, became an important center of learning through which Arab intellectual achievements entered and influenced western Europe. Arab knowledge of science and mathematics, derived from the Chinese, Greeks, and Hindus, was highly sophisticated. The Muslim mathematician al-
Middle Eastern Arabs translated and codified the scientific and philosophical learning of Greek and Persian antiquity. In the ninth and tenth centuries that knowledge was brought to Spain, where between 1150 and 1250 it was translated into Latin. Europeans’ knowledge of Aristotle (see Chapter 3) changed the entire direction of European philosophy and theology.
Muslim medical knowledge far surpassed that of the West. By the ninth century Arab physicians had translated most of the treatises of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and produced a number of important works of their own. Arab science reached its peak in the physician, philologist, philosopher, poet, and scientist ibn-
Unfortunately, many of these treatises came to the West as translations from Greek to Arabic and then to Latin and inevitably lost a great deal in translation. Nevertheless, in the ninth and tenth centuries Arab knowledge and experience in anatomy and pharmaceutical prescriptions much enriched Western knowledge.