John Vinocur has a piece in IHT about Sylvain Gouguenheim’s new book, Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel. Gouguenheim felt compelled to challenge the standard version after the EU in 2002 issued a “recommendation” that schoolbooks give a more positive portrayal of Islam’s contribution to Europe’s heritage.
When Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today’s historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe’s reawakening from the Middle Ages.
He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy – a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.
“This thesis has basically nothing scandalous about it, if it were true,” [emphasis mine -ed.] Gouguenheim writes. “In spite of the appearances, it has more to do with taking ideological sides than scientific analysis.”
…
“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Moorish Spain. [emphasis mine -ed.]
Not quite the story we’ve been told in the West, especially since the 1960s. Gouguenheim offers up an alternative to the approach of (former) Nazi Sigrid Hunke whose work, which includes Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland an essay she used to claim Arabic influence as “the first step in freeing Europe from Christianity”, remains a point of reference.
Vinocur includes some highlights from the book, a good thing, since the book is in French.
Nuggets: Gouguenheim argues that Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom, said to be created by the Abassids in the ninth century, was limited to the study of Koranic science, rather than philosophy, physics or mathematics, as understood in the speculative context of Greek thought.
He says that Aristotle’s works on ethics, metaphysics and politics were disregarded or unknown to the Muslim world, being basically incompatible with the Koran. Europe, he said, “became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them.”
Gouguenheim calls the Mont Saint-Michel monastery, where the texts were translated into Latin, “the missing link in the passage from the Greek to the Latin world of Aristotelian philosophy.” Outside of a few thinkers – he lists Al-Farabi, Avicenne, Abu Ma’shar and Averroes – Gougenheim considers that the “masters of the Middle East” retained from Greek teaching only what didn’t contradict Koranic doctrine.
The book sounds interesting to me. Unfortunately, I could not find an English version available yet. But if you happen to read French, you can get the book through Amazon.ca.
Filed under: Culture, Education, History, Islam, Middle East, Politics, Religion, Science | Tagged: Arabs, Aristotle, Christianity, Europe, European Union, France, Greek Thought, Greeks, History, Islam, Koranic Science, Latin, Middle Ages, Mont Saint-Michel, Philosophy, Sigrid Hunke, Sylvain Gouguenheim
It isn’t?
The West did have sources of Aristotle before Muslims brought over their far superior versions for Christians and Jews to rip off.
You see, since Islam is basically the same as Christianity and Judaism, the perverted texts (that is, the “adapted” versions of the text) could easily be transmitted to across the three religions.
Aristotle was okay, since he didn’t talk about homosexual/pedophile relationships… Plato, on the other hand, well, although he was clearly sharper, wittier, and more thought provoking, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish “”"”"thinkers”"”"” didn’t give his work the time of day.
Anyway, Europe is indebted to Islamic philosophers… fact. Not “Islam.”
Those Islamic philosophers, however, are indebted to the Middle Easterners who preserved the ancient texts. For if those pre-Islamic Middle Easterners hadn’t done so neither the East nor the West could mutilate and pervert the ancients as they did.
I’m not arguing that guy is absolutely correct. I think it sounds interesting and I’d like to read it. And for better or worse, it is not the same story.
I would hope that the book addresses the quality of the texts in the West… and I wonder about the quality of the texts from Mont Saint Michel.
The quality of the original Aristotelian texts doesn’t matter if the idiots could understand what he was talking about.
Today we have publishers cranking out Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, but who cares? It’s only people with the capacity to derive some sort of meaning from those texts that will benefit from their being so readily available. And even fewer still could utilize the newly obtained knowledge for the benefit of society in general.
Let me make this simple:
Aristotle (3rd century bce) —-> Avicenna (10century ce) —> Averroes (12 century ce) —-> Aquinas (13 century ce)
If the idiot who wrote the book you refer to wants to make a point, he has to discover the philosophy of a Westerner that had a more significant influence on Thomas Aquinas (either directly or indirectly) than the influence of the Aristotelianism found in Avicennism or Averronism. And that is the job of a philosopher, not an historian, and especially not a dumb-ass historian.
Thank you for this last post, konservo. When the words idiot and dumbass appear in the conversation, we immediately realise that a real philosopher hath spoken.
FF,
Argumentum ad hominem is more effective if you address the facts. That’s the difference between our posts. We’re both insulting, but I addressed facts pertaining to the topic at hand, you didn’t.
I have spoken.