How Arabs Brought the Renaissance to Europe
When people bring up the Renaissance, one often thinks of the works of highly skilled individuals who single-handedly contributed to entire bodies of knowledge.
From the works of Descartes or the paintings of Da Vinci, we can all admire the incredible talent these hardworking individuals had and how much they put into their respective fields.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to get caught up in the marvels of that world that one no longer wants to understand what happened in the world before the Renaissance. The ancient world did not skip a phase into the Renaissance. It was a slow process and was also contributed to by one significant party: The Arab Empire.
The Translation Movement
The rise of the Arabic empire in the 7th century profoundly affected the development of knowledge in later centuries.
Somewhere around the latter half of the 8th century, a movement supported by the rise of the Abbasid caliphate and the ruling Caliph Al-Mansur arose.
It was a movement that would culminate in the mass translation of works from different regions for the next two centuries. The scale of the translation might not be understood in context until a few glaring problems are brought to light.
For instance, the Arab world found it necessary to translate Greek works in many different fields. This would have been easy if there were still scholars in certain fields, but to put it simply, the Greek scientific tradition had already died 200 years earlier.
For comparison, it would be the equivalent of you attempting to read a complex mathematical text in Latin that was written a few hundred years ago. How would the progress be?
One geographical advantage that the Arabic empire had was being at the crossroads of South Asia, Africa, and Europe. This afforded it the advantage of seeking assistance from scholars from far and wide.
A particularly striking example of this advantage was the brainstorming that Indian, Persian, and other scholars did to combine their knowledge and decipher the mathematical texts of the Greeks. The entrance of concepts that existed in different languages such as Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic, and Persian was a huge boon to the scholars of the Arab world.
All these interactions even went further to revive the Greek scientific tradition as the other regions had not lost their scientific traditions at around this time.
State Support
All these achievements could not have arisen independently. The empire's bureaucracy found it necessary to develop practical competency in vast fields that concerned the well-being of the populace. Fields like medicine and mathematics found center stage as they directly determined how people could be treated and calculations of important matters.
Such motivations led to the emergence of an elaborate network of scholars partnered with technical experts sponsored by the state to serve the sole purpose of making the Arabic language a source of an immense body of knowledge.
The effects of this movement were so profound that the revival of the Greek scientific tradition saw the Byzantines (predominantly Greek-speaking people) see their scientific tradition arise once more.
But it is not enough to simply translate works and let them sit around. The next phase was the most important one.
Transmission
The transmission of knowledge back into Europe with a richer body of knowledge from different parts of the world allowed the introduction and dissemination of valuable information.
A similar movement, albeit between Arabic and Latin, arose in the 12th Century to make information in Arabic available to the European class that spoke Latin.
In the Spanish town of Toledo, the combination of many Arabic manuscripts coupled with a similar necessity for practical texts led to the proliferation of translators who made many works available in Latin.
Texts in medicine and astronomy made by recent scholars in Arabic quickly found their way spreading throughout Europe during the 12th century because of the many translators who painstakingly dedicated themselves.
Even with the complete halt of these activities in 1300, a newer translation tradition led by Jewish scholars in Europe revitalized this movement more than a century later.
The contribution of these scholars was so instrumental that the translation of Arabic texts into Latin essentially changed the trajectory of entire fields in Europe. The Renaissance saw much of its invigoration come as a result of Arabic work.
Sources:
[1]Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. “Influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on the Latin West.” (2008).
[2]D’Ancona, Cristina. “Greek sources in Arabic and Islamic philosophy.” (2009).
[3]”How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition.” Open Culture. Last modified June 15, 2017. https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/how-arabic-translators-helped-preserve-greek-philosophy-and-the-classical-tradition.html.
