[alcuin]

> That story begins in a palace library nearly a thousand years ago, at a time when most of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness.

Laughable revisionism already thoroughly debunked by Sylvain Gouguenheim many years ago. A real shame as it makes me doubt the objectivity of the entire article.

[boomboomsubban]

I dislike invoking the idea of the "dark ages" as it's usually a misrepresentation of events. That said, Fibonacci is credited with spreading the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Western Europe, showing that at least in the area of mathematics they were in a relative darkness.

I hadn't heard of Gouguenheim but his ideas seem rather absurd. He seems to believe the Islamic golden age never occurred, and I can't find how he tries to explain where something like Liber Abbaci came from. His objectivity seems far more suspect than this piece.

[adrian_b]

Also, the Islamic Golden Age is not only about mathematics, but also about other sciences.

The chemistry progressed a lot during that time. Several preserved Arabic works contain a much improved classification of the known chemical substances, better than anything that existed before them.

That chemical classification was improved only in the 18th century, by several generations of Swedish chemists, leading eventually to the modern chemistry based on the notion of chemical elements, which was created by Lavoisier and his French colleagues, shortly before the French Revolution.

Attempting to deny the essential Arabic/Islamic contributions to the evolution of the sciences shows just ignorance or bad intentions.

[alcuin]

I don't know where you are reading about his work, but his Aristote au mont Saint-Michel isn't about his ideas or beliefs, it's about providing historical evidence of significant intellectual developments in the early middle ages as well as translations of key ancient texts in French monasteries half a century before they were alledgedly imported from the Arab world, which completely changes the narrative of knowledge transmission. That's his main thesis as far as I can recall.

[selimthegrim]

I wonder what Gouguenheim thinks about Porphyry’s Isagogy and its influence on the Arabs.

[dleslie]

I'm not sure why you were downvoted so low that I had to vouch you up; but the concept of a western intellectual dark age has well and truly been contradicted by modern scholarship.

For further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)#Mod...

[xyzzyz]

It is contradicted by some modern scholarship, but it is by far not the consensus in the field. There are many scholars who do believe that Europe entered period of civilizational and intellectual decline for a number of centuries after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The debate is very much open on the issue.