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Frank
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A lot of those ancient Greek texts were lost to the West because of the Muslim conquest of the Greek speaking Eastern Roman empire. The translators themelves were not Arabs either, but conquered Christiand and Jews who learned Arabic. Arabs did not learn Greek or Latin. A great influx of Greek texts to the West happened with the fall of Byzantium in 1453 when fleeing Greek scholars brought the texts to The West. Some ancient texts were discovered in Western European monastery libraries, totally unrelated to any Muslim conquest of the East or of Spain. Petrarch, for example, discovered Cicero's letters in the library of Verona. The Irish monastic tradition of copying ancient texts wax crucial for saving many of the works, and for bringing them back to continent through the network of monasteries and their libraries and scriptoria. Intellectual interaction between Arabs and the Latin West was minimal to non-existent, with very few isolated exemptions. In any case, much of what is touted as Muslim contribution to learning is like the plundering of Greek, Persian, Indian libraries and knowledge. Arabic numerals, for example, are in fact Indian numerals. Muslims were only interested in texts that supported the Koranic "revelations". This is why they didn't translate Homer, Herodotus, comedies, tragedies, poems from ancient sources.
No positive Islamic influence on the West has existed and certainly none exists now.
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