Abstract
The passage of the West from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance was facilitated by the Islamic civilization, whose contribution was central to the emergence of the modern enlightened West as we have come to know it. Yet, this essential fact of world history has been almost systematically overlooked in leading humanism studies, thus perpetuating a crucial chasm in the sequence of world history and the genealogy of ideas. In his poem To Helen, the great Edgar Allan Poe could just as easily have bridged that gap by adding to the famous lines ‘the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome’,1 a proper reference to ‘the magnificence that was Baghdad’. Artistic licence aside, such oversight is indicative of a long-standing amnesia developed in the Western world over recent centuries and which has functioned as a mode of invisibilization of the magnitude of the impact of Arab and Islamic cultural thought and practice on the rise of the modern Western world.
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Notes
P. E. Grieve (2009), The Eve of Spain–Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press), p. 69. The, at times, schizophrenic disposition of actively repressing and passively appropriating Muslim achievements is tackled, in the case of Spain, by Barbara Fuchs (2008) in Exotic Nation–Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
Notably by Edward Said (1978), Orientalism–Western Conceptions and the Orient (New York: Routledge);
Edward Said and (1994) Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books).
See, also, U. Singh Mehta (1999) Liberalism and Empire-A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
E. W. Said (2004), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 47.
See, in particular, S. Bessis (2002), Western Supremacy: The Triumph of an Idea (London: Zed Books);
C. Hall (2002), Civilizing Subjects-Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press);
C. Hall and V. Forrester (2004), Le Crime Occidental (Paris: Fayard).
R. Rorty (1997), ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality’, reprinted in M. R. Ishay (ed.) The Human Rights Reader (New York: Routledge), p. 263.
F. Fukuyama (1989), ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest 16, p. 9. The sentence was excised from the book of the same title published in 1992 by the Free Press.
Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri (1995), Introduction à la critique de la raison Arabe (Paris: La Découverte), p. 37; translated compilation of Al-Jabri’s two major works: Nahnu wal Turath: Qiraat Mu’asira fi Turathina Al Falsafi [Tradition and Us: Contemporary Readings in Our Philosophical Heritage] (Casablanca: Dar Al Nashr Al Maghribiya, 1980) and Al Turath wal Hadatha [Tradition and Modernity] (Beirut: Al Markaz Al Thaqafi, 1991).
A. Bloom (1987), The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 36.
Z. Sayre Schiffman (1985), ‘Renaissance Historicism Reconsidered’, History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2, p. 170.
V. Romani (2009), ‘The Politics of Higher Education in the Middle East: Problems and Prospects’, Middle East Brief, No. 36 (Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Waltham, Massachusetts), p. 2.
P. K. Hitti (1944), ‘America and the Arab Heritage’, in N. A. Faris (ed.) The Arab Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 2–3.
R. Arnaldez (1985), ‘Les traductions du grec: naissance des sciences profanes et de la philosophie dans les pays musulmans’, in Les grands siècles de Bagdad, Vol. I (Algiers: Entreprise Nationale du Livre), p. 257.
See N. Nofal (1993), ‘Al-Ghazali’, Prospects (UNESCO), Vol. 22, Nos 3–4, pp. 519–42.
P. K. Hitti (1968), Makers of Arab History (New York: St. Martin’s Press), p. 160. Hitti also notes Al-Ghazali’s influence on Jewish scholars. He writes: ‘Less than a century after al Ghazali’s death, a Jewish convert to Christianity in Toledo had his philosophical works translated into Latin. In the mid-thirteenth century, Mizan al ‘Amal [The Balance of Deeds], a compendium of ethics, was done into Latin by a Jew in Barcelona. Maimonides of Cordova, the most celebrated Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, used his Maqasid. The compendium on mysticism, Mishkat al Anwar [The Niche of Lights], was translated and aroused much speculation among Jewish scholars’ (p. 163).
See F. D. Logan (2002), A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge).
