Islam Creator of the Modern Age
2. Holding Sacred that which is not Sacred
~ 99 ~
In 1330, an institute for translation was established
under the patronage of Remond of Taletala,
through which famous books were rendered into
Latin from Arabic, and through these translations a
whole new world was opened up to Europe. This
work of translation continued right up to the
fourteenth century. Not only the works of Ar Razi,
Avicena and Averroes, but also those of Galen,
Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Eucleides, Ptolemy,
etc. were translated from Arabic into Latin. Dr.
Guilkirk, in his book on the history of this period,
mentions more than three hundred books translated
from Arabic into Latin.
Other western scholars have even more openly
acknowledged this as a historical fact. Robert
Briffault, for example, has written that the Greeks
produced system, generalized it, formulated it, but
that it was alien to their temperament to go into the
labour of observation and experimental research.
George Sarton, the famous chronicler of scientific
advances, writes that the most fundamental and
most distinctive success lay in fostering the latter
activities and that what ultimately came to be called
science was the result of a new method of
