The Islamic Impact on Western Civilization Reconsidered

Abstract

Introduction
The topic of the Islamic impact on western civilization has received
a great deal of attention from various Muslim scholars, and some attention
from western scholars. When discussing this topic, Muslims usually
concentrate on providing a list of important scientific discoveries made
by Muslims with the intent of proving that Muslims made the discoveries
before the Europeans. For example: Ibn Sina’ (d. 1036) used an air thermometer
and Ibn Yunus (c. 900) used a pendulum many centuries before
Galileo, al Idrisi (c. 1000) discovered and mapped the sources of the Nile
River nine hundred years before the Europeans, and al Zarkayl proved
that the planetary orbits were elliptical-not circular-many centuries in
advance of Copernicus.
Whereas the historical authenticity of these claims cannot be questioned,
such discussion does not shed much light on the Islamic impact on
western civilization. It is entirely possible that even though the Europeans
made the noted discoveries many centuries after the Muslims, they did so
without having any knowledge of earlier Islamic works. Such is the case
in the above-mentioned examples. Hence, the issue of the Islamic impact
on the West cannot be discussed in this context.
Due to the shortcoming of the typical method of discussing the issue
at hand, this paper will adopt an alternative method: the history of ideas
and intellectual traditions in the Muslim world and the West. An attempt
will be made to identify broad trends and characteristics of the western and
Islamic intellectual traditions in order to discover possible links. The primacy
of reason, logic, and the scientific method are the defining characteristics
of the western intellectual tradition from the Renaissance to the
present. Prior to the Renaissance, Christian theology determined ...