ABSTRACT
The first challenge arose in the Middle Ages, when Muslim theologians and philosophers were beginning to respond to and adopt the cultural heritage of ancient Greece. The hellenization of Islam was itself affected by the collapse of the Arab Islamic empire in the thirteenth century: The hellenization of Islamic thought failed to prevail beyond the epoch of High Islam and did not set deep roots. The grammatical structure of 'arabiyya has indeed hardly changed at all in centuries. The basic grammatical structures of 'arabiyya have hardly altered at all in centuries. Philosophy, within which 'arabiyya began to develop from a sacred language into a language of science, "was as dangerous in the Orient as the natural sciences in Italy after Galileo's trial.".
