الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

secondary importance compared with the intensity and significance of the work accomplished in Spain; and the influence of the Crusaders, to which at one time it was customary to attribute a considerable share in these scientific and cultural exchanges, now appears to have been very slight. 16

Indeed, cultural contacts between Islam and Christian Europe began first in the days of the Cordova Imarate, and continued at a faster pace by muzarabic and Jewish elements during the next few centuries. Translations from Arabic into Latin were made in Catalonia from the tenth century onwards. At Barcelona, during the first half of the twelfth century, Plato of Trivoli, with the help of Abraham bar Haiyya, an Andalusian Jewish official, translated Arabic and Jewish works on astrology and astronomy. About this time the centre of such activities shifted to Toledo, which had already been re-conquered by Christian forces and turned into “a beacon of Graeco-Arab-Hebraic culture for the whole of the Latin West.” Learned men flocked from almost every part of Europe to study science, medicine and philosophy, encouraged by Raymund, the archbishop of Toledo (1125- 52). The “Toledo School”, as it came to be known, included men like Dominicus Gundislavi, archdeacon of Segovia, the muzarab Ghalippus (or Ghalib), the converted Jew Avendeath (or Ibn Dawud), known also as Johanne Hispanus, the Englishman, Adelard of Bath and Robert of Chester, the Slav Herman the Dalmatian, and the most famous the Lombard Gerard of Cremona. Their achievements ranged from translating works of Qusta bin Luqa, Avicenna, Alfarghani, to al-Kindi, Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali. The second efflorescence of translations was led by Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, another archbishop of Toledo (1170-1247), and included men like Marcus of Toledo, the second translator of the Qur’an; Michael Scot, and Herman the German, who translated works of Aristotle, Ibn Rushd and al-Farabi. A little later in the thirteenth century, this unprecedented cultural enterprise 16 F. Gabrieli, “The Transmission of Learning and Literary Influences to Western Europe,” in P. M. Holt, Ann Lambton and Bernard Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), vol. 2B, 852.

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