The Arabs’ Contribution Much of the writings of the Greeks and Romans had been familiar to monks and clergymen through the ‘Middle Ages’, but they had not made these widely known. In the fourteenth century, many scholars began to read translated works of Greek writers like Plato and Aristotle. For this they were indebted not to their own scholars but to Arab translators who had carefully preserved and translated ancient manuscripts (Plato was Aflatun, and Aristotle Aristu in Arabic). While some European scholars read Greek in Arabic translation, the Greeks translated works of Arabic and Persian scholars for further transmission to other Europeans.
These were works on natural science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and chemistry. Ptolemy’s Almagest (a work on astronomy, written in Greek before CE and later translated into Arabic) carries the Arabic definite article ‘al’, which brings out the Arabic connection. Among the Muslim writers who were regarded as men of wisdom in the Italian world were Ibn Sina * (‘Avicenna’ in Latin, - ), an Arab physician and philosopher of Bukhara in Central Asia, and al-Razi (‘Rhazes’), author of a medical encyclopaedia. Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’ in Latin, - ), an Arab philosopher of Spain, tried to resolve the tension between philosophical knowledge ( faylasuf ) and religious beliefs.
His method was adopted by Christian thinkers. Humanists reached out to people in a variety of ways. Though the curricula in universities continued to be dominated by law, medicine and theology, humanist subjects slowly began to be introduced in schools, not just in Italy but in other European countries as well. * The European spelling of these individuals’ names made later generations think they were Europeans!
Schools at this time were only for boys. C HANGING C ULTURAL T RADITIONS T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY