The West was importing from Islamdom for a reason.
From the eighth to the thirteenth century, the latter was “the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world.” Muslim scientists had made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, astronomy, and optics.
“Had there been Nobel Prizes in 1000,” argues an American historian, “they would have gone almost exclusively to Moslems.” Islam’s theologians anticipated many of the complex issues their Christian counterparts would address much later.53 Islamic cities were much cleaner and more polished than European ones. That explains why a nun in the tenth century was so impressed with Cordoba, a city in then–Muslim-ruled Spain, that she called it “
the ornament of the world.”
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The Christians who were fascinated by Muslim culture were soon dubbed by their more conservative co-religionists as Mozarab—a term that literally meant “Arab wannabe.” There were understandable reasons for this. The library in Cordoba, during the reign of Caliph al-Hakam II in the tenth century, is said to have 400,000 manuscripts, whereas the library of Charles V of France, “Charles the Wise,” who lived four centuries later, had only 900”.
