27 June 2025

We have students living in houses on either side of us. Recently, the tenancies  changed hands I met one household over the garden wall but I went to see the other. I spoke to one of the students. He was studying Arabic which must be one of the most important subjects especially if you also study international relations.

Although we sometimes refer to the period of history from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the turn of the first millennium the ‘Dark Ages’, it isn’t true that darkness fell upon the whole world. Scholarship thrived not least amongst Arabic speaking Muslims.

In the fourth century BC, Euclid produced his ‘Elements’. This is his famous thirteen volume book of geometry which in one form or another constituted the mathematics curriculum in the United Kingdom right up until the 1960s.

Euclid wrote his ‘Elements’ in Greek. During the ascendancy of Islam, lots of Greek texts were translated into Arabic. Difficult though it is to believe, the Greek texts were lost during this Dark Ages in the West but the Arabic translations were preserved.

In the twelfth century, a monk called Adelhard who came from Bath travelled across Europe to the Middle East. On his travels, he learnt Arabic and translated Arabic texts into Latin. One of these was Euclid’s ‘Elements’ which had never been translated into Latin before.

In this way, Adelhard brought back the ancient Greek text and its brilliant mathematics to Europe. When  we are so immersed in potential warfare between Islamic countries and countries of predominantly Christian culture, it is salutary to remind ourselves of the debt we owe our Arabic brothers and sisters!