'ISLAM AND THE WEST'

A part of Speech by The Prince Charles at Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford 1993 :

"If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of #Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world."

Mediaeval Islamic world, from Central Asia to Atlantic, was a world where scholars & men of learning flourished.
But coz we've tended to see Islam as enemy of West, as an alien culture, society &system of belief, we've tended to ignore erase its great relevance to our own history

We've underestimated the importance of 800 years of Islamic society &culture in Spain between the 8th & 15th centuries.

Contribution of Muslim Spain to the preservation of classical learning during the Dark Ages, &to the first flowerings of Renaissance, has long been recognised.

But Islamic Spain was much more than a mere larder where Hellenistic knowledge was kept for later consumption by the emerging modern Western world.

Not only did Muslim Spain gather and preserve the intellectual content of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, but it also..

Also interpreted &expanded upon that civilisation &made a vital contribution of its own in so many fields of human endeavour -in science, astronomy, mathematics, algebra (itself an Arabic word) law history, medicine, pharmacology, optics, agriculture, architecture, theology music

Averroes & Avenzoor, like their counterparts Avicenna & Rhazes in the East, contributed to the study & practice of medicine in ways from which Europe benefited for centuries afterwards.

Islam nurtured and preserved the quest for learning.

In the words of tradition, 'the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr'

Cordoba in 10th century was by far the most civilised city of Europe
Lending libraries in Spain at time King Alfred was making terrible blunders with the culinary arts in this country

400,000 volumes in its ruler's library amounted to more books than all the libraries of the rest of Europe put together. That was made possible because the Muslim world acquired from China the skill of making paper more than four hundred years before the rest of non-Muslim Europe

Many of the traits on which modern Europe prides itself came to it from Muslim Spain.
Diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the techniques of academic research, of anthropology, etiquette, fashion, alternative medicine, hospitals, all came from this great city of cities.

Mediaeval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West.

The extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western.

Islam is part of our past and present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.