Christian scholars in the Arab world

While it is true that Muslim scholars (whether Arab, Persian, or otherwise), helped preserve many of the classical Greek texts, they did not do so by translating them. In fact Muslim scholars could not translate them. The whole reason for the translation of Greek texts into Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age was not for the purpose of preserving them. It was because Muslim scholars could not read Greek or Latin, and were therefore totally unable to understand the texts they had acquired unless they were translated.

Franz Rosenthal, who was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic at Yale University, noted that the famous ninth and tenth century Muslim commentators on the Greek texts, did not actually know how to read or write either Greek or Syriac. [23] Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich, writes "When philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes read Aristotle, it was never in Greek - a language of which they were ignorant". [24]

Since they could not read the Greek texts themselves, Muslim scholars paid Christian and Jewish scholars to translate these works into Arabic for them. Unlike the Muslim scholars for whom they were translating, Christian and Jewish scholars were typically literate not only in their native language but also in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, and sometimes in additional languages such as Hebrew or Syriac.

The Christian scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi was fluent in Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic, and was known by his Arab contemporaries as the Sheikh of Translators. As head of the famous House of Wisdom, the famous library and education center in Persian Baghdad, it was this Christian scholar who led the Translation Movement of the Islamic Golden Age.

The Christians understood not only the language but the philosophical background of the Greek texts. Adamson comments quote "These Christians could offer expertise in the relevant language, and also the intellectual background needed to understand what was going on in a work like Aristotle's Categories or On the Soul". [25]

Historian of philosophy Cristina D'ancona likewise says "Even under the ‘Abb¯asid rule, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the Christians of Syria were the unexcelled masters of Aristotelian logic". [26] In another work, Peter Adamson likewise writes "when Muslim aristocrats decided to have Greek science and philosophy translated into Arabic, it was to Christians that they turned".

Similarly, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies Bernard Lewis wrote that the medieval Muslims found translators "among their Christian or Jewish subjects, or among converts from those religions". [26] Franz Rosenthal commented "Almost all translators were Christians of various churches". [27]

This is confirmed by Doctor Mohammad Hannan Hassan, a specialist in Islamic civilization, who writes that out of 44 translators listed by a prominent Arab biographer of the Islamic Golden Age, "twenty-eight (64%) are Christians, two are Sabians, one is a Jew, none are Muslims, and thirteen (29.5%) are unknown", continuing "This study supports Rosenthal's assertion that almost all translators from Greek and Syriac into Arabic were Christians belonging to various churches". [28]

Transmission of Greek classics to Western scholars via Arabic

As I noted previously, during the Twelfth Century Renaissance, Western scholars were recovering the classical intellectual tradition from the Greek, not via the Arabic. For example, by the end of the twelfth century Western scholars had recovered almost all of Aristotle from Greek texts transported from the East.[29]

Copleston notes that Aristotle's work De Anima was translated from the Greek in 1215, whereas the translation from Arabic was not made until later. [30] Copleston lists three other works by Aristotle, Physica, De Generatione et Corruptione, and Politica, which were translated directly from Greek by Western scholars, before the Arabic was available. [31]

He concludes "modern investigation has shown that translations from the Greek generally preceded translations from the Arabic", adding that "even when the original translation from the Greek was incomplete, the Arabic-Latin version soon had to give place to a new and better translation from the Greek".[32]

Maria Mavroudi, professor of history at the University of California Berkeley, likewise says that "the entire Aristotelian corpus reached the Latin schools from Greek before it did from Arabic".[33] She notes only three exceptions; Aristotle's work On the Heavens, and some parts of two other works, Meteorology and Zoology.

Although Arabic works began to become available in the West during the twelfth century, most of the texts were philosophical rather than scientific or mathematical, nearly all of them were commentaries on Aristotle or other subjects, rather than actual translations of Aristotle and other Greek classics, and some of them were not written by Muslim scholars at all. This didn't change until the last quarter of the twelfth century.

Very few of the Greek texts were actually returned to the West via the Arabic translations. Although almost all of the Aristotelian corpus was available to Muslim scholars by the end of the tenth century, hardly any of it was transferred to the West through Arabic; Western scholars recovered almost all of it themselves, through Greek texts.

French philosopher and medievalist Jean Jolivet noted that some works by Euclid and Ptolemy were recovered via the Arabic translations. Nevertheless, he also wrote that "most of the works of Aristotle, however, were translated directly from the Greek, and only exceptionally by way of an Arabic intermediary".[34]

Copleston likewise comments that "it is a mistake to imagine that the Latin Scholastics were entirely dependent on translations from Arabic or even that translation from the Arabic always preceded translation from the Greek".[35]

Professor and historian of science Edward Grant also makes the point that "Of the translations of Aristotle's works, those made directly from Greek were far more numerous than those made from Arabic".[36]

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[23] Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.

[24] Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2016), 22.

[25] Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2016), 22-23.

[26] Cristina D’Ancona, “Greek into Arabic: Neoplatonism in Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 20.

[26] Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York; London: W.W. Norton, 2001), 8.

[27] Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.

[28] Mohammad Hannan Hassan, “Where Were the Jews in the Development of Sciences in Medieval Islam? A Quantitative Analysis of Two Medieval Muslim Biographical Notices,” Hebrew Union College Annual 81 (2010): 113-114.

[29] Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Arthur Hilary Armstrong (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68.

[30] "The De Anima was translated from the Greek before 1215, the translation from the Arabic by Michael Scot being somewhat later.", Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (A&C Black, 1999), 207.

[31] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (A&C Black, 1999), 207.

[32] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (A&C Black, 1999), 207-208.

[33] Maria Mavroudi, “Translations from Greek into Latin and Arabic during the Middle Ages: Searching for the Classical Tradition,” Speculum 90.1 (2015): 54

[34] Jean Jolivet, “The Arabic inheritance,” in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116.

[35] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (A&C Black, 1999), 206.

[36] Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26.

How accurate is the idea that literate Christians like monks and priests were impressed/influenced enough by classical texts of Greece and Rome to preserve them in monasteries and to copy them repeatedly so they continued to exist?

Extremely accurate.

Was this a widespread practice?

Yes. It occurred pretty much wherever there were Christians.

Or, was the role of the Byzantine Empire and the Arab civilization far more important than the monasteries of Western Europe?

The Byzantine Empire was very valuable. The Arab civilizations contributed nothing to the translation of the texts, and very little to their transmission to the West, though they contributed greatly to their preservation in the Arab world (though not in the West), and to their interpretation. I'll explain this in stages further down in this post.

Finally, where does current scholarship stand on the "darkness" of the Middle ages?

The general consensus is that the "darkness" of the medieval era was almost completely a myth invented during the Renaissance, and developed further in the Early Modern period.

Now I'll provide the evidence for my previous comments, describing in detail the contributions of Christian scholars in preserving the Greek intellectual tradition. I will need to do this in subsequent posts. Those posts will use much of the material I have written on Medium, in particular here, and here.