Quick Take: How the Christians Saved Islamic Scholarship

It wasn't enlightened Medieval Muslims who saved Western scholarship: it actually was the other way around

There are so many myths and misconceptions about the Middle Ages that it’s really hard to begin, although my preference is for those now best-entrenched: those dealing with the process in which ancient knowledge was transmitted to the modern era.

Last year, I wrote about what we might describe as the foundational myth of Middle Ages misinformation: the idea that enlightened Medieval Muslims saved, with their hard work and dedication, Western scholarship and the Western intellectual tradition.

Quick Take: No, Muslim Scribes & Translators Didn't Save the Graeco-Roman Legacy

Like I wrote back then, this a surprisingly widespread view. I’ve lived in several countries, and heard several versions of this legend, sometimes from scholars (normally not Medievalists) and I’ve read views to this effect in multiple occasions:

Just Google “did the arabs save graeco-roman books” and look at the top results, if you don’t believe me. Lots of well-educated people believe this, not to speak of history enthusiasts all over the Internet. However, the truth is that Arab translators had only a modest impact on the transmission of Graeco-Roman texts to modern times.

As a follow-up to last year’s piece, today I will briefly look into something that only specialists about the period know about: the way in which, through selfless hard work and dedication, enlightened Medieval Christians also saved Islamic scholarship and the Islamic intellectual tradition.

The first thing to understand here is the extremely dire state of the Islamic intellectual world in the years after 1000 AD. This was the era when Al-Ghazali rose to become the most influential scholar in the Ummah, a period I already discussed here:

Quick Take: Why is Christianity Waning & Islam Growing?

It’s important to realize the extent of the rot. The Islamic world was dominated by three Caliphates in the process of collapsing — based in Cordoba, Cairo and Baghdad — that would soon be replaced by near illiterate steppe and desert confederations — Berber in Spain, Turkic, Kurdish and eventually Mongol elsewhere. The Ummah’s economy was going rapidly downhill, with ever fewer non-Muslims to provide tax revenue. Cousin marriage was spreading all over like wildfire, resulting in growing clannishness and lower intellectual capacity.

As non-Muslim elite families vanished from Islamic states, key figures who likely were born in recently converted families or were Muslim converts themselves, like the 9^th century Al-Khwarizmi, the semi-mythological polymath Jabir ibn Hayyan and the 10^th century Fatimid vizier Yaqub ibn Killis (930-991) stopped appearing.

Despite a smattering of brilliant scholars and travelers who brought news of the outside world, the Ummah as a whole remained fairly inward looking, religion-obsessed, and clueless about developments elsewhere. Arab geographers of the 9^th and 10^th century reveal an alarming ignorance of the geography of other regions, to the point that even the European shores of the Mediterranean were unknown to the Arabs.

An example of this is Ibn Khurdadhbih, who wrote in 846 and made additions to his work until 886, and still knew nothing of the Christian West. Narbonne, which had been captured by the Franks in 759 following four decades of Muslim rule, is for him still a Muslim town. The Tyrrhenian Sea is virtually a region still to be explored. The same ignorance is revealed by the Geography of Al-Yakubi, and the slightly later book of the same name written by Ibn al-Fakih, dating from the beginning of the 10^th century. Many Arab geographers of this period confuse Rome and Constantinople, and those who didn’t weren’t quite sure where the two cities were: Al-Fakih wrote that it took a year to travel the distance from Rome to Constantinople¹.

Amid a general decline of scholarship especially from the 10^th century, contemporary Muslim historians became equally untrustworthy. Islamic works like Ferdowsi’s and Al-Nadim’s, famous in the Arabic-and Iranian-speaking world to this day, compare poorly with less-well known work by the surviving smattering of Christian scholars – like the Syriac Orthodox theologian Bar Hebraeus (1226-1286), who wrote a great Syriac-language encyclopedic work, "The Cream of Science", looking at human knowledge from a Christian Aristotelian perspective. A Jacobite, Bar Hebraeus also wrote at least two Arabic-language works, including the “History of the Dynasties,” a summation of Levantine history to his era, including chapters on the likes of Alexander and Cleopatra, all the way to Islamic times.

