The enlargement of knowledge, though forcing upon Arabic science a
conviction of Ptolemy's mistake in over-extending the limits of the
world known to him, only led to the invention of a scholastic
distinction between the real and the traditional East and West, while
the confusion was made perfect by the travestied history always so
popular among Orientals. The "Gades of Alexander and Hercules," the
farthest points east and west, were named after the mythical conquests
of the real Iskander and the mythical hero of Greeks and Phoenicians.
Arim in the middle, with the pillars of Hercules and Alexander, and the
north and south poles at equal distance from it--the centre and the four
corners of the world as neatly fixed as geometry could define--this was
the map, first of the Arabs, and then of their Christian scholars.
To form any idea of the complete spell thus cast over thought both in
Islam and Christendom, we may look at the words of European scholars of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living far from Islam, long after
its intellectual glory had begun to decay, and at a time when Christian
scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position. Gerard of
Cremona and Adelard of Bath (the translator of the great Arabic
geographer, Mohammed Al-Kharizmy) in the twelfth century, Roger Bacon
and Albertus Magnus in the later thirteenth, are all as clear about
their geographical postulates as about their theological or ethical
rules.
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