Chapter 1
The Study of Arabic in the West
In 632
ce,
the Prophet of Islam, Muḥammad, died in the city of Medina. The
century of conquests that followed brought both the Islamic religion and the
Arabic language to the attention of a world that up until then had possessed only
the vaguest notion of what went on in the interior of the Arabian peninsula. Ever
since this first confrontation between the Islamic world and Europe, the Arabs
and their language have been part of the European experience. At first, the intel-
lectual relationship between the two worlds was unilateral. Greek knowledge
and knowledge about Greek filtered through into the Islamic world, while the
Byzantines did not show themselves to be overly interested in things Arabic.
Although their
military prowess was feared, the Arabs’ culture and language were
not deemed worthy of study. Their religion was regarded as little more than the
latest in the series of Christian heresies that flourished in the East. For the Byzan-
tines, the Greek heritage did not need any contribution from the inhabitants of a
desert, whose only claim to fame rested on their ability
to harass the Byzantine
armies and contest Byzantine hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean.
In Western Europe, for a long time information about the Arabs and their
religion remained limited to vague notions about paganism in the desert of Arabia.
After the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711, the Arabs’ presence came to be
seen as a direct threat to Europe and Christianity. Yet
there was another side to
this confrontation, because through the Arabs Western Europe got in touch with a
part of its heritage that it had lost in the turmoil of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Western medicine and philosophy became dependent on the Arab culture of
Islamic Spain for knowledge of Greek medical and philosophical writings, which
were practically unknown in the West. From the eleventh century onwards, after
the fall of Toledo in 1085, these writings began to circulate
in Latin translations of
the Arabic versions. The Arabic language itself was not widely studied, since most
scholars relied upon translations that were made by a small group of translators,
often Jews, who had familiarised themselves with
the language either in Arab
Sicily or in al-ʾAndalus.
In the twelfth century, during the period of the Crusades, Western Europeans
became acquainted with Islamic culture and Arabic on site. This first-hand contact
contributed to the ambivalence of the European reaction. On the one hand, Islam
2
The Arabic Language
was the enemy that threatened Europe and held the keys to the Holy Land. On the
other hand,
for the time being the Muslims, or Saracens, were the keepers of the
Greek heritage in medicine and philosophy, and provided
the best available access
to these treasures. Thus, while crusaders were busy trying to wrest Jerusalem
from the Muslims and to preserve Europe from Islam, at the same time scholars
from all over Europe were travelling to Islamic Spain in order to study at the
famous universities of Cordova and Granada. The study
of Arabic served a double
purpose. For the medical scholars at the University of Paris, who humbly sat down
at the feet of the Arab doctors and called themselves
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