Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look - The New York...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-polit...

When Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today's historical vision

of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion,
accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of
the Christian Europe's reawakening from the Middle Ages.
He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the
knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening
the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and
philosophy - a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.
"This thesis has basically nothing scandalous about it, if it were true,"
Gouguenheim writes. "In spite of the appearances, it has more to do
with taking ideological sides than scientific analysis."
For a controversy, here's a real one. Gouguenheim, a professor of
medieval history at a prestigious university, l'cole Normale
Suprieure de Lyon, is saying "Whoa!" to the idea there was an Islamic
bridge of civilization to the West. Supposedly, it "would be at the origin
of the Middle Ages' cultural and scientific reawakening, and
(eventually) the Renaissance."
In a new book, he is basically canceling, or largely writing off, a debt to
"the Arabo-Muslim world" dating from the year 750 - a concept built
up by other historians over the past 50 years - that has Europe owing
Islam for an essential part of its identity.
"Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel" (Editions du Seuil), while not
contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case
that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab
world's initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of
"Islam" but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of
translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in
France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in
Moorish Spain.
When I talked to Gouguenheim about his book a couple of weeks ago,
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Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look - The New York...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-polit...

he said he had no interest in polemics, just some concern that his

research could be misused by extremists.
At the same time, he acknowledged that his subject was intensely
political. Gouguenheim said it was in light of a 2002 recommendation
from the European Union that schoolbooks give a more positive
rendering of Islam's part in European heritage "that an attempt at a
clarification becomes necessary." Reading Gouguenheim without a
background in the history of the Byzantine Empire or the Abassid
caliphate is a bit of a challenge. It justifies distance and reserving
judgment.
But Le Figaro and Le Monde, in considering the book in prominent
reviews, drank its content in a single gulp. No suspended
endorsements or anything that read like a caution.
"Congratulations," Le Figaro wrote. "Mr. Gouguenheim wasn't afraid
to remind us that there was a medieval Christian crucible, a fruit of the
heritage of Athens and Jerusalem," while "Islam hardly proposed its
knowledge to Westerners."
Le Monde was even more receptive: "All in all, and contrary to what's
been repeated in a crescendo since the 1960s, European culture in its
history and development shouldn't be owing a whole lot to Islam. In
any case, nothing essential.
"Precise and well-argued, this book, which sets history straight, is also
a strongly courageous one."
But is it right?
Gouguenheim attacks the "thesis of the West's debt" as advanced by
the historians Edward Said, Alain de Libera and Mohammed Arkoun.
He says it replaces formerly dominant notions of cultural superiority
advanced by Western orientalists, with "a new ethnocentrism, oriental
this time" that sets off an "enlightened, refined and spiritual Islam"
against a brutal West.
Nuggets: Gouguenheim argues that Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of
Wisdom, said to be created by the Abassids in the ninth century, was

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Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look - The New York...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-polit...

limited to the study of Koranic science, rather than philosophy, physics

or mathematics, as understood in the speculative context of Greek
thought.
He says that Aristotle's works on ethics, metaphysics and politics were
disregarded or unknown to the Muslim world, being basically
incompatible with the Koran. Europe, he said, "became aware of the
Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were
brought to them."
Gouguenheim calls the Mont Saint-Michel monastery, where the texts
were translated into Latin, "the missing link in the passage from the
Greek to the Latin world of Aristotelian philosophy." Outside of a few
thinkers - he lists Al-Farabi, Avicenne, Abu Ma'shar and Averroes Gougenheim considers that the "masters of the Middle East" retained
from Greek teaching only what didn't contradict Koranic doctrine.
Published less than a month ago, the book is just beginning to
encounter learned criticism. Sarcastically, Gabriel Martinez-Gros, a
professor of medieval history, and Julien Loiseau, a lecturer, described
Gouguenheim as "re-establishing the real hierarchy of civilizations."
They said that he disregarded the mathematics and astronomy
produced by the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries and
painted the period's Islamic civilization exactly what it was not:
obscurantist, legalistic, fatalistic and fanatic.
Indeed, Gouguenheim's thesis, they suggest, has "intellectual
associations that are questionable at their very heart" - which I take to
mean nastily right-wing.
If you read Gougenheim's appendix, he's preemptively headed off that
kind of accusation. He offers his book as an antidote to an approach to
Islam's medieval relations to the West exemplified by the late Sigrid
Hunke, a German writer, described as a former Nazi and friend of
Heinrich Himmler.
Hunke describes a pioneering, civilizing Islam to which "the West owes
everything." Gouguenheim replies that, in deforming reality, her work
from the 1960s continues as a reference point that unfortunately still

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Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look - The New York...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-polit...

"shapes the spirit of the moment."

He says he means to rectify that.
His book is interesting and bold. At the very least, it is kindling for
arguments on a touchy subject where most people don't have more
than inklings and instincts to sort out even shards of truth from angry
and conflictual expertise.

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