Arabic Thought and Its Place in History

307 Pages·2003·11.548 MB·English

by  De Lacy O’Leary

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ARABIC THOUGHT AND
ITS PLACE IN HISTORY
BY
DE LACY O'LEARY, D.D.
Lecturer in Aramaic andSyFTac, Bristol University
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192*

FOREWORD
History traces the evolution of the social structure
in which the community exists to-day. There are
three chief factors at work in this evolution racial
;
descent, culture drift, and transmission of language :
the first of these physiological and not necessarily
connected with the other two, whilst those two are
not always associated with each other. In the evolu-
tion of the social structure the factor of first impor-
tance is the transmission of culture, which is not a
matter of heredity but due to contact, for culture is
learned and reproduced by imitation and not in-
herited. Culture must be taken in the widest sense
to include political, social, and legal institutions, the
arts and crafts, religion, and the various forms of
intellectual life which show their presenceinliterature,
philosophy, and otherwise, all more or less connected,
and all having the common characteristic that they
cannot be passed on by physical descent but must
be learned in after life. But race, culture, and
language resemble one another in so far as it is true
that all are multiplex and perpetually interwoven,so
that in each the lines of transmission seem rather
like a tangled skein than an ordered pattern results
;
proceed from a conflicting group of causes amongst
which it is often difficult to apportion the relative
influences.
The culture of modern Europe derives from that
of the Roman Empire, itself the multiple resultant
of many forces, amongst which the intellectual life
of Hellenism was most effective, but worked into a
coherent system by the wonderful power of organiza-
tion, which was one of the most salient characteristics
of that Empire. The whole cultural life of medieval
Europe shows this Hellenistic-Roman culture passed
FOREWORD
vi
on, developed, and modified by circumstances. As
the Empire fell to pieces the body of culture became
subject to varying conditions in different localities,
of which the divergence between the Greek-speaking
East and the Latin-speaking West is the most striking
example. The introduction of Muslim influence
through Spain is the one instance in which we seem
to get an alien culture entering into this Eornan
tradition and exercising a disturbing influence. In
fact, this Muslim culture was at bottom essentially a
part of the Hellenistic-Boman material, even the
theology of Islam being formulated and developed
from Hellenistic sources, but Islam had so long lived
apart from Christendom and its development had
taken place in surroundings so different that it seems
a strange and alien thing. Its greatest power lay in
the fact that it presented the old material in an
entirely fresh form.
It is the effort of the following pages to trace the
transmission of Hellenistic thought through the
medium of Muslim philosophers and Jewish thinkers
who lived in Muslim surroundings, to show how this
thought, modified as it passed through a period of
development in the Muslim community and itself
modifying Islamic ideas, was brought to bear upon
the culture of mediaeval Latin Christendom. So
greatly had it altered in external form during tfie
centuries of its lifejapart, that it seemedanewtypeof
intellectual life and became a^sturbing^factor which
~
Imes and
new^
Church, directly fading up to the Benascence^which
gave^the.dea^^low_to mediSBval culture! so little
had it altered in real substance th&t Ifused the same