The Arab forebears of the European Renaissance

UNESCO Courier, Feb, 1997 by Rachid Sabbaghi

* How did you first become interested in Arab-Islamic philosophy?

Alain de Libera: It was when I embarked on my work as a historian of medieval philosophy. I read a book by the French philosopher and historian Etienne Gilson called L'Etre et l'Essence ("Being and Essence"), which contained two extraordinary, thought-provoking chapters on Avicenna and Averroes. Ever since, my interest in Arab-Islamic philosophy has been indissociable from my interest in medieval philosophy.

The received wisdom at the Sorbonne when I was a student there was that the Middle Ages were a kind of long parenthesis in the history of humankind. The nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan called it an appalling period, a "1,000-year disaster". The traditional view insisted that nothing happened between Aristotle and Descartes. As a philosophy student, then, I saw the Middle Ages as a neglected period of history.

When I read Gilson's book, I realized that at the core of this neglect was neglect of the Arab-Islamic dimension within medieval philosophy. I then became convinced of two things: first, that medieval thought as a whole had a contribution to make to philosophy that was as important as that of Greek or classical philosophy; and secondly, that a key reason why it was overshadowed was the overshadowing of Arab-Islamic philosophy, which I then approached from the most difficult philosophical angle, the metaphysical angle.

* Was the contribution of Arab culture to the making of modern Europe not overlooked as well?

A. de L.: Yes, without doubt. But it must be said that there was something diabolical in this neglect, since it went hand in glove with the recognition of a certain debt. This debt is often referred to as though it should be taken for granted, as when people say: "The existence of an Arab-Islamic legacy is so obvious that there's not much point in discussing it." The debt is so patent that it distracts attention from the neglect. People say: "Of course the Arabs passed on the bulk of Greek science to the Christian West." But we must be careful here: when it is admitted, objectively and dispassionately, that the Arabs were "transmitters", they are denied any other role or any other contribution to the overall history of Western thought. Recognition of this kind, through a process of total assimilation, turns the Arabs into the continuation, in another form, of the Greeks, into people whose only role was to pass on what they had received, just as relay runners hand over a baton or torch. They passed on a science that was not theirs, a science they simply reproduced and perpetuated. They passed it on, then stepped aside; their job was done. They withdrew from the European stage, where they had no business to be and where they had never had anything to do but serve as intermediaries.

Now this image is fallacious. The Arabs made a much more important contribution to the history of European thought than that.

* How would you define this contribution?

A. de L.: I should find it very hard to answer the question: "What contribution did Greek philosophy make to the forming of a European identity?". The question you have asked has equally wide implications. The influence of such thinkers as Avicenna and Averroes on European culture is as vast a subject as that of Plato's or Aristotle's influence. One is tempted to treat the subject comprehensively, and looking at it in detail it is hard to know where to begin. But I will try to suggest some basic guidelines.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to start with the notions of science and scientificity. In the twelfth century the Christian world realized that there existed a considerable corpus of scientific work in Antiquity (which had up to then been lost or known only in a very fragmented and indirect form) - a systematic organization of knowledge, a division of the sciences, a classification of scientific disciplines, an articulation, a system, a hierarchy of disciplines. The West made this discovery when the catalogue of sciences drawn up by Al-Farabi was translated into Latin.

With Al-Farabi the Christian world obtained its first signposts to the corpus of knowledge bequeathed by late Antiquity organized so as to provide a kind of map of the knowable. The West then went on to make a detailed examination of each of these sciences, which ranged from astronomy and metaphysics to psychology, biology, botany and meteorology. In each case it discovered an Arabic text which, if it was not always a founding text, had the effect of accompanying, boosting or accelerating knowledge.

Between the end of the twelfth century and the middle of the thirteenth century, the Latin West became scientifically literate as a result of two great batches of translations of Arab scientific works, which became the very foundation of the university system. The medieval European university, which came into being at the beginning of the thirteenth century, was in a sense the institutional manifestation of the map of knowledge drawn by Al-Farabi. The Arab learning that was translated and passed on to the West formed the basis and the scientific foundation of the university in its living reality - the reality of its syllabus, the content of its teaching.