


by Charles Burnett

Rate this article:


By Professor Charles Burnett*

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. The controversial context of the debate
3. Academic evaluation
4. Critical evaluation
5. Conclusion

* * *


1. Introduction

image alt text


Sylvain Gouguenheim has recently caused a furore, especially in French academic circles, in claiming that European culture owes nothing to Arabic culture, but that the successive renewals of learning of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were entirely of Greek inspiration (Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, published by Editions du Seuil in March 2008) [1].


image alt text

Figure 2: Front cover of Ibn Baklarish’s Book of Simples. Medical Remedies between Three Faiths in Twelfth-Century Spain, edited by Charles Burnett (Oxford University Press, 2008).


2. The controversial context of the debate

image alt text

Figure 3: Front cover of Abu Ma‘shar’s The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology: Together with the Medieval Latin Translation of Adelard of Bath, edited and translated by Charles Burnett et al. (Brill, 1994).


image alt text




‘That which distinguishes Western Latin philosophy is not its presenting itself as the heir to the Greeks. On the contrary, in Christian lands the Western difference (difference occidentale – the emphasis is de Libera’s: we may say: ‘what makes the West different’) derives from the Latin-speakers’ Arabic sources and roots. At the other extremity of the Christian world, Byzantium isolates itself, in continuing, alone, Hellenic ‘Romanness’. The particularity of Byzantium arises from the fact that in the 12th century, Byzantium is more western in the modern sense of the term than the Latin-speaking world: Greek-speaking, the Byzantine world remains closed to the philosophical culture of the land of Islam; its intellectual richness, its tradition, its heritage exempts it from looking elsewhere. The Latin world, on the other hand, is philosophically poor and its poverty makes it open and receptive. Once they are masters of Toledo, the Christians start to translate’ [4] (and elsewhere de Libera insists that it is only when a culture is translating texts from another culture that it grows and develops – Muslim philosophy stagnated when it ceased to incorporate through translations new texts).

image alt text

Figure 5: Page from the Commentarium magnum Averrois in Aristotelis De Anima libros, the Great commentary by Ibn Rushd on Aristotle’s Book of the Soul, translated into Latin from Arabic by Michael Scot. French manuscript, third quarter of the 13th century, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS (Source).


Unfortunately, Gouguenheim gives prominence, in a first ‘Annexe’, to another author, Sigrid Hunke (1913-99), whose book, Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland (‘The sun of Allah illuminates the West’) advances the thesis of the Western world being corrupted by Judaeo-Christianity and owing its science, civilisation and art of living only to the Arabo-Muslim world. Arabic-Islamic civilisation, in other words, rescued Europe from Judaeo-Christianity. Somehow she managed to associate Islam with the values of ‘pagan Germany’, uncorrupted by the oriental religion of Christianity. Gouguenheim may be quite right in attributing the distortions of her book to her allegiance to the Nazi party (hence the title of the Annexe: ‘L’amie d’Himmler et le ‘soleil d’Allah’), but it is really rather unfair to hold up this clearly biassed book as representative of the pro-Arabic view.

image alt text


In view of this politicizing of the question it is not surprising that reaction, especially among French scholars, has been rather passionate. About forty historians and philosophers of science, led by Hélène Bellosta (CNRS), published a text: ‘Taking old moons for new stars, or, how to rewrite the history of knowledge today’. An international group of 56 researchers added their signatures to an article in Libération on 30 April 2008, entitled: ‘Yes, the Christian West is in debt to (redevable) the Islamic world’. Alain de Libera of course responded, with a letter fully of cutting sarcasm, published in Télérama (a weekly French magazine owned by the French daily newspaper Le Monde), which includes, among other things: ‘The hypothesis of Mont St-Michel as a missing link in the history of the passage of Aristotelian philosophy from the Greek world to the Latin world… has as much importance as the re-evaluation of the role of the genuine Mère Poulard in the history of the omelet’; and concludes ‘This Europe is not my Europe. I leave it to the ministry of immigration and national identity and the vaults of the Vatican [6].’ In response to these attacks, the publisher of the book speaks of an ‘inquisition’ against the book and others spoke of a ‘fatwa’ against the author. On 17 October an article appeared in Le Monde (supplément ‘des livres’) on ‘L’Affaire Gouguenheim’, mentioning the establishment of a committee of experts charged with examining the book (which sounds very much like inquisition and a revival of the Vatican Index!)

