HRH, The Prince of Wales: Islam And The West (partially)

May 2, 2000
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> of Islamic society and culture in Spain between the 8th and 15th
> centuries. The contribution of Muslim Spain to the preservation
> of classical learning during the Dark Ages, and to the first
> flowering of the Renaissance, has long been recognized. But
> Islamic Spain was much more than a mere larder where Hellenistic
> knowledge was kept for later consumption by the emerging modern
> world. Not only did Muslim Spain gather and preserve the
> intellectual content of ancient Greek and Roman civilization, it
> also interpreted and expanded upon that civilization, and made a
> vital contribution of its own in so many fields of human
> endeavour -- in science, astronomy, mathematics, algebra (itself
> an Arabic word), law, history, medicine, pharmacology, optics,
> agriculture, architecture, theology, music. Averroes and
> Avenzoor, like their counterparts Avicenna and Rhazes in the
> East, contributed to the study and practice of medicine in ways
> from which Europe benefited for centuries afterwards.
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> Islam nurtured and preserved the quest for learning. In the words
> of (the Prophet's) tradition "the ink of the scholar is more
> sacred than the blood of the martyr." Cordoba in the 10th century
> was by far the most civilized city of Europe. We know of lending
> libraries in Spain at the time King Alfred was making terrible
> blunders with the culinary arts in this country. It is said that
> the 400,000 volumes of its ruler's library amounted to more books
> than all the of the rest of Europe put together. That was made
> possible because the Muslim world acquired from China the skill
> of making paper more than four hundred years before the rest of
> non-Muslim Europe. Many of the traits on which Europe prides
> itself came to it from Muslim Spain. Diplomacy, free trade, open
> borders, the techniques of academic research, of anthropology,
> etiquette, fashion, alternative medicine, hospitals, all came
> from this great city of cities. Mediaeval Islam was a religion of
> remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians
> to practice their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which
> was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West.
> The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam
> has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in
> the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much
> towards the civilization which we all too often think of,
> wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and
> present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to
> create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a
> thing apart.
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