ABSTRACT
Islam was not only a great creative upsurge, but a spiritual melting-pot, the more effective because it was so much more tolerant than the Christian West of wide varieties of religious views, including Christians and Jews. The growth of Christian theology was regulated by Church Councils; the Arabs of the Muslim faith were subject to no comparable authority. Ali Mansur al-Hukim’s rule marked an exception; from his succession in 996 he persecuted Christians and Jews. But tolerance and intellectual receptiveness were very general, and medieval Islam awakened and kept alive a knowledge of Greek philosophy based on texts which the West, and even the Byzantines, had lost or put out of sight and forgotten. There was as much intellectual curiosity and enterprise as in the Europe of the Renaissance; and Islam was less bound than Europe by its own past.
