Science and Philosophy: The Arabs’ Contribution

The Arabs’ role in this story is easy to miss, because it sits quietly between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance Italians. But without them, much of what we call classical learning would never have reached Europe. The key idea is simple: the Arabs did not merely copy Greek and Roman texts — they preserved them, translated them, and passed them on at exactly the moment European scholars were ready to receive them.

For centuries, monks and clergymen in Europe had known about Greek and Roman writings. They had access to these works throughout the Middle Ages, yet they never made them widely known. The knowledge stayed locked away, available to a few, shared with almost no one. In the fourteenth century, that changed. A growing number of scholars began reading translated works of Greek writers, especially Plato and Aristotle. And here is the crucial point: they were able to do this not because of their own scholars, but because of Arab translators.

These Arab translators had carefully preserved ancient manuscripts and translated them into Arabic. The very names of the Greek philosophers changed in the process — Plato became Aflatun, and Aristotle became Aristu. So when a European scholar read Aristotle in the fourteenth century, he was often reading an Arabic translation, not the original Greek. The debt was direct and unacknowledged by many.

The traffic was not one-way. While some Europeans read Greek works in Arabic translation, the Greeks themselves translated works of Arabic and Persian scholars for further transmission to other Europeans. These were works on natural science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. So the exchange ran in both directions: Arabic versions of Greek classics flowed west, and Arabic and Persian originals flowed through Greek into European hands.

One small piece of linguistic evidence shows how deep the Arabic connection ran. Ptolemy’s Almagest, a major work on astronomy written in Greek before 140 CE, was later translated into Arabic. The title carries the Arabic definite article ‘al’ — the ‘Al-’ in Almagest is the Arabic word for ‘the’. The very name of the book, as Europeans knew it, was Arabic.

Several Muslim writers were regarded as men of wisdom in the Italian world. Three stand out:

• Ibn Sina — known in Latin as ‘Avicenna’ (980–1037). He was an Arab physician and philosopher from Bukhara in Central Asia. His fame rested on both medicine and philosophy.
• al-Razi — known as ‘Rhazes’. He was the author of a medical encyclopaedia, a work that carried practical medical knowledge across cultures.
• Ibn Rushd — known in Latin as ‘Averroes’ (1126–98). He was an Arab philosopher of Spain who tried to resolve the tension between philosophical knowledge (the faylasuf tradition) and religious beliefs. His method of reconciling the two was later adopted by Christian thinkers. …