*Ø* Blogmanac | An identity forged out of many
By Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times
"In the first great work of what we would now recognise as the English language, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one of the characters is a doctor. To establish his credentials, Chaucer tells us that
'Wel knew he the olde Esculapius,
And Deiscorides, and eek Rufus,
Old Ypocras, Haly and Galien,
Serapion, Razis and Avicen.'
"These are the names that anyone familiar with medical science in the 14th century would be expected to recognise. None of them is Christian. The first six are figures from Greek and Roman civilisation. The last three, the most modern figures for Chaucer's contemporaries, are from the medieval Islamic world: Ibn Sarabi-yun or Serapion as he was known to Europe, a Syriac physician of the 9th century; Razis, the great Arab clinician of the early 10th century, and Avicenna, as most Europeans called him, referring to Ibn Sina, whose early 11th-century medical encyclopaedia was the most important summation of medical knowledge.
"If Chaucer wrote his verses on paper, he would almost certainly have been aware that he was using a technology that came to his little backwater in the Atlantic from the Islamic world. Paper was a Chinese invention, but it entered the Arab world through Samarkand and then came to Europe through Moorish Spain. The word 'ream' which we still use for a sheaf of paper comes from the Arabic rizma.
"It seems to me that Chaucer and any other educated European in the late middle ages would have been rather surprised to learn from the Connacht Ulster MEP Dana Rosemary Scallon on 'Morning Ireland' [last week] that the Christian nature of European civilisation is a 'historical fact'.
"That Christianity was a huge element of their culture would, of course, have been obvious, but the notion that European culture, civility and learning were utterly bound up in Christianity would have seemed quite bizarre. Without the pagan Greeks, the pagan Romans and the Islamic Arabs, literate Europeans would have felt themselves mired in ignorance.
"This is not an abstract reflection. The EU's constitution is being drawn up in a context where the notion of an endless clash of civilisations between the West and Islam has become fashionable. In this context, the demand that the EU constitution should explicitly pay homage to the Christian nature of Europe's heritage is not innocent. Two years ago, the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told us that Western civilisation is superior to Islam and therefore would triumph over it.
"The demand that, in Dana's words, the constitution should insist that 'the Christian heritage is our identity' is part of this mind-set. It is not about respecting religion, but about drawing lines between the West and the rest.
"The irony is that Europe became dominant in the first place precisely because it didn't draw these lines. It took the classical heritage of Greek learning that had been preserved by Arab scholars, reintegrated it into European culture and created the Renaissance. It raided the Islamic world for the intellectual tools with which modernity was forged ..."
Continue HERE
By Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times
"In the first great work of what we would now recognise as the English language, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one of the characters is a doctor. To establish his credentials, Chaucer tells us that
And Deiscorides, and eek Rufus,
Old Ypocras, Haly and Galien,
Serapion, Razis and Avicen.'
"These are the names that anyone familiar with medical science in the 14th century would be expected to recognise. None of them is Christian. The first six are figures from Greek and Roman civilisation. The last three, the most modern figures for Chaucer's contemporaries, are from the medieval Islamic world: Ibn Sarabi-yun or Serapion as he was known to Europe, a Syriac physician of the 9th century; Razis, the great Arab clinician of the early 10th century, and Avicenna, as most Europeans called him, referring to Ibn Sina, whose early 11th-century medical encyclopaedia was the most important summation of medical knowledge.
"If Chaucer wrote his verses on paper, he would almost certainly have been aware that he was using a technology that came to his little backwater in the Atlantic from the Islamic world. Paper was a Chinese invention, but it entered the Arab world through Samarkand and then came to Europe through Moorish Spain. The word 'ream' which we still use for a sheaf of paper comes from the Arabic rizma.
"It seems to me that Chaucer and any other educated European in the late middle ages would have been rather surprised to learn from the Connacht Ulster MEP Dana Rosemary Scallon on 'Morning Ireland' [last week] that the Christian nature of European civilisation is a 'historical fact'.
"That Christianity was a huge element of their culture would, of course, have been obvious, but the notion that European culture, civility and learning were utterly bound up in Christianity would have seemed quite bizarre. Without the pagan Greeks, the pagan Romans and the Islamic Arabs, literate Europeans would have felt themselves mired in ignorance.
"This is not an abstract reflection. The EU's constitution is being drawn up in a context where the notion of an endless clash of civilisations between the West and Islam has become fashionable. In this context, the demand that the EU constitution should explicitly pay homage to the Christian nature of Europe's heritage is not innocent. Two years ago, the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told us that Western civilisation is superior to Islam and therefore would triumph over it.
"The demand that, in Dana's words, the constitution should insist that 'the Christian heritage is our identity' is part of this mind-set. It is not about respecting religion, but about drawing lines between the West and the rest.
"The irony is that Europe became dominant in the first place precisely because it didn't draw these lines. It took the classical heritage of Greek learning that had been preserved by Arab scholars, reintegrated it into European culture and created the Renaissance. It raided the Islamic world for the intellectual tools with which modernity was forged ..."
Continue HERE
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