2. HOLDING SACRED THAT WHICH IS NOT SACRED

2. Holding Sacred that which is not Sacred ~ 98 ~ the Romans were not interested in it. “Social pressures, political persecution and the antiintellectual bias of the church Fathers drove the few remaining Greek scientists and philosophers to the East. There they ultimately found a welcome when the rise of Islam in the seventh century stimulated interest in scientific and philosophic subjects. Most of the important Greek scientific texts were preserved in Arabic translations. Although the Arabs did not alter the foundations of Greek science, they made several important contributions within its general framework, and when the interest in Greek learning revived in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholars turned to Islamic Spain for the scientific texts. A spate of translations (from Arabic into Latin) resulted in the revival of science in the west ... scientists of the Middle Ages reached high levels of sophistication and prepared the ground for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”49 Moseoleban asserts in his book, Arab Civilization, that Arab sciences reached Europe not through the crusades, but by way of Andalusia, Sicily and Italy.