40 A Short History of the Middle East

Central Spain to die borders of Egypt. Both Berber dynasties
were rigidly orthodox in matters of Muslim thought, and accord-
ing to a fairly reliable tradition even had the writings of the great
Ghazzali, the 'restorer of the faith', publicly burned in the market-
place of Cordoba. While, however, they imposed the severest
orthodoxy on the mass of the people, they did not interfere with
the speculations of the Muslim philosophers, provided that these
did not reach the multitude and disturb their faith. Thus twelfth-
century Spain, ruled by religious conservatives, was yet the home
of two outstanding Arabic philosophers, Ibn Bajja (Avempace)
and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the latter of whom asserted that the
Qur'an, being but an imperfect presentation of truths which might
be learnt more completely and correctly from Aristotle, was a dis-
cipline fit only for the masses whose intelligence neither desired nor
was capable of philosophical reasoning. But while the Moorish
rulers tolerated such heresy, so long as it did not reach the people,
they vigorously persecuted the many thousands of Christians and
Jews in their Spanish province, and periodically expelled to the
Christian North all who refused conversion to Islam. The twelfth
century thus marked the beginning of the decline of scholarship in
Muslim Spain. The refugees took north with them their advanced
culture, especially to the kingdom of Toledo, which had been cap-
tured by the Christians in 1085. Here Archbishop Raymond set
up early in the twelfth century a college for the translation of
Arabic philosophy and science, which flourished for 150 years and
attracted scholars from all parts of Europe, including Britain.1
The following century, the thirteenth, was the great period of
translation from Arabic into Latin. It was encouraged notably by
Alfonso the Wise of Castile, who was interested in philosophy and
astronomy, and had two Jews translate an Arabic record of planet-
ary movements which was still authoritative enough to be con-
sulted by Galileo and Kepler in the seventeenth century. It was
through such translations that in the following centuries the cream
of Arabic scholarship, the legacy of their Greek and oriental fore-
runners and the original Muslim contribution, was passed on to the
rising universities of the'West.

1 An attractive and imaginative picture of the procedure followed by these
scholars, and the linguistic and interpretative difficulties they encountered, is
given by Chas. and Dorothy Singer, in The Legacy of Israel, 204 ff.