M. A. Palacios (1919), La Escatologia Musulmana en la ‘Divina Comedia’ (Madrid: Real Academia Española). Also see his 1931 El Islam Cristianizado (Madrid: Editorial Plutarco).
E. Lavisse and A. Rambaud (1894), Histoire Générale du IVème Siècle à Nos Jours–Vol. II: L’Europe Féodale, Les Croisades (1095–1270) (Paris: Armand Colin), p. 346.
N. Matar (1999), Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 15.
J. V. Pimienta-Bey (1992), ‘Moorish Spain: Academic Source and Foundation for the Rise and Success of Western European Universities in the Middle Ages’, in I. van Sertima (ed.) The Golden Age of the Moor (Rutgers: Transaction Publishers), p. 182.
W. Boutros-Ghali (1996), La tradition chevalresque des Arabes (Casablanca: Eddif), p. 33; originally published in Paris by Plon in 1919. The etymology of ‘chivalry’ is from the Arabic ‘chelval’ or ‘cherval’ used to mount a horse.
S. Lane Poole (1898), Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), p. 306.
G. le Bon (1884), La Civilisation des Arabes (Paris: Firmin-Didot), p. 428. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire writes similarly: ‘To the commerce of Arabs and their imitation, the rough masters of our Middle Ages softened their boorish habits and the knights without losing their bravery came to know more delicate sentiments, more noble, and more humane. It is doubtful that only Christianity, however beneficent, would have inspired them thus.’ See J. B. Saint-Hilaire (1865), Mahomet et le Coran (Paris: Didier et Cie), p. 223.
A. Al-Azmeh (1982), Ibn Khaldun (London: Routledge), p. 11.
See F. Mernissi (1997), The Forgotten Queens of Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
On Al Jahilia, see D. O’Leary (1927), Arabia before Muhammad (London: K. Paul, Trench & Trubner).
On this issue, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson (1991), Scribes and Scholars-A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
E. Renan (1871), La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (Paris: Hachette). Renan adds: ‘One sees that in all things the Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity… [T]he Semitic nations… have never been able to achieve true maturity.’
C. de Vaux (1931), ‘Astronomy and Mathematics’, in T. W. Arnold and A. Guillaume (eds) Legacy of Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
See, for example, D. R. Kelley (1970), Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship-Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press);
or P. Burke (1970), The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press).
S. Freud [ 1930 ] (1961), Civilization and its Discontents, translated and edited by J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton), p. 59.
T. Mastnak (2002), Crusading Peace-Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press), pp. 91–2, 117.
C. Darwin (1839), The Voyage of the Beagle (London: Henry Colburn), ch. 5.
S. Lindqvist (1996), Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: The New Press), pp. 46–7; 111.
S. Venayre (2002), La gloire de l’aventure-genèse d’une mystique moderne, 1850–1940 (Paris: Aubier), p. 89.
In France, for example, those features were shared by radically different regimes before and during World War II. See P. Ory (1994), La Belle Illusion — Culture et Politique Sous le Signe du Front Populaire, 1935–1938 (Paris: Plon); and C. Faure (1989), Le Projet Culturel de Vichy (Lyon: CNRS).
Among many such titles, see for instance A. Pagden (2008), Worlds at War — The 2, 500-Year Struggle Between East and West (New York: Random House).
M. Mamdani (2004), Good Muslim, Bad Muslim-America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Random House), p. 19.
N. A. Faris (1957), ‘The Muslim Thinker and His Christian Relations’, The Muslim World, Vol. 47, No. 1, p. 62.
Robert Briffault writes: ‘The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries of revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence’. See R. Briffault (1928), The Making of Humanity (London: G. Allen and Unwin), pp. 200–1.
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Mohamedou, MM.O. (2012). A Forgotten Debt: Humanism and Education, from the Orient to the West. In: Al-Rodhan, N.R.F. (eds) The Role of the Arab-Islamic World in the Rise of the West. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393219_7
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