The "Arabick" Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England.

• Author: Saliba, George

When people think of the impact of Islamic civilization on the Latin West they usually think of the period of the tenth to twelfth centuries that produced the immense collection of texts (mainly scientific and philosophical) that were translated from Arabic into Latin. The common wisdom is that this period in medieval European history was the main source of fresh knowledge, and thus produced what Charles Haskins called the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.

The European Renaissance, on the other hand, was supposed to have taken place without any input from the same Islamic civilization that was responsible for the remarkable phenomenon of medieval times and in total isolation from it. Thereafter, what happened in Europe was simply a European affair, and should be studied and interpreted as an indigenous production totally independent of other cultures, most of whose output was by then much inferior to the brilliant results that began to be produced in European countries both south and north of the Alps. This view of European history is more than a century old, and is so common that it does not need any documentation.

Furthermore, because this major outline of European intellectual history is so well entrenched, very few people have taken the time to examine it in any detail, or even dared to question the validity of its inner logic. Even when striking similarities between the intellectual production of Islamic civilization and that of renaissance Europe began to appear, mainly during this century, and in such fields as medicine, astronomy, mathematics, or even literature and philosophy, the main outline was barely shaken, and the specialized research of distinguished scholars continued to be confined to professional journals and never percolated into less specialized literature to reach a wider audience. Who remembers, for example, that in the fifties, some forty years ago, both Marie-Therese d'Alverny and Joseph Schacht, to name only two, had together collected evidence to support the thesis that the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood can first be documented in a thirteenth-century work of Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288) of Damascus and Cairo, and was later rendered in the Latin texts of the Renaissance by the sixteenth-century physicians Servetus (d. 1553) and Colombo (d. 1559) before it was finally reformulated, with some additions, of course, by Harvey (d. 1657)? Or who remembers the similarities between the methods and mathematical techniques found in the works of astronomers who flourished within Islamic civilization during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the techniques found in the works of Copernicus (1473-1543), which have been known for more than thirty years now, and are still confined mainly to the most erudite and specialized literature? In both instances, the evidence of transmission is tantalizing, and the methodology used to track influence and transmission seems to be inadequate to settle the issues involved one way or the other. We have no clear evidence, in the traditional sense of evidence, that Michel Servetus, for example, had ever read the works of Ibn al-Nafis directly or indirectly, or that Copernicus had ever read the works of Ibn al-Shatir of Damascus (d. 1375), in...