Un libro che ci spiega, a noi europei, le altre nostre radici. Pubblicato dall’autorevole MIT Press nell’aprile 2007, ma l’argomento non scade, anzi.
Ecco qualche riga dello stesso autore, George Saliba, professore alla Columbia University su Rorotoko:
In the 12th and 13th centuries there was a massive translation movement in Europe, from Arabic into Latin. Traditionally, this is seen as the time when Europe was recapturing its own roots so to speak. It is said that the Greek texts could not be found, that’s why they were translated via Arabic.
But it is not true that those texts could not be found. They were actually found and translated directly from Greek later on, in the 15th and the 16th centuries. The question is, why did they translate them from Arabic when the same text existed in Greek?
The essence of my argument is that the European scientists used the bricks that were already formulated in the Islamic civilization to construct their very own and new science. It does not mean that the Renaissance is not a brilliant renaissance. That is indeed one of the most creative periods in history.
But note that the method of translation changed after the 14th century. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Europeans were no longer treating those Arabic texts in the same way they were treated in the medieval period. Instead of hiring translators, the European scientists learned Arabic themselves.