The Legacy of Islam

The Legacy of Islam is a companion volume to The Legacy of Greece, The Legacy of Rome, The Legacy of the Middle Ages, and The Legacy of Israel.  It seeks to give an account of those elements in the culture of Europe which are derived from the Islamic world.  Broadly speaking, the Legacies of Greece and Rome are the legacies of two homogeneous and original cultures, each emanating from a definite geographical centre.  The Legacy of the Middle Ages is the legacy of an epoch in the development of western European civilization.  The Legacy of Israel is ‘the contribution that has come to the sum of human thought from Judaism and from the Jewish view of the world’.  The Lgacy of Islam is to be understood in a different sense from any of these.  It is a provocative title, the meaning of which is only fully explained by the book itself.  The nearest parallel is the Legacy of Israel.  But whereas it is from the religion of the Jews that the complexion of the Legacy of Israel is derived, in the Legacy of Islam we do not treat of the Legacy of the religion of Muhammad qua religion: the reader will learn from this book that there is little that is peculiarly Islamic in the contributions which Occidental and Oriental Muslims have made to European culture.