ABSTRACT
The Islamic West – that is, Andalusia (Muslim Iberia) and the Maghrib (western North Africa) – felt a cultural lag familiar to regions remote from the notional centres of economic and social influence. Umayyad dynasts, escaping the ‘Abbāsid onslaught that destroyed their house in the East in the mid second/eighth century, flourished in Spain until the fifth/eleventh. Translation of Greek scientific works into Arabic, which had preceded the birth of Islamic philosophy in Baghdad in the third/ninth century, continued in Cordova, with the rendering, for example, of a brilliantly illustrated Greek manuscript of Dioscorides’ Materia medica in 340/951. The original was a gift from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII to the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (fourth/tenth century), whose Jewish vizier Ḥasday ibn Shaprūṭ (905–75), a scholar, linguist and physician as well as a statesman, personally oversaw translation and other learned activity under the auspices of the court. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s son al-Ḥakam II (ruled 350/961–366/976) founded seven schools in Cordova endowed with stipends for indigent scholars and amassed a library of some 400,000 volumes. But most of the books were gathered by his agents in the East; and many, especially in logic and astronomy, were burnt by order of the Caliph Hishām (ruled 366/976–399/1009), during a popular reaction against “the ancient learning”.
