1989/04/01 by George Makdisi · 4 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Islamic Studies and History #Medieval and Classical Philosophy #Education and Islamic Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/604423
openalex publication_date 1989/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
HISTORY IS, AMONG OTHER THINGS, A SEARCH FOR ORIGINS. It helps us to understand our religious, cultural and intellectual heritage. In so far as we are Christians we know that our religious origins go back to the Jews, that we are Judaeo-Christian; the Bible is there to prove it. In so far as we are Western we know that we are indebted intellectually to the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome. The Great Books of Western Civilization are there to give us the development of that heritage. The cultured Christian layman is aware of his religious debt to Judaism, and of his intellectual debt to Greco-Roman antiquity; but, generally speaking, he is not aware of any debt to classical Islam. The very idea may cause him to smile indulgently, or to dismiss the suggestion as unworthy of his attention. Others may be aware of some legacy from Islam, but seem to remember that it was Greek, or something else, in origin, and that the West was able, subsequently, to recover the item in question directly from its source. Thus there is nothing that our historical studies have brought to our attention of a significant legacy of purely Islamic origin. And if a suggestion of such a legacy was made somewhere in our reading, it somehow did not make an impression. Was there really nothing in the legacy of classical Islam that was purely Islamic and somehow incorporated in Western culture without our being aware of it, for one reason or another? Could it be that all we have from that great civilization are things of little consequence, some words that passed into Western vernaculars, some trivia of no great importance? This evening, I would like to entertain you with a brief description of some phenomena, whose origins, I believe, can be adequately explained only on purely Islamic-Arabic grounds. Two major intellectual movements, which we have long considered as of exclusively