The founders of what has become the European Union used to stress the ‘Christian’ identity of Europe. The tendency to ignore the complexity of Europe’s religious and cultural heritage, particularly the Islamic dimension, has deep roots. The Jewish dimension has become recognised, often through the vague term ‘Judaeo-Christian’; the Islamic dimension has more recently begun to attract historians, across the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans and Spain. Elizabeth Drayson, then, is not the first to challenge the emphasis on Europe’s Christian history. Jim al-Khalili’s Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science (2010) described how discoveries in the Arab world and Persia, including the translation of classical texts otherwise lost to humanity, laid the basis for scientific knowledge in medieval Europe. Drayson has adopted a longer perspective than others, however. 

The book’s subtitle, ‘Islam and the Forging of Europe’, implies that the religion of Islam played a fundamental role in the spread of Arabic science. This is not quite the argument that Drayson makes. As she states, the early caliphs were strongly interested in the recovery of classical knowledge, accessible in Greek and Syriac manuscripts. As much as Byzantium, the early Islamic empires can be seen as successors of ancient Greece and Rome. Abd al-Rahman III, the tenth-century caliph of Córdoba, was intrigued by the medical and botanical data provided by the ancient Greek author Dioscorides. With the help of his Jewish counsellor Hasdai ibn Shaprut, he obtained a copy of his work from Constantinople and had it translated. In later centuries, the Christian rulers of Castile also produced translations of key scientific texts, which sometimes migrated from Greek into Syriac into Arabic into Castilian Spanish into Latin.

Muslim-ruled Spain played a key role in the transmission of knowledge, and Drayson devotes about half the book to the country. Muslim armies invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711, though there is some doubt about how many of the invaders (especially among the Berber majority) were Muslim in a meaningful