i also want to clarify a few points about the translation movement.
the translation movement is often presented as a great, benevolent thing. we're told that stupid white people forgot how to read, and the arabs saved our ass by translating everything, which saved roman civilization from collapse. then, we got it all back from arabic spain.
each of these points is a half-truth at best.
it is true that there was a massive movement to translate greek and persian sources into arabic, but the traditionalist narrative never asks two key questions:
(1) why did the muslims want to translate everything - everything - into arabic?
(2) what happened to the texts after they translated them?
the answer to the first question was to censor them and in that sense they didn't just not save greek civilization from self-ruin but came close to erasing it. when we find pre-islamic texts by key authors like euclid or plato and compare them to post-translation texts, we learn that the translation process deleted or altered large sections of the classic texts. a good portion of the classical literature that we have today comes to us in the form of vandalized translations, that were severely altered to be in line with muslim theology. if aristotle said something in the original source that the muslim clerics didn't agree with, it was deleted or even reversed in the translation.
the answer to the second question is that they burned them after they translated then because (1) the original versions were no longer to be read (the idea was to force you to read the arabic and not the greek, latin or persian) and (2) the original versions were not consistent with sunni orthodoxy. in some cases, texts were not translated at all, they were just burned.
this narrative about the muslims saving the books is consequently very misplaced. and how bad was it?
well, compare the states of classical greek, latin and persian literature in post-renaissance space. constantinople was eventually conquered by the turks, but the arabs could not get through the theodosian walls and never did. they got to sicily but never to rome and never to paris or london. however, they completely wiped out the persians.
today, we do have a concept of latin and greek classical texts that were preserved in the byzantine empire and to a lesser extent in the rump papal states that followed after 476. further, the romans were able to get out of constantinople alive. there were massive waves of refugees from greece to rome after 1452 and they brought a lot of books with them to italy. this was the true cause of the renaissance - roman back-migration to italy after the turkish conquest. it is for that reason that we do still have original copies of the texts that continued to be read in greece, absent the arabic vandalism and censorship to remove anything offensive to islam. greek sources of latin texts are always better than arabic sources when they can be found for that reason and the amount of information back translated from spanish arabic sources was consequently far less than the amount back translated from greek sources. of course, they then had the pope to deal with, too.
we have no extent classical persian writings. none. not a sentence. we have the behistun inscriptions carved into the rockface in the desert. everything else got burned. we have no trace of it anywhere, except in difficult to trace lineages from extent arabic sources. the romans did something similar when they wiped out carthage. we're told the phoenicians gave us the alphabet (and that might be somewhat untrue. it might have come from ancient greece first.), but we don't have a sentence of surviving phoenician writing. the romans destroyed everything. the only trace of it is in the form of texts translated to latin, and difficult to trace source lineages.
if the arabs had sacked constantinople would they have wiped greek literature out entirely rather than supposedly have saved it? the persian evidence suggests they likely would have.
as mentioned before, this is a consequence of a fluke of geography. the libraries of the ancient world were in hot dry places, deserts, because the texts keep longer. so, the libraries were in carthage, alexandria, damascus and babylon and not in rome or athens or paris, where they have more humid air and experience winters. rome woke up with it's libraries in the hands of foreigners who were hostile to them and aggressively vandalizing them and no way to stop it. persia never woke up at all.
there was a lesser known library in the medieval period in a distant saharan checkpoint called timbuktu. the romans explored a lot of africa but didn't move out of the desert. there's evidence of the romans settling far down the atlantic coast and romans placing military checkpoints in chad and in tanzania. there were expeditions to the african great lakes. they lost a war against nubia (modern day sudan) and didn't go further. the ancient literature talks of the italians disliking the african climate and preferring to trade with the locals. it was outside the roman sphere of influence, but they were there.
there are vague descriptions of roman scholars escaping into the desert and finding refuge in timbuktu. there's good evidence that there was a large italian population in the city.
it was destroyed like the other libraries were.
if you want a concrete takeaway from this - you are probably not an encyclopedic nerd with a photographic memory like i am - it's to be careful with authoritarian sources. history has biases. it is not always written by victors anymore, but it always seeks to play favourites. always be skeptical. always read dissenting views and take differing arguments into consideration. always be prepared to alter your perception of what is true and to expand your concept of what you were told is true.
