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Originally Posted by Archaea
Very true. Most of my readings leave me to believe that Islam preserved Classical culture, refined some aspects and through Judaism transmitted it to Rome.
It's interesting how things go from East to West to East to West. Which is the best of those books? Perhaps one of those books could be our Book of the Month.
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You must mean Rome/Rennaisance. Of course Islam followed the fall of ancient Rome. In fact it filled the vacuum left by the fall of Rome and more. By 732 the Caliph in Damascus governed a monolithic empire that stretched from Spain to Thailand, and was threatening conquest of France. Byzantium was reduced to practically a city state, an island of Christianity in a sea of Islam. Islam absorbed the most civilized cities in the world and translated many of the greatest and most important books from Greek (mostly) and Latin into Arabic, which, as described in this article, were in turn translated into European languages, beginning with Castillian and French, after the fall of Cordoba. It is a great story of restored truth. The Umayyad empire was the last of the ancient empires. Later, as the empire started to fragment, the Umayyad caliph fled to Cordoba where he set up a kingdom that lasted 300 years, which was critical for Europe's future.
I think the Cross and the Crescent sounds the most interesting of these. In fact, I'm going to pick it up. It's very short, I see. 183 pp.