The decline of Islamic scholarship is evident in that the great Saladin, hero of Islam and conqueror of Jerusalem, was practically forgotten in the Ummah for centuries and his later fame only dates from 1898, when the very Christian German emperor William II extolled his exploits in a dinner speech in Damascus – and later spent Christian money to restore Saladin’s mausoleum in the city, adding a Prussian eagle, sculptured in wood, rising to the skies².

When history was written, the somewhat rigorous work of early Islamic historians like Al-Masudi was traduced into straightforward propaganda like that injected into the folk tales told by Andalusian chronicler and philosopher Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), who told a famous – and entirely imaginary – anecdote of how Cordoba’s Abd al-Rahman III amazed Frankish ambassadors with his court’s magnificence and wealth.

This tradition of telling barefaced lies that supposedly contributed to display the Ummah’s awesomeness became a dominant strand in Islamic chronicles from this era, making much of future Islamic historiography worse than worthless. Thus, figures like the 9^th century scholar Al-Firnas were magnified into polymathic titans who built all sorts of wonderful devices – in Al-Firnas’ case, artificial wings with feathers that he used to fly “for a considerable distance as if he had been a bird,” as the Algerian Ahmad Al-Maqqari credulously wrote in the 17^th century, almost a millennium after the event occurred³.

Locally, this state of decline couldn’t be compared with the great works of other cultures because by this time the process of translation of foreign texts to Arabic, limited and irregular as it had been at its peak in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, had ground to an almost complete halt.

At a time when scholars in Europe, India and China kept producing valuable work that the Ummah’s rulers, merchants, bureaucrats and researchers could have used, pretty much nobody was translating any texts to Arabic, and very few would in the centuries to follow.

More interestingly, this was also a time when Christian European scholars were busy translating multiple Arabic classics – Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, even astrological nonsense – to Latin despite some calls by prominent Muslims to stop this practice⁴. It’s a good thing that the Christians wouldn’t listen to such fools, because multiple Arabic classics have only survived because the Christians bothered to keep copies and have only gained fame because the Christians bothered to praise, discuss or criticize them.

One of those classics is very close to the place where I’m writing this now: Ibn Munqidh’s “Book of Contemplation,” written for Saladin in around 1183, which only survived in an Arabic copy stored in the Monastery of El Escorial, because the Spanish Inquisition never was quite as bad as most think (that’s a subject for another day, though.) Others are spread across Europe: “The Book of Ingenious Devices,” the best-known work by the also ingenious Banu Musa brothers, only survived in an Arabic copy kept in Constantinople.

Christian scholars enjoyed the advantage of being multilingual. Even if most remained wholly ignorant of Greek, they all spoke (an increasingly wrote) their native languages, of whatever root, while still writing Latin of such exquisite correction and complexity that it would have baffled most actual Latin-language native speakers. Perhaps the most complex Latin sentence every written was penned by the Flemish monk Folcard, in the mid-11^th century, at the very opening of his Life of the English-Saxon abbot and saint Botolph of Thorney, who lived four centuries earlier:

“The benevolence of almighty God – compassionate towards the error of the human race, which, having been stripped by the ancient serpent of the glory granted to it by heaven, is condemned to the darkness of ignorance – wished to display the riches of His mercy in the restoration of it, so that (the human race) might return to the glory of the light from which it had blindly strayed, through the Light which He bestowed upon it, by His ineffable grace.”⁵

Fuck yeah. These scholars also relied on the Church’s tolerance of the circulation of Latin translations of every sort of book that could be obtained. Petrus Alfonsi (1062-1144), a Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity and took up residence in England, produced the well-received “Disciplina Clericalis,” the oldest medieval collection of oriental stories and fables; in fact, European Christian culture was so open to foreign influences that scholars later spent much ink debating the highly unlikely proposition that courtly love literature could have been influenced by Arabic love poetry transmitted via Spain⁶.

In truth, multiple enterprises looking to translate Arabic (and Greek) manuscripts flickered in an out of existence in various places of Western Europe, most notably Toledo, often with Jews helping on the Arabic translations. Although most focused on scientific and philosophical texts (and none on love poetry), a handful were dedicated to make Islamic religious documents available in Latin, including one coordinated by Peter the Venerable (1092-1156), Abbot of Cluny.

