아랍어-라틴어 번역 운동이 유럽의 르네상스에 미친 영향

Abstract

Islam was born in the first half of the seventh century. Since then the Muslims began to collect and synthesize the advanced knowledge gained from the ancient Greek, Persian and Indian civilizations. And this led to the translation movement, which reached its zenith during the Abbasid Caliphate(750-1258). Especially Al-Ma'mun of Baghdad, the seventh and probably the greatest Abbasid caliph(813-833 reign) founded Bayt al-Hikma(House of Wisdom), a translation center. He invited, housed, and supported Jewish and Christian scholars to translate ancient Greek manuscripts into Arabic. During his reign in the ninth century hundreds of manuscripts were translated from Greek into Arabic. The twelfth century, to the Europeans, was the great period of translation and absorption from the Muslim world. Much of the knowledge available in Europe during the 12th century was obtained by translations from foreign languages, chiefly Arabic. The center of translation for most of the period was in Andalusia and Sicily. During 12-13th centuries many European scholars, who felt the need for new deeper knowledge, turned their attentions to Arabic sources. And it is worth mentioning that the Latin-Arabic translations were well planned and organized at the behest of churchmen and government officials. The Arabic-Latin translation movement brought a lot of changes in Western Europe's intellectual environment. The translations shocked Europe out of its long slumber and ignited the explosive development of the West. During the 13th century the new knowledge from the Islamic world spread among the universities in major European cities like Paris, Oxford and Bologna. The European scholars could access nature and human beings from the new perspective by dint of the Arabic knowledge. And this helped Europeans to pave the way for the Renaissance.