CONCLUDING PARAGRAPH – De Lacy O’lay
CONCLUDING PARAGRAPH We have now traced the transmission of a particular type of Hellenistic culture through the Syrian Church, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and the pagans of Harran to the Islamic community, where it was rather compromised by the patronage of those whom the official Muslim teachers decided to regard as heretics. In spite of this censure it has left a very distinct and enduring impression on Muslim theology and on popular beliefs. After a chequered career in the East it passed over to the Western Muslim community in Spain, where it had a very specialised development, which...
Read MoreINFLUENCE OF THE ARABIC PHILOSOPHERS ON LATIN SCHOLASTICISM – De Lacy O’lery
We have now followed the way in which Hellenistic philosophy was passed from the Greeks to the Syrians, from the Syrians to the Arabic-speaking Muslims, and was by the Muslims carried from Asia to the far West. We have now to consider the way in which it was handed on front these Arabic-speaking people to the Latins. The first contact of the Latins with the philosophy of the Muslims was in Spain, as might be expected. At that time, that is to say during the Middle Ages, we can rightly describe the Western parts of Europe as “Latin,” since Latin was used not only in the services...
Read MoreTHE JEWISH TRANSMITTORS – De Lacy O’lery
We have already seen that the Jews took a prominent part in bringing a knowledge of philosophical research from Asia to Spain, and Ibn Jabirul (Avencebrol) takes his place in the line of transmission by which Spanish Islam was brought into contact with these studies. This did not end the participation of the Jews in philosophical work, but their subsequent writers do not form part of the regular series of Aristotelian students influencing the Muslim world, but are rather confined to Jewish circles. Yet they are of an importance wider than merely sectarian interests, for it was by means of...
Read MoreWESTERN PHILOSOPHY – De Lacy O’lery
Muslim rule in North Africa west of the Nile valley was commenced under conditions very different from those prevailing in Egypt and Syria. The Arabs found this land occupied by the Berbers or Libyans, the same race which from the time of the earliest Pharaohs had been a perpetual menace to Egypt, and which, on the Mediterranean seaboard, had offered a serious problem to Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Gothic colonists. For some thousands of years these Berbers had remained very much the same as when they had emerged from the neolithic stage, and were hardy desert men like the Arabs in...
Read MoreThe formation of an orthodox scholasticism – De Lacy O’ley
The formation of an orthodox scholasticism within the Muslim church appears as a development spread over the 4th-5th centuries of the Hijra (10-11 cent. A.D.), and is in three strata associated with the three leaders, al-Ash‘ari, al-Baqilani, and al-Ghazali. Such a development, of course, is principally of interest for the internal history of Islam and the evolution of Muslim theology, but it had its influence also on the transmission of Arabic thought to Latin Christendom in two ways: (i.) directly, in that al-Ghazali was established as one of the great Arabic authorities when the...
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