3. Academic evaluation

image alt text


But, leaving politics aside, is there some merit in Gouguenhim’s approach? It might seem petty to point to factual mistakes in the book, although there are in fact many.

Louis-Jacques Bataillon has recently scoured the third chapter, which gives the book its title – Le moines pionniers du Mont-Saint-Michel: l’oeuvre de Jacques de Venice’ (‘the pioneer monks of Mont St-Michel: the work of James of Venice’) [7], and pointed out a number of misidentifications of the Greco-Latin translations and incorrect dates of the manuscripts containing them at Mont-St-Michel. More serious is the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that James of Venice himself was at Mont-St-Michel. One of the manuscripts crucial to Gouguenheim’s thesis—Avranches 232, was brought to Mont-St-Michel from somewhere else in Northern France (from the evidence of its handwriting), and some of the Aristotelian texts in it (Ethics Bk 1, Physics, De memoria, De longitudine et brevitate vitae) were copied in the 13th century. Moreover, Gouguenheim was unaware that the translations of the De generatione et corruptione and the Ethics (bks 1 and 2), also in Avranches 232, were not made by James of Venice, but by the scholar Burgundio of Pisa, for whom there are ample records that he spent his whole career as a professional notary in Pisa. So the texts were brought to the abbey, not translated on the spot.

image alt text



image alt text




4. Critical evaluation

image alt text

Figure 10: Book cover of Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception. First Three Books of Alhacen’s de Aspectibus, by A. Mark Smith. Vol. 1: Introduction and Latin Text. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 2001, Paperback, 520 pp.



image alt text

Figure 11: Two pages from Book X, chapters 6-7, of Ptolemy’s The Almagest in Latin. The most important medieval Latin translation of the Almagest, which is found in many manuscripts, was made from the Arabic in Spain in about 1175 by Gerard of Cremona, the most prolific of all medieval translators from Arabic into Latin (Source).


In the field of science and technology the transmission of information and techniques from the Islamic world to Western Europe has been uncontroversial. It is plain to see that Arabic numerals have been adopted by European mathematicians, that techniques for building bridges, for raising water and making paper were introduced into Europe from the Islamic world. The extent to which is this the case has been documented in books such as Danielle Jacquart and Françoise Micheau’s La médicine arabe et l’occident medieval (1990), and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science (English translation 1996; French text 1997) edited by Roshdi Rashed and Régis Morelon, which includes articles on ‘the influence of Arabic astronomy in the medieval West, the influence of Arabic mathematics in the medieval West, the Western reception of Arabic optics, the reception of Arabic alchemy in the West, the influence of Arabic medicine in the medieval West’. One of the most recent proponents of Arabic-Islamic science is George Saliba in his Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007); he makes a strong claim for the distinctly Islamic character of ‘ilm al-hay’a (‘science of the configuration [of the cosmos]’), which gave rise to the Western genre of Theorica planetarum, and traces a continuous development of Arabic astronomy through the works the al-‘Urdi (d. 1266), Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), and al-Qushji (d. 1474) to Copernicus.

image alt text

Figure 12: The only complete Islamic spherical astrolabe known to have survived. © 2005 Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (Inv. 49687) (Source).The spherical astrolabe, long employed in Islamic astronomy, was introduced to Europe by Gerbert d’Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II: see Gerbert d’Aurillac.

One can point also to elements in Western European society that were or could have been influenced by Arabic models and contacts. Without dwelling on the controversial questions of whether the College system arose from the Islamic waqf (dealt with by George Makdisi [12], who is not mentioned at all by Gouguenheim) or that the Scholastic method pursued there was modelled on the disputations in the Islamic madrasas [13], one can still point to many areas in which practices and characteristics in Islamic societies are adopted in Christian societies: Roger II’s use of a Fatimid diwan in his chancery in Palermo [14]; Alfonso X’s adaptation of Islamic law in his own law code – the Siete Partidas – the use of paper and Arabic numerals in legal and mercantile contexts, additions and changes to cuisine (e.g. pasta), the introduction of musical instruments and the concomitant styles of performance, melodies and rhythms.

But Gouguenheim’s focus is much narrower. He disregards science and technology, and even elements of everyday society, and focuses on texts – and philosophical texts at that – as representing cultural heritage most profoundly.

The documentary evidence in the field of philosophy for the relative value of Greek and Arabic sources is quite straightforward: Aristotle’s works in logic either already existed in Boethius’s late antique translations or were recovered through translations from Greek. His works on natural science, on the other hand, were recovered through translations both from Arabic and from Greek, and, in the course of time, the Greek translations prevailed (William of Moerbeke, in the late thirteenth century, made sure that any outstanding translations from Arabic were replaced by translations from Greek). The interpretations of Aristotle, on the other hand, and the major later texts in the Peripatetic tradition, were written in Arabic, and it is these Arabic texts that were translated into Latin. (As a correspondent in Le Monde put it: ‘the letter of Aristotle remained dead until the keys of the Arabic commentators revived it’) I am referring to Averroes’s three levels of commentary, Avicenna’s Shifa’, and several works by al-Kindi, al-Farabi and al-Ghazali. Only in the case of the logical and ethical texts were antique or Byzantine commentaries used (Boethius, Eustratius, Michael of Ephesus). Thanks to William of Moerbeke there was a limited knowledge of the Greek commentaries of Philoponus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius and Simplicius in the later Middle Ages, but this can be balanced by the use of Averroes’ Middle Commentaries on the logical texts, and, indeed, the replacement of Aristotle’s original Poetics by Averroes Middle Commentary on that text.


image alt text



But, we return to the question to what extent can we call the philosophical works of Averroes, Avicenna, al-Farabi etc. ‘Islamic’ (to take up Sylvain Gouguenheim’s argument again)? Philosophy was always regarded as a ‘foreign science’ by the Muslims, and was never more than a minority interest. Its very name falsafa was simply the transliteration of the Greek word. Al-Farabi, the most strictly Aristotelian of the Arabs, was a ‘free-thinker’ (zandiq) or heretic, rather than a proper Muslim. Al-Ghazali, as a good Muslim, ‘destroyed the opinions of the philosophers’, while Averroes, though writing a ‘destruction of al-Ghazali’s destruction’, had still to disguise his true philosophical beliefs by using the devise of the ‘double truth’ – and even so he was persecuted and his philosophical works were hardly transmitted in Arabic. Gouguenheim writes (pp. 197-8) that ‘European clerks took philosophical commentaries from many scholars, Arabs, Persians, Muslims, Jews and Christians, whose influence was real even though these sources were filtered and readapted. But even in respect to the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes, nothing can affirm that notions specific to the Arabic language or concepts proper to Islam brought about the cultural revolution of the 12th and 13th centuries’ (p. 198).

One could respond that Aristotle was also regarded as pagan and unchristian in the West, as shown in the series of condemnations of Aristotle’s works – first of all, of whole works and their commentaries, then of 219 doctrines contained in them. And Alain de Libera points out (in his letter in Télérama) that the Byzantines called philosophy a ‘foreign science'(‘or Hellenic fables’), before the Arabs did. But if we have to exclude the ‘foreign’ (or ‘ancient’) sciences from the question of Arabic influence on Europe, what are we left with? Arabic grammar and Islamic theology and religious law. Is Gouguenheim’s point, then, solely that Arabic grammar and Islam, as a religion, had no impact on European culture? This would be the implication of his use of the word ‘islamicised’ as being of the same order as ‘hellenicised’ (p. 164: ‘En somme l’Islam ne s’est pas héllenisé, pas plus que l’Occident ne s’est islamisé’), even though this analogy is not exact, since Islam is a religion, but Hellenism is not.

