Science and literature started flourishing, and with the help of the brilliant Greek philosophers the dormant Europeans were able to shed the ignorance of Medieval times and open the doors of science and civilisation.
Traditional education about Western civilisation tells the story of how Europe, floundering in the ignorance and illiteracy of the Middle Ages, suddenly came across a number of texts in classical Greek which at once recovered the lost memory of Europe’s glorious Greek and Roman past. Biased educative material should be corrected to offer a true image of history to our youth. Popular belief reaffirmed the theme of the revived classics by repetition after repetition until the Arabic heritage in Europe came to be forgotten. Scholars hardly dared cite an Arab in support of their revolutionary developments. Latin humanists created a movement imitating the Arab tradition in its key values, but distinguishing itself by classical Latin as its lingua franca and the classical authors as its founding fathers.Īfter a period in which classical culture was vigorously celebrated and Arab influences were attempted to be removed from the scientific canon, the image of a Greek source of European culture had settled itself firmly in the European mind.
The sixteenth century Renaissance was rather the construction of an exclusive Christian European identity within the world of literature and science. In fact, the progress in civilisation had begun in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was the result of the transfer of Arabic civilisation to Europe.
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