Are the claims about the islamic golden age being responsible for the Renaissance accurate?

by Stoicpeace
sunagainstgold

No.

I discuss this myth in an earlier answer, which focuses on North Africa and the Near East.

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[1/2]

Bad history like this always worries me. On one hand, it perpetuates tired out myths--/u/Steelcan909 is correct; there were no Dark Ages. On the other, it forces POC into a narrow mold of "benefiting white people"--instead of focusing on the actual culture and accomplishments of the Muslims of medieval Iberia, Sicily, North Africa, and the Near East.

i. Correcting the Myth with the Myth

ij. On "the Dark Ages"

iij. The Muslim Presence in Early/High Medieval Europe

iiij. The Actual Myth

v. European Muslims' Amazing Accomplishments

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Correcting the Myth with the Myth

The first thing that needs to be said is, this particular tweet is so careless that it can't even get the myth right. By the time "the Renaissance" in the Teenange Mutant Ninja Turtles namesakes' sense gets going in the late 14th century, Muslims control a tiny fraction of Iberia and Christians have expelled them from Sicily altogether. Classical learning in Italy gets a major boost after the 1450s...when Greek Christian scholars flee Constantinople surrounding the Muslim Ottomans' conquest.

Attributing The Renaissance to the Almohads (Muslim Berbers conquerers of part of Iberia) or their Almoravid and Umayyad predecessors is about as ludicrous as the 19th century British claiming Joan of Arc as a national hero. You know, the Joan of Arc who rallied France to ultimately win the 100 Years War and kick the English out of their long-held territories on continental Europe forever.

The myth refers instead to what scholars call the "12th century renaissance" (for the obvious reason). Stretching a little longer than the actual 12C, scholars generally agree that this was an era of significant change in western Europe--religious, intellectual, social, what I will call "ongoingly economic" (although all of these are ongoing), and various levels of political. This period, especially its intellectual developments, is generally where Iberian Muslims are seen to play a major role in the changes within western Europe.

Now, let's look at how we get to this point.

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On "the Dark Ages"

First, the "statistics" for Christian Europe are not correct, even insofar as there can be accurate statistics for the Middle Ages. Europe never had a literacy rate of 1%. When I call it rock-bottom low, I refer specifically to lay people outside cities (even in 1500). Monastic and clerical Church figures, including nuns, meant Europe retained a Latin literacy rate somewhere around 10% at its lowest, and pretty much higher.

It's also kind of meaningless to say that Christian Europe ever had two universities. Learning centers gradually coalesced in a few major cities over the course of the 12th century. The foundation charters for the earliest unis are mostly in the early 13th. But basically, Europe went from having zero universities to a whole bunch in a very narrow span of time. And "university" had as much to do with legal privileges for students and faculty, as it did for actual learning.

But enough of that.

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The Muslim Presence in Early/High Medieval Europe

In the High Middle Ages, the period under consideration here, Muslims maintained a strong presence in Mediterranean Europe. By 711, a dynasty named the Umayyads had swept from Syria across North Africa, and conquered a large swath of al-Andalus (Iberia and a bit of France) from its contemporary Visigoth Christian population. After centuries of raids, the Aghlabid dynasty from central North Africa--characterized by infighting between Arab and Berber residents--conquered Sicily from Byzantine Christians.

Al-Andalus in this era was ruled by Andalusi leaders. Sicily was subordinate to Tunisia-ish and then Egypt-ish/Tunisia-ish. (Roll with it).

In the 11th century, new groups of Christians from the north (Iberian kingdoms and Normans, respectively) began to invade al-Andalus and Muslim Sicily. This went somewhat better and more quickly in the latter than the former. "The Reconquista" was not one war, and scholars debate hotly whether it was a re-conquest at all.

This is relevant to present purposes because, in the ensuing centuries of political turmoil, the shrinking area of al-Andalus was occasionally ruled by two Morocco-ish dynasties--the Almoravids and Almohads. They had their own governors, but were indeed ruled from North Africa. However, the residents were primarily native to those regions, i.e. Europe.

Were they people of color? This question is difficult to answer, because medieval Christian and Islamic ideas of "POC" were different from our own. (I've discussed this topic several previous times on AH.) Of particular interest here is a 13C manuscript from Christian Iberia known as the Book of Games. Its depictions include brown- and white-skinned Muslim men, white-skinned Christian men, and exclusively white-skinned Muslim and Christian women alike. (There is, of course, no mention of African versus European origins). The different colored skin is probably ideological--but what would it mean? And what if it's not? And how do we know North Africans were "POC" (in the medieval or modern senses) in the first place?