The Influence of Aristotle.

While the Latin West was moving toward the triumph of scholasticism, other important developments were occurring in the territories under Islamic rule. Within a century of the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad, his followers had conquered all of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula (consisting of modern Spain and Portugal), which they called al-Andalus. Along with other spoils of conquest, the entire corpus of Aristotle's writings, minus the Politics, had fallen into their hands. Translated into Arabic with the help of Syrian Christians over a period of a century and a half (c. 750–900), Aristotle, virtually unknown at the time to the Latins, was to become, as it were, the "house philosopher" of the Muslim world. Philosophy for Muslim thinkers primarily consisted of comments on the writings of the pagan...