In al-Andalus (Iberia), in the eleventh century of the Christian era, Ibn ‘Abdun warned his fellow Muslims about the activities of the translators: ‘One should not sell scientific books to Jews or Christians ... since they translate these scientific books, attributing authorship to their own bishops and coreligionists when they are actually Muslim works’.^[16] Since Ibn ‘Abdun’s time, a minority tradition of Western scholarship (including Bacon, Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon and Priestley) has sought to rectify the suppression of Europe’s scientific, philosophical and cultural debt to the Islamic or Arab-speaking world, a debt which was incurred in al-Andalus.^[17] The background to the Andalusian achievement can be briefly outlined.^[18] In the wake of the division of the old Roman Empire into Eastern and Western blocs that were comparatively watertight (Sicily, extending up to Naples, being an exception), a rough distribution of the cultural inheritance of classical antiquity obtained whereby, while the Eastern (Byzantine) empire maintained the scientific, philosophical, literary and cultural legacy of Greece, the Western (or ‘European’) empire found itself the repository of the relatively reduced inheritance of the Latin world.^[19] During the momentous century or so following Muhammad’s death, Islam spread outwards from the land of its origins with an unstoppable vitality that exceeded even that of imperial Rome. In the process, most of Byzantium and Sassanian Persia were taken over and their Greek philosophical and scientific learning (though not the poetry and literature)^[20] translated into Arabic, usually from the Syriac or other Byzantine language into which it had earlier been translated but sometimes from the original Greek. Over the next century or so, this learning was subject to the vicissitudes of survival under the aggressively militaristic regime of the Ummayyad Caliphate, but it managed to live on in the eastern outposts of the Islamic empire, particularly in exiled Nestorian centres of learning in eastern Persia, where it was augmented with scientific (especially astronomical) and mathematical knowledge emanating from India.^[21] With the ascendancy of the ‘Abassid Caliphate and the shifting of the political centre of the Islamic world to Baghdad, science and philosophy were actively encouraged and magnificent libraries assembled. The exiled legacy of ancient Greece was brought to the centre of Islamic culture, where, among other things, it was enlisted to buttress Islam’s dialogic armature in response to disruptive theological problems, concerning revelation, monotheism, predestination and the like, which had arisen through contact with the different faiths of the conquered peoples. To secure key elements of the Islamic tradition which were still being transmitted orally, the ‘Abassid caliphs sponsored the wholesale commitment of knowledge (including the Qur’an) to Arabic script, in the course of which project, during the eighth and ninth centuries of the Christian era, most of the Greek philosophical and scientific sources available today were translated into Arabic.^[22]

Somewhat prior to these latter developments – in the early eighth century A.D. – and on the north-western frontier of the Ummayyad empire, Visigothic Andalusia was conquered in a series of expeditionary raids carried out by combined forces of Arabs and Berbers and brought under the administrative control of Qayrawan, the regional headquarters of the African segment of the empire, situated in modern Tunisia. Though the Berbers had adopted Islam, they maintained cultural and linguistic separateness and continually agitated against the overlordship of the Arab minority. This antagonism continued into al-Andalus, so that, when the ‘Abassids expelled the Ummayyad caliph ‘Abd ar-Rahman and his followers from Damascus in 750 A.D. and moved the capital to Baghdad, the fugitive ar-Rahman sought allies amongst the disaffected Berbers, at first in Africa but finally and successfully in al-Andalus, where he established his family dynasty from Cordoba in 755 A.D.

Despite the administrative and political dividedness of the Islamic world, a comparatively high degree of logistical cohesion was maintained. Relegated to provincial status in the far west, the Ummayyad sultans^[23] in Cordoba displayed an attitude toward science and learning which was markedly different from that which had characterised their predecessors in the Damascus Caliphate. They patronised the importation of intellectual and scientific (especially medical) knowledge from the eastern centre and attracted a number of polyglot Jewish intellectuals from Mesopotamia and elsewhere. In its third century (i.e. during the 10th century A.D.), the Ummayyad dynasty in al-Andalus produced two rulers, ‘Abd ar-Rahman III and al-Hakam II, who successively presided over a period of extraordinarily fruitful interchange and collaboration between Muslim, Jewish and Christian intellectuals, all writing in Arabic, in Cordoba, Toledo, Seville, Granada and other centres. By this stage, whatever a scholar’s religion, the language of scholarship was definitively Arabic, and Muslim faith had no necessary connection to Arab ethnicity. In following centuries, the work of translation having been effectively completed, most of the greatest developers of the Hellenic tradition (Ibn Rushd [Averroës], Ibn Sinha [Avicenna] and Ibn Maymun [Maimonides] to cite but three) took their Aristotle, their Galen and their Neoplatonism from Arabic sources and did not even know Greek. The Greek only lived in the Arabic.^[24]

This was the world of learning that became available for translation into the Latin of the Western Empire as a result of conquest – or, more specifically, of the Reconquista, the Christian jihad into al-Andalus through which an emergent Europe embarked on the Crusades. It should be stressed that ‘world’ of learning here signifies a dynamic tradition which, far from acting as an inert or neutral transmitter, creatively and critically engaged with the Greek legacy over a long period of time, extending it, changing its emphases, reshaping it and incorporating new elements from outside.^[25] The Reconquista brought about a coexistence of Latin speaking (or, at least, writing) conquerors and Arabic speaking locals, generating a requirement for dialogue and, accordingly, for translations and translators.^[26] From the thirteenth century on, translation into Latin was increasingly done directly from the Greek.^[27] Prior to this, however, from the tenth-century translations of information concerning the astrolabe to the comprehensive alienation of knowledge that fuelled the intellectual transformation that Charles Homer Haskins termed the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’,^[28] Europe (or what was to become Europe) principally derived its scientific and philosophical advancement from its exposure to the Arabic tradition. Under different circumstances, things could have been otherwise – after all, the Greek texts had theoretically been available in western Christendom all along. As Haskins again put it, however, the Latin world ‘could have got much Greek science in this way, but for the most part it did not’.^[29]

Some scholars have attributed the European Renaissance and (by implication at least) the bulk of global modernity beyond it to Islamic inspiration,^[30] while others have dismissed such claims as emanating from naive enthusiasm, Islamic conviction or both.^[31] The non-committed have occupied a surprisingly narrow stretch of middle ground.^[32] Through all this, the integrity of the Islamic Other has remained robust, since almost no-one has problematised the process whereby the substantial commonalities between Islamic and Western discourse have persistently been erased in favour of a stark and mutual contrariety (a notable exception is the work of Maria Rosa Menocal).^[33] Focusing on the commonalities linking Islam and the West is at least superficially at odds with the stress on otherness that runs through Edward Said’s Orientalism. Incommensurability does not plausibly account for the intensely specific virulence that has animated Western discourse on Islam. Islam gets under – more accurately, is already under – the skin of the West. The two have never been separate after all. Not only do we share a book, but Muslims have had the blasphemous temerity to find our Saviour deficient from within and to claim that an impostor has furnished them with the remedy. Pagans, savages or barbarians are merely ignorant; they cannot blaspheme. Nor can they frustrate the coming of universal Christianity. They are safely Other. To appreciate the intensity of Western discourse on Islam, we should recognise it as not simply a species of undifferentiated Othering, but as a quite specific suppression of sameness.^[34] This consideration further underlines the historical contingency of the convergence between European Islamophobia and Hindu communalism, whose history is not marked by this particularity of European discourse.