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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

Much of what Islamic scholars preserved was also from Greece and Rome I believe. From what I understand, many Greek and Roman texts only exist today because they were transcribed and preserved by Islamic scholars.

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I mean, sure. But there seems to be this weird underlying idea that the world owes Islam a debt of gratitude for conquering the region where these texts existed and had been successfully transcribed and preserved under Christian rule for hundreds of years already, as if they swooped in at just the right moment to save them from being swallowed by the desert.

It rarely makes sense to debate what-ifs in history. Because we don't know the alternate. We owe all past scholars a debt of gratitude for being the keepers and makers of knowledge as it passed through time. That includes the Greece, Rome, India. That includes the Islamic caliphate, especially during the Islamic Golden Age.

Greek and Roman works were, indeed, transcribed to Arabic. But the Romans got their maths from the Greeks, who got much of theirs from the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

Zero, with "Arabic" numbering, certainly originated in Northern India. Was it "Hindu"? The people credited with inventing it certainly were. But they may have learned much from the Harappans, whose work is today wholly unknown.

Persians and Egyptians, many of them Muslim, created a great deal of new mathematics, building upon older works. They also invented, in all its details, what we now call science. It was introduced to Europe on the back of a book, Optics, by Al-Haytham. The earliest European scientists freely admitted their debt to him.

Appreciation for higher learning in the medieval Islamic world was no more universal than in Renaissance Europe, or in our modern world, but it was honored in pockets, for just barely enough centuries to catch on in similarly restricted pockets of Europe.

Is modern science Christian? Not if you believe many Christians. But many of the people who built science atop translations from Arabic were very seriously Christian.

Higher learning is always anomalous wherever it blossoms, and always treated with suspicion by many in both church and government everywhere. It doesn't belong to any culture or people. We can honor anyone, anywhere, who fostered it, whatever their ancestors' or descendents' failings.

Problems also arise from the fact that Hindus were a group of people not religion. Hindus now are people who identity religious with Hinduism

The word Hindu is derived (through Persian) from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, the historic local appellation for the Indus River in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, which is first mentioned in the Rig Veda. - google

I believe that Sicily, during the 1100s, was the place where translations from both Arabic and Greek to Latin occurred. In that century, it was ruled by the Normans who had conquered the Arabs. (Yes, the Normans, that same ex-Viking, Normandy-based group who were also busy conquering England, at that time!) There were separate law courts for each of the three language groups and translators who could speak all three languages.

I couldn't find a definitive reference. There is this short scholarly article from 1920, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1834924?seq=13#metadata_info_ta.... And this series of articles about Sicily's history, http://www.bestofsicily.com/history.htm

One key figure seems to have been Adelard of Bath. "He is known both for his original works and for translating many important Arabic and Greek scientific works of astrology, astronomy, philosophy and mathematics into Latin from Arabic versions, which were then introduced to Western Europe." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelard_of_Bath

Both are missing the point. The important point is this was before Islam.

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