‘Islamicisation’ in the sense of becoming Muslim, was firmly rejected in the Latin Middle Ages. The importance of accepting Arabic texts but rejecting the Islamic religion was repeatedly made. Peter the Venerable regarded the Arabs as ‘gifted and wise’ and praised their libraries, full of books consecrated to the liberal arts and to the sciences of nature, while judging them ‘fools in regard to eternal and divine things’. Hermann of Carinthia refers to the intimi Arabum thesauri (‘intimate treasuries of the Arabs’) from which he and his fellow translator, Robert of Ketton, have taken precious texts, but he calls the Muslim ‘infelicissimus Agarenus’ (‘most wretched descendant of Hagar’) and the Ismaelita, and the prophet Muhammad an ‘infelicissimus homo’ (70vD) [20].

Nevertheless, the Muslim religion was not entirely absent from the Arabic texts translated, and had some impact on western culture. Peter the Venerable, as is well known, commissioned a translation of the Koran, with accompanying texts in the early 1140s; a second translation was made by Mark of Toledo in the early thirteenth century, when it accompanied the profession of faith of Ibn Tumart, the religious leader (Mahdi) of the Almohads, who held the reins of power at that time in Islamic Spain and the Maghreb [21]. Religious phrases also appear in other texts. The predictions in astrological texts are often followed by the phrase ‘bi-idhn Allah’ (‘by the permission of God’), which the Christian translators render as ‘Deo annuente’. Since every Arabic text written by a Muslim begins with the basmala, in which the name of God is invoked. This is the most obvious way of showing that the text belongs to the Islamic cultural heritage. In the literal translations made in Toledo and elsewhere in Spain a close equivalent of the basmala was provided: ‘In nomine Domini misericordis et pii (miseratoris)’ (‘in the name of God the merciful and kind’). The Islamic invocation of the ninety-nine names of God inspired Ramon Llull to invent a Christian equivalent, the arguments for the unity of God in the writings of Ibn Tumart added weight to Christian arguments for the One God, and the story of the mi‘raj (Prophet Muhammad’s midnight journey through the seven heavens) is reflected in European literature, perhaps even in Dante’s Divine Comedy.


5. Conclusion

Thus we must acknowledge both Mont St Michel and Toledo as contributors to European culture; both Greek and Arabic sources enriched the intellectual world of the Middle Ages. Gouguenheim’s focus on the true roots of ‘Christian Europe’ runs the danger of ethnicity—of replacing a racial purity of blood with a textual one. It is significant that blood is mentioned in one of the two quotations that open the book: Monique Dosdat’s statement that ‘The book in Christianity is like water, like blood: it irrigates the life of the soul’. Blood is passed naturally from one generation to another, but texts can only be passed down to ‘sons’ (and ‘daughters’) who are worthy and appropriate to receive them—those who understand them through their innate nature (viz. Gouguenheim’s discussion of the incompatibility of the Arabic learning for receiving Greek syllogistic argument). A pure tradition is contaminated by elements coming from outside it (e.g. Gouguenheim speaks of ‘a distortion of Greek astronomy by the Arabs, into something more “spiritualist” than scientific, which was diffused in Europe where for a long time astronomy and astrology were combined. The Islamic filter has then, operated with efficacy, hindering and limiting that which should have been a profound and durable Hellenization’) [24]. An alternative view is that texts are enriched both by passing through the languages of other cultures, and by being supplemented by new texts incorporating distinctive characteristics of these cultures. Thus Greco-Latin translations and Arabo-Latin translations are not only two conduits by which ancient Greek culture reached the Middle Ages; they also provided the Byzantine, Arabic (and beyond Arabic, the Persian, and Indian) developments and supplements to this culture, whose mixture makes Western European civilization what it is.



