Islam Creator of the Modern Age
2. Holding Sacred that which is not Sacred
~ 98 ~
the Romans were not interested in it. “Social
pressures, political persecution and the anti-
intellectual bias of the church Fathers drove the few
remaining Greek scientists and philosophers to the
East. There they ultimately found a welcome when
the rise of Islam in the seventh century stimulated
interest in scientific and philosophic subjects. Most
of the important Greek scientific texts were
preserved in Arabic translations. Although the
Arabs did not alter the foundations of Greek
science, they made several important contributions
within its general framework, and when the interest
in Greek learning revived in Western Europe
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholars
turned to Islamic Spain for the scientific texts. A
spate of translations (from Arabic into Latin)
resulted in the revival of science in the west ...
scientists of the Middle Ages reached high levels of
sophistication and prepared the ground for the
scientific revolution of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.”
49
Moseoleban asserts in his book,
Arab Civilization,
that Arab sciences reached Europe not through the
crusades, but by way of Andalusia, Sicily and Italy.
