Abstract
In the intellectual history of the Mediterranean,
arguably no more
significant events took place than the transmission
of ancient Greek
scientific and philosophical knowledge into Arabic and
its subsequent
transmission from Arabic into both mediaeval Latin and
back into medieval Greek. The demand for these translations,
and the translations themselves, changed the course
of intellectual history and are directly responsible
for the European Renaissance and hence for the state
of scientific
development in which the world finds itself today. The
paper investigates the social and historical circumstances
that generated this unprecedented transmission of knowledge
(but not transfer of culture in general): the
massive translations from Greek into Arabic in Abbasid
Baghdad from the 8th to the 10th centuries, and those
from Arabic into Latin in Spain in the 12th (with a
brief look at the contemporary translations from Arabic
into Byzantine Greek if time permits). The former are
rooted in internal political and social developments
in early Abbasid society, in particular the Abbasid
revolution against the Umayyads and the need of the
new regime for legitimacy and the consolidation of its
power, while the latter were generated by the context
of international politics and the crusader ideology
that dominated the Christian reconquest of Spain.
Beyond
Orientalism and Occidentalism
March 4th/6th 2006 - Cairo, Egypt
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