Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Muslims Contribution in the European Renaissance 735
lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova and Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life. ”It was under their successors at the Oxford School (that is, successors to the Muslims of Spain) that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Sciences. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim Science and Method to Christian Europe and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic an Arabic Science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge. Discussions as to who was the originator of the experimental method are part of the colossal misrepresentation of the origins of European civilization. The experimental method of Arabs was by Bacon’s time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout Europe. Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab civilization to the modern world ; but its fruits were slow in ripening. Not until long after Moorish culture had sunk back into darkness did the giant which it had given birth to rise in his might. It was not science only which brought Europe back to life.
Other and manifold influences from the civilization of Islam communicated its first glow to European life. For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory-natural science and the scientific spirit. The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries of revolutionary theories, science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The Astronomy and Mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture.
The Greeks systematized, generalized and theorized, but the pa.tient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute method of science, detailed and prolonged observation and experimental enquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any

736 Political and Cultural History of Islam

approach to scientific \vork conducted in the ancient classical world. What we call science arose in Europe as a icsult of a new spirit of enquiry, of new methods of investigation, of the methods of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of mathematics, in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs. It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would never have arisen at all, it is absolutely certain that but for them it would not have assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution.
Iftikhar Haider Malik says, ”The Muslim scientists included well known inventors like Hasan b. al-Hatham, whose discoveries in the field of optics helped the future studies completed by Roger Bacon and Witelo. Similarly, Hunayn b. Ishaq, al-Rarabi, Ibn-iRushd and al-Razi were the other leading innovators of the time, who rendered multifarious services in the disciplines of natural and medical sciences. Ishaq b. Sulayman was another physician with the Jewish ethnic background, who rose to the highest pinnacle of fame. Ibn-Zuhr and Maimondas-the latter also being a Jew-belonged to the category of the scientists who mainly dwelt on the scientific discoveries of Ibn-i-Sina and al-Farabi. This was the age of interdisciplinary learning, where an individual dealt in philosophy, sciences and literature simultaneously. Such individuals spent a major portion of their lives in gaining knowledge through travels to far away places and spent rest of their lives in transmitting it to others. They would attend the daras of some eminent scholar in religious or mundane academies and then would move on to the farthest corner of the Muslim world to resume teaching and research. Quite frequently such talents were patronized by the rulers, but still these scholars were the most mobile people of their age. They worked as the agents of trans-cultural and trans-intellectual values in far away regions. Like al-Beruni and others, these people travelled with the Muslim armies to the new places and with their observation and participation acquired a practical form of knowledge.
They wrote in Arabic mostly, which was the Latin of the Muslim world. Ibn-i-Sina and Ibn-i-Khaldun are some of the best case-studies of this mobile Muslim intelligentsia of the Middle Ages: ”With Ibn-i-Sina, Muslim medicine reached the peak of its achievement. While less of a clinical physician than al-Razi, ’’he was more philosophical, more systematic; he tried to rationalize the
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immense accumulation of medical science which has been inherited from antiquity and enriched by his predecessors”. He was very much influenced by early Greek scientists like Hippocrates and Galen, and himself discussed the .favourite contemporary philosophical themes like soul, mind and ego, so much a popular subject with Read Descartes the father of the European rationalist school of thought.”