Arab Civilization as an Important Precondition to the Renaissance

Authors

  • Badri Belkania Free University of Tbilisi
  • Irina Matchavariani Free University of Tbilisi

Keywords:

Golden Age, Renaissance, Science, Philosophy, Islamic

Abstract

After producing mankind’s achievements during the antiquity, science and philosophy were forgotten in the middle ages’ Europe and were remembered only after the centuries. By that time, Islamic civilization had already made big steps towards scientific development and new discoveries. It is known that science, literature, art, and philosophy need “leisure time” –  a free time when a person doesn’t need to think about the satisfaction of simple materialistic needs, a luxury which was absent in the medieval period Europe. Although, things were different in the Islamic world, where, in the period between 8th and 13th centuries, even caliphs and nobles were interested in scientific achievements and were providing every condition for researchers of that time to do their job without disturbing factors and without wasting time on thinking about existential issues.

This brought about the “Golden Age” of Islamic Civilization: a period when astonishing progress was achieved in mathematics, geometry, natural science, medicine, sociology, and philosophy.

This “Golden Age” was by no means an indecent process without consequences. It served as a predecessor of the European Renaissance: both western and eastern scholars confirm the influence of the Islamic Golden Age on the Renaissance ways of thinking: Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, Al Kindi, Ibn Khaldoun: Europeans learned a lot from them. That’s why it seems right to study Renaissance and the Islamic Golden Age as overlapping phenomena. This article serves exactly this purpose.

Published

2019-12-03

How to Cite

Belkania, Badri, and Irina Matchavariani. 2019. “Arab Civilization As an Important Precondition to the Renaissance”. Free University Journal of Asian Studies, no. 1 (December). Tbilisi. https://journals.org.ge/index.php/asianstudies/article/view/18.

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Section

ARTICLES