The influence of Moorish culture

I would like to answer Joseph Anthony Debono (September 9). He referred to the Myth of Arab Culture.

I am sure Mr Debono had found glory in reading the article by Robert Kilroy Silk in the Sunday Express some months ago. Mr Kilroy Silk's anti-Arab diatribe is not only offensive and stupid, it also shows a startling degree of ignorance - as Mr Debono's letter does. As a result, Mr Kilroy Silk was asked to resign as a presenter of BBC.

What have the Arabs ever done for us? The answer is zero, just to begin with.

I suggest Mr Debono take a holiday to Spain (to start with) and visit the south of that country, to Granada in the province of Andalucia, where he would see some of the most beautiful architecture in Europe. These buildings were planned, built and exquisitely decorated by the ancestors of the people he apparently thinks so inferior. He doesn't have to look hard to realise that what he sees is no myth!

It is not in Spain alone that Arab architecture has left a European mark. The pointed arch, so eagerly adopted by mediaeval builders and known today as gothic, was an idea copied from the east and brought to the west by the early crusaders. And while those religiously crazed bigots were burning and slaughtering in the holy land, Arab poets, mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers and scientists were advancing human civilisation to unprecedented peaks of sophistication.

Basically, Greek science reached Europe from the Arabs and not from Constantinople. The influence of Moorish culture was not confined to Spain. Many Christians from other countries visited the hospitals and universities of Moorish Spain to study and take home with them greater knowledge of medicine, of astronomy and of mathematics - fields of science in which, fortunately, difference of religion interposed no barriers. Among these visitors to Spain were two famous monks, Gregory of Cremona and Abelard of Bath.

The Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, which flourished for half a millennium from about AD750, was arguably the most dazzling of regimes the world had seen up to that date. Arab scholars picked up from where the Greek ancients had stopped centuries earlier and extended human understanding in virtually every field. As every schoolboy knows, the mathematical concept of zero was discovered by Arabs, when northern Europeans were still wearing horns on their helmets.

In fact, as you might be thinking, every schoolboy is probably wrong: The zero idea almost certainly came from India, but, crucially, it was first written down by an Arab.

Writing is a key part of the Arab nation's bequest to the world. Paper was introduced from China before the end of the first Christian millennium, freeing Arab writers from the costly straight-jacket of parchment and papyrus, some 300-400 years before paper reached Western Europe. The result was a torrent of poetry and prose, philosophy and scholarship, learning and entertainment. This was the era of The Thousand and One Nights and of vast public libraries.

There were astronomical observatories, pharmaceutical laboratories and medical schools. And most of these were flourishing before England's King Alfred was born.

Mr Debono might argue that these are spent glories and that the modern Arab culture is debased. More poetry than prose is published in Arabic today. The visual arts are vibrant. Music, both popular and traditional, is flourishing. Calligraphy, that most elegant of arts, continues to fascinate users of the flowing Arabic scripts. Arab cuisine - Lebanese mainly but increasingly Egyptian and other North African - is being belatedly discovered in the West. The list is endless.

For sure, the Arab world has more than its share of despotic rulers and religious bigots. But to lump everyone together under Mr Debono's puerile labels is not only false but plain daft. Cultures and their values are not only measured by historical achievement but also in terms of day-to-day living.

I have lived among Arabs in Egypt and India. They are people who are ready to laugh and they show the greatest courtesy and grace, even in the most trying and sometimes downright tragic circumstances. Indeed, the Arab propensity for laughter and friendship is one of my fondest memories of those times.

The Arab people have been traduced enough in the western world and - let's be honest - the western media. It is perhaps time we poured our collective bile over a more deserving target. Cheap, mindless, voyeuristic, shallow, nasty, lobotomised daytime TV, to take a random example.

I hope that Mr Debono comes to his senses and stops living the myth he was "educated" in. We all know what we learned at school, all the way up to higher education about our culture, that 99 per cent of the world's discoveries and progress came from the European continent or from the US. I will be very pleased to send Mr Debono papers about 1,000 years of missing history. I suggest he explores the fascinating Muslim contribution to present-day science, technology, arts and civilisation and, thus, ease him out of living the myth he is in.

To mention another thing about mathematics: The science of algebra owes much to gifted mathematicians of the Islamic era. Its very name proves the magnitude of this debt, for the name itself is Arabic, al gebr, "a binding together". Though of Greek origin, algebra was greatly expanded by Moslem mathematicians. From about 800-1,200 the Arabs evolved a more critical study of equations, giving them for the first time some element of scientific treatment. Algebra was then handed on to Europe via Spain and Sicily.

Gunpowder: The Arabs also learned from the Chinese how to make gunpowder but they put it to a use the Chinese had never conceived of. They experimented with the idea that the explosive power of gunpowder could be utilised to project a missile from an enclosed chamber. It is claimed that the first effective cannon was made in Egypt sometime in the 12th century. Made of wood bound with bands of metal, it discharged round stones. By the middle of the 15th century the Moslems had so improved the cannon that it was employed in the siege and capture of Constantinople.

Prince Charles, heir to the British monarchy, in a recent public speech at Oxford University said: "If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the straight-jacket of history, which we have inherited. The mediaeval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history".