The title of this chapter from the online essay series “Islamic Expansion and Decline” says it all:
http://islamicexpansionanddecline.blogspot.com/2007/04/chapter-11-parasitic-civilization.html
Myth of the Western Debt to Islam
A persistent misconception, the debt western science and scholarship owes to Islam, has afflicted historians for many years, although never more so than at the present time. The historian Herbert Muller, writing at a time when academic candor was still common, debunks the belief in the preservation and transmission of science under Islam, as well as a few other widely cherished myths.
For the sake of understanding … I should say flatly that these high-minded apologists for Islam are talking about a fiction or a dream. The religion preached by Mohammed, and thereafter practiced in his name, is quite different from the Islam they describe. The prophet had nothing of the scientific outlook, and demanded absolute obedience to the law that he alone laid down. Islam never produced a democracy or a state in which the people were actually sovereign. In all states, past and present, economic inequality has been glaring. Its holy wars fought on principle, its degradation of women, and its formal acceptance of slavery make nonsense of its theoretical principle of equality, or any profession of universal human brotherhood.[91]
Other historians and philosophers echo Professor Muller’s viewpoint. Charles Burnett writing in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy refutes the belief that it was the Arabs who re-transmitted Plato’s Republic to Europe. “The Republic of Plato, though translated into Arabic, was not subsequently translated into Latin.”[92] Frederick Copleston in his History of Philosophy says that “it is a mistake to imagine that the Latin scholastics were entirely dependent upon translations from Arabic or even that translation from the Arabic always preceded translation from the Greek.” Moreover, “translation from the Greek generally preceded translation from the Arabic.”[93] Another historian of philosophy Peter Dronke concurs:
Note that Latin versions of a number of learned Greek works (Euclid, Ptolemy) came through translations from the Arabic; most of the works of Aristotle, however, were translated directly from the Greek, and only exceptionally by way of an Arabic intermediary…translations from the Arabic must be given their full importance, but not more. Another confirmation comes from Dod, according to whom the following were first translated from Greek: Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistici elenchi, Physics, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica (Book IV), De anima, De sensu, De memoria, De somno, De longitudine, De inventute, De respiratione, De morte, De animalibus (De progressu, De motu), Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Oeconomica, Rhetoric, Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, and Poetics. Only the following were first translated from Arabic: De caelo, Meteorologica (Books I-III), and De animalibus (Historia, De partibus, De generatione).[94]
Furthermore, as Franz Rosenthal points out, many of the works translated from the Arabic were not the work of Muslims. “Aristoteles latinus” by Bernard Dod, a chapter of The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, provides a comprehensive list of medieval translations of Aristotle from Arabic into Latin, none by Islamic scholars—unless by “Islamic” one means “Christian or Jewish.”[95] Indeed, in Islamic Spain it was Jewish scholars who were instrumental in translating Greek knowledge into Latin.[96] Carson sums up the reality of the translation process as follows:
So the great rescue of Greek philosophy by translation into Arabic turns out to mean no rescue of Plato and the transmission of Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts of Aristotle, either directly or more often via Syriac or Hebrew, to a Christendom that already had the Greek texts and had already translated most of them into Latin, with almost all of the work of translation from any of these languages into any other having been done by Christians and Jews and none of it by Muslims.[97]
Moreover, the most important preservers and transmitters of classical knowledge were not Muslims, or even dhimmis working in Muslim lands. While much has been made of Muslim Spain as a transmitter of ancient Greek knowledge to the West few have remarked on how the Byzantines transmitted Greek knowledge to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The 11th century Byzantine scholar Psellus “remarked at the height of his career that Celts, Arabs, Persians and Ethiopians came to Constantinople to hear his lectures.”[98] And it was these same Byzantines, who at the time of the tragic destruction of their city, brought this knowledge to the West. As the famous historian Steven Runciman observes:
…these refugee Greek scholars … took trouble to collect and copy the Greek manuscripts that Byzantium had preserved. … It was from these scholars… that the men of the Renaissance learnt most of their philosophy. … They conserved ancient books … and transmitted what they had conserved for the benefit of European civilization.[99]
