Greek contributions to the Islamic world

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Greece played a crucial role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world. Its rich historiographical tradition preserved Ancient Greek knowledge upon which Islamic art, architecture, literature, philosophy and technological achievements were built. Ibn Khaldun once noted; The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks, have come down to us, because they were translated through Al-Ma'mun’s efforts. He was successful in this direction because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection.^[1]

The common^{[according to whom?]} and persistent myth claiming that Islamic scholars “saved” the classical work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction is inaccurate. Arabic scholars were indeed responsible for the initial transmission of many Greek texts to Western Europe (translated to Latin from Arabic), with many original Greek texts not leaving the Byzantine Empire until the Renaissance. Medieval possession of Greek texts in Latin was largely thanks to Arabic scholars, but today the original Greek is accessible thanks to Renaissance scholars. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European dark age between the fifth and the tenth centuries. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, but rather were preserved and studied by the scholars and monks of the Byzantines and passed on to the rest of Europe and to the Islamic world at various times. Aristotle had been translated in France at the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel before translations of Aristotle into Arabic (via the Syriac of the Christian scholars from the conquered lands of the Byzantine Empire). Michael Harris points out:^[2]

The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece … were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.… Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.

Historian John Julius Norwich adds that “much of what we know about antiquity—especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law—would have been lost forever if it weren’t for the scholars and scribes of Constantinople.”^[3]

Ibn Khaldun pointed out that the one civilization from which the Arabs had learned the sciences, was that of the Greeks, thanks to the translations by Christian (Assyrians) scholars of Greek texts into Syriac and then into Arabic. Ibn Khaldun also records that Abbasid caliph al-Mansur requested from the Byzantine Emperor the mathematical works of the Greeks.^[4]