Credit: Express Tribune:
The Dark Ages is the period Europe spent in ignorance of Greek knowledge.
How did Europe get out of this period? We saw last week — in my oped titled “A brief history of modernity” published in this newspaper on March 18 — how the foundations of modernity came about through a burst of activity in Greece starting around 500 BC.
But two aspects are missing from this sequence, which says that the Renaissance in 16th century Europe renewed Europe’s bond with the Greeks and produced the modern world.
Indian director and writer Saeed Akhtar Mirza brings our attention to them in his book, The Monk, the Moor & Moses Ben Jalloun.
The first aspect is the manner in which this lost knowledge was retrieved. If Greek language had been forgotten in Europe, how did the church scholars read Aristotle? The answer is that for a couple of centuries, Muslims and Christian Arabs were the greatest minds in Europe. They had translated all of Aristotle and all of Plato into Arabic. When Europe was going through its Dark Ages it was the Muslims who kept the flame of knowledge burning.