What would a Muslim scholar from the Islamic golden age think about Greco-Roman culture?

by Melocotonazo

As far as I know (I may be wrong), the preservation of ancient Greek ideas (or at least Aristotle's) was, among many others, a major contribution of Islamic culture. Apart from that preservation function, what would (for example) a scholar from Baghdad or Cordoba think about the works, beliefs and other cultural details of Greeks and Romans?

Thank you very much in advance.

KiwiHellenist

Im sorry I can't address the main part of your question, but there is a majorly inaccurate assumption embedded in your question and it's such a pernicious one that I think it's worth straightening it out.

the preservation of ancient Greek ideas (or at least Aristotle's) was, among many others, a major contribution of Islamic culture

This is a frequently misunderstood point. Aristotle does not in any way depend on Arabic or Persian scholarship. Islamic scholarship helped to disseminate certain Greek ideas (including Aristotle) to a particular audience, at a particular time -- namely western Europe, prior to the 1400s -- but our text of Aristotle does not depend on that dissemination.

The idea that Aristotle only survives thanks to Islamic scholarship sounds like it's paying due respect to a non-western culture, in a nice enlightened way. But it has two very, very nasty side-effects:

  1. It's racist. Not so much racist against Arabs (though they do sometimes get cast as a passive pipeline): against Greeks. It basically nullifies the textual transmission work done in the Greek-speaking world, and in the west too, by Greek immigrants working in early renaissance publishing houses. 99.99% of ancient Greek texts survived to the present by being transmitted by Greek-speaking people. Open up an edition of Aristotle, and you'll see it's in Greek, not Arabic. The 'Islamic scholars preserved Aristotle' myth is handy for racists who like to draw a hard ethnic boundary between late mediaeval (and modern) Greek-speaking people, and ancient Greek-speaking people.
  2. It's a STEM-lord thing. First: it neglects the fact that only philosophical and medical texts were disseminated to western Europe in this way. There are no mediaeval Arabic copies of the Iliad. And second: it has the effect of treating modern humanities scholarship as worthless. Modern editions of Aristotle are made by modern scholars, not by mediaeval Arabs, and they rely on Greek manuscripts, not Arabic ones. The myth silences what modern scholars actually do. It sustains the stereotype that people working in the humanitites just spend their time reading old books or listening to classical music -- something that a certain prominent public face of modern astronomy claimed a few years back.

Just as an example, here's a mediaeval manuscript of Aristotle's On sleep. It was made in the Greek-speaking world in the 11th century, then brought westward in the 15th century. It's now housed in the Apostolic Library at the Vatican. There are tens of thousands of these things, and none of them were made by Islamic scholars.

We can value mediaeval Islamic scholarship for what it was, and its immense contribution to the development of human knowledge, without obliterating the work done by other groups. I hope a specialist can come along to answer the main part of your question. I can at least say that while mediaeval Islamic scholars were very interested in Greek science and medicine, they were almost completely uninterested in literary works. If you want to find out more about how ancient Greek texts actually survived -- not this junk -- I wrote a piece on this a couple of months ago, but there are plenty of other good sources out there.