Replies

Actually, during the barbarian (Germanic tribes) invasions, many of the original Classical manuscripts existing in Europe had simply been destroyed or lost, not “purged.” The Classical works were still available in Byzantium, but they were lost during the Islamic invasions starting shortly after Mohammed’s invention of his cult in the 7th century.

One of the bright lights in the Dark Ages was (pre-Islamic) Spain, where a monk, St. Isidore of Sevilla, wrote a compendium of “all human knowledge” in the 7th century, including quotes from Aristotle, although most of the original works of the Classical thinkers were lost by that time.

One of the reasons that the Muslims always boast about Islamic Spain is that Spain, as Rome’s closest and most important colony, actually had still retained seats of learning at the time of the Muslim invasions in the 8th century; the Muslims simply took these over. Since most of the original Muslim rulers of Spain were recently Islamicized peoples from places such as Syria and Persia, rather than ignorant Arabs, they still retained remnants of their learned past (the pre-Islamic Persians were particularly noted for astronomy) and were able to take advantage of the Christian and Jewish scholars already working in Southern Spain.

Of course, as Islam consolidated, it became more and more hostile to learning, since Islam is fundamentally anti-rational at its core.