ABSTRACT
The influence of Islamic philosophy, science, and culture on the rise of modern West is discussed in this chapter. Between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, European students of philosophy and science oozed into Andalusian universities, particularly the University of Cordoba, from all regions of Western Europe. Andalusia formed historically the Western frontier of the Islamic civilization with Europe and was as such a zone of contact where Christians interacted with one of the most advanced centers of Islamic learning. The fall of Cordoba to the Visigoths gave Europe access to Cordoba’s library and thus to a priceless source of philosophy, science, and literature. The chapter also examines the rise of European learning as a result of their exposure to new sciences and sheds light on the breadth and depth of the transmission of knowledge from the Muslim Spain to Western Europe and shows that contrary to the claims of many European historians, modern sciences that emerged in Europe through the eighteenth century were the outcome of centuries of labor by Muslim scientists and philosophers and have little resemblance to what European sources claim to be grounded in the Greek philosophy of the Axial Age.