[2] Coloman Viola, ‘Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel’, Millénaire monastique du Mont Saint-Michel, ed. R. Foreville, 2 vols, Paris, 1967, II, pp. 289-312, see p. 298.


[4] La philosophie médiévale, p. 309: ‘Ce qui distingue la philosophie occidentale latine n’est pas de se poser en héritière des Grecs. Bien au contraire, en terre chrétienne la différence occidentale vient des sources et de l’enracinement arabes des latinophones. A l’autre extrémité du monde chrétien, Byzance s’isole à continuer, seule, la romanité hellénique. Le “particularisme byzantin” vient de ce qu’au xiie siècle, Byzance est plus occidentale au sense moderne du terme que le monde latinophone: hellénophone, le monde byzantin reste fermé à la culture philosophique de la terre d’Islam; sa richesse intellectuelle, sa tradition, son héritage le dispensent de regarder ailleurs. Le monde latin au contraire est philosophiquement pauvre et sa pauvreté lui tient lieu d’ouverture. Une fois maîtres de Tolède, les chrétiens se mettent à traduire’. The isolation of Byzantium is exaggerated, as can be seen from the writings of Irfan Shahid and Paul Magdalino.

[5] Aristote au Mont Saint Michel, p. 140: ?Je ne peux suivre Alain de Libera qui crédite l’Islam d’avoir effectué “la première confrontation de l’hellénisme et du monothéisme”, oubliant les Pères grecs! et estime que c’est à l’Islam que l’Occident doit la raison et la rationalité: “La raison, improprement dite “occidentale”, telle la lumière, vient aussi de l’Orient” (Penser au moyen âge, 114-6). Si l’exercice de la raison est universel, la pratique du raisonnement démonstratif est née en Grèce’.

[6] `L’hypothèse du Mont-saint-Michel… “chaînon manquant dans l’histoire du passage de la philosophie aristotélicienne du monde grec au monde latin”, hâtivement célébrée par l’islamophobie ordinaire, a autant d’importance que la réévaluation du rôle de l’authentique Mère Poulard dans l’histoire de l’omelette… Cette Europe-là n’est pas la mienne. Je la laisse au “ministère de l’Immigration et de l’Identité nationale” et aux caves du Vatican’.

[7] L.J. Bataillon, ‘Sur Aristote et le Mont-Saint-Michel’, in Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 92, 2008, pp. 329-334.


[9] See C. Burnett, ‘The Contents and Affiliation of the Scientific Manuscripts Written at, or Brought to, Chartres in the Time of John of Salisbury’, in The World of John of Salisbury, edited by M. Wilks, Studies in Church History, Oxford, 1984, pp. 127–60.




[13] Christopher Beckwith, ‘Central Asian Buddhist Sources of Early Scholasticism in Medieval Tibet, Islam and Western Europe’, forthcoming in Islam and Tibet, eds A. Akasoy, C. Burnett and R. Yoeli-Tlalim, Aldershot 2009.



[16] Giles of Rome, Errores philosophorum, ed. Josef Koch… English translation by John O. Riedl, Milwaukee, 1944.





[21] See Thomas Burman, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560, Philadelphia, 2007.

[22] Oeuvres philosophiques et scientifiques d’al-Kindi, 2 vols, Leiden, 1997-1998, II, pp. 12-13.


[24] Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel, pp. 146-7: ‘Cette orientation plus spiritualiste que scientifique s’est diffusée en Europe où, longtemps, astronomie et astrologie vont aller de pair. Le filtre islamique a donc opéré avec efficacité, freinant et limitant ce qui aurait pu être une héllenisation profonde et durable’.
