The "Golden Age of Islam" Myth

You probably first heard it in school: Islamic civilization was flourishing when Christendom was in the Dark Ages. Most of the innovations enjoyed by Westerners today were really the developments from Muslims scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, poets and philosophers. The great works of Greek philosophy destroyed by the book-burning zeolots of the early Christian Church returned to the European world through Arabic translations. Muslims invented the scientific method, birthing the Renaissance. Islamic scholars invented the numerical concept of "zero", giving rise to the digital age. Etc.

At best, these are all half-truths. More accurately, they are nothing more than fairy tales, but very popular ones defended by top scholars today.

I got thinking about the myth of the "Golden Age of Islam" after reading an article at The American Thinker by Dr. Jonathan David Carson published this past Friday, Islam, Christianity, Classical Civilization, and Modernity. The article is short, but he does make a good point about the ability of Christianity to adapt their thinking while Islam has intellectually "frozen".

But digging a bit further, I came across two additional articles by Carson:

Hyping Islam's role in the History of Science (07/29/05)

The not-so-golden age of Islamic Philosophy (08/19/05)

In the first of these articles, he offers this important quote by Bernard Lewis, the recognized dean of Islamic studies, from his book, The Muslim Discovery of Europe:

We know of no Muslim scholar or man of letters before the eighteenth century who sought to learn a western language, still less of any attempt to produce grammars, dictionaries, or other language tools. Translations are few and far between. Those that are known are works chosen for practical purposes [philosophy being considered a practical discipline] and the translations are made by converts [who knew western languages before conversion] or non-Muslims.

Carson notes that not a single translation of Aristotle from Arabic to Latin was performed by a Muslim. Instead, they were prepared by Christian and Jewish scholars. However, most of Aristotle's corpus in Latin did not come through Arabic, rather, they were translated directly from the Greek. And for Plato, the only work of his to be translated into Arabic (The Republic), was never translated back into Latin from that source.

In the second cited article, he says:

Access “for western scholars to the great classics of Greece and Rome by their translation into Arabic, from which they were rendered into European languages” almost always means access to a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a Greek text. Sometimes it means access to a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of a Hebrew translation of a Greek text. It can even mean access to a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a Greek text. Only on rare occasions does it mean access to a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of a Greek text.

This is an important discussion. Carson provides detailed evidence that refutes the post-modern scholars who are attempting to rewrite history in an effort to discredit medieval (and thus, current) Christianity.

One modern Muslim scholar, Yasser Latif Hamdani, has written a short article, Myths about the Golden Age of Islam, directed at other Muslims who are hoping to revive a supposed "Golden Age of the Caliphs" - one of the ideological selling-points of radical Islamist groups, like al-Qaeda and Hizb-e-Tahrir. This addresses some of their revisionist history as well.

More on this issue later.