In central Italy, a wave of translations in the second half of the 11^th century included efforts by Constantine the African, a Carthaginian who was familiar with medical texts used and produced in Kairouan (Tunisia) during the 10^th century and helped to translate out of Arabic the “Isagoge Iohannitii” or “Liber isagogarum,” an introduction to the works of Galen focused on the four humors (blood, phlegm, bile and melancholy) and of the qualities (heat, cold, moistness and dryness) describing bodily temperament. Constantine also translated out of Arabic an encyclopedia of medicine which became known as Pantegni.

The net was cast widely in this endeavor, to the point that Al-Ghazali’s notoriously anti-Christian works became so very well-known and circulated in Christendom that, like other well-known Muslim scholars, Al-Ghazali received his own Latin name: Algazel. Some forty Latin-language hand-copied manuscripts of “Algazel’s” opus magna, “Maqasid al-falasifa,” survived the Middle Ages into the 21^st century⁷.

Adelard of Bath travelled extensively throughout Greece, Sicily, Spain, Anatolia, Syria and potentially Palestine, always seeking information and manuscripts and knowledge. And that is the only reason why the astronomical work of Al-Khwarizmi survives at all – the book is lost in the Arabic original, and every subsequent copy derives from Adelard’s Latin-language translation; the same applies to Al-Khwarizmi’s work on Indian arithmetic, only surviving in other, contemporary Latin translations, or to the large majority of the work by the philosopher Averroes (1126-1198), entirely lost in the original Arabic.

Besides Adelard’s, the names of the places of origin of some of the scholars who came to Spain, obtained ecclesiastical benefices there, and forged links with resident Jews and Mozarabic Christians, suggest widespread interest in Christendom for any knowledge to be found wherever. These were people like Hermann of Carinthia, Plato of Tivoli – who was in Barcelona between 1132 and 1146 – and Robert of Chester, who translated the Algebra of al-Khwarizmi at Segovia in 1145. Between 1150 and 1180, Gerard of Cremona translated in Spain major works by al-Razi and Avicenna, ensuring their survival.

Indeed, much of the work of Islamic mathematicians like the Iranian Kushyar Gilani, also known as Ibn Labban (971–1029), and the Arab Ibn Ṭahir al-Baghdadi (d. 1037) is now known because of Christian copyists. “Book of Optics,” the most influential book written by the Egyptian Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen (d. 1040), sometimes called "the father of modern optics", only survived in Latin translation after the Arabic original was lost. In fact, most of his works were lost, and of those that survive most are Western copies, and he had much influence on Western theoreticians like Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253).

All this enterprise can be compared with the number of surviving Latin-to-Arabic or Greek-to-Arabic translations of any works whatsoever produced in Medieval Christendom, which stands at approximately zero⁸. Which, of course, explains many things.

1. Cit. “A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages,” by Eliyahu Ashtor (University of California Press, 1976), p. 105.

2. Cit. "The Latin East, 1098-1205," by Hans Eberhard Mayer, in "The New Cambridge Medieval History," Vol. IV, 1024-c.1198, Part II, p. 659.

3. On the strength of this incredible tale, Al-Firnas had an airline, a crater of the moon and a bridge in Cordoba named after him. A statue of the scholar wearing his fake wings stands outside of Baghdad’s international airport since 1973.

4. Notably, Seville’s Ibn Abdun in the 12^th century, who was (typically) concerned that dastardly Christians would attribute the great works of Muslims to their people and their bishops.

5. “Omnipotentis Dei benignitas, compatiens errori humani generis, quod ab antiquo serpente caelitus concessa denudatum glo­ria, ignorantiae damnatur tenebris; divitias misericordiae suae in eius restauratione exhibere voluit, ut ad gloriam lucis de qua cae­cum aberraverat, rediret per lumen quod ei ineffabili gratia administravit.” The translation is by Roger Pearse (in his personal blog, 11.7.2025).

6. This suggestion is often defended by grasping as such straws as alleging the word troubadour may be a French version of the unusual Arabic verb “taraba” (chant) instead of the Latin name “tropator” (versifier).

7. See “The Latin Readers of Algazel, 1150-1600,” a 2013 dissertation by Anthony H. Minnema, University of Tennessee.

8. The work of early Church Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa or John of Damascus was translated into Arabic, typically for use by Arabic-speaking Christian communities under Islamic rule, barely circulated at all, and was as a rule completely unknown among Muslims.