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1 August 2010
Did ancient Hellenic Civilisation come to the West via the Islamic world?
One of the strangest features of the West at the moment is the unabashed eagerness of its dominant leftist class to put Western Civilization in the criminal dock and find it guilty of all manner of crimes. Their self-loathing, as I have remarked previously, is unfathomable - at least for me. I do not expect an early explanation of this bizarre psychopathology because often those capable in the relevant discipline are forelock-tugging members of the Left - or keep their mouths shut for reasons of career preservation.
Proof of the bizarre nature of this turn of mind is especially evident in the growth in academia of Islamophilia, precisely following the 2001 Islamic attack on New York. In this meticulously planned attack, the terrorists crossed boundaries into a level of barbarism that nobody in the West could have imagined. At least not then. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has since given us poignant lessons in their nightmarish brand of barbarism by publicly hacking off the heads of civilian hostages.
One of the pet assertions of the academic Islamophiles is that Islamic Civilization bequeathed its great learning to the bigoted peasants of Europe in the late Middle Ages. The treasures of classical Greece came to the Middle Ages from the Islamic World. As in just about every case of cultural self-loathing in the West, there is another side to the story, one that can be prosecuted vigorously with argument and substantial evidence. Attached is a review of a book by a French historian, Sylvain Gouguenheim: Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chretienne ( Seuil, 2008). [Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: the Greek Roots of Christian Europe].
This review appeared in the July issue of the Annals.
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Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com
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