Medieval Muslims feared Christian translators would steal credit for Arabic learning
Evidence
Ibn ‘Abdun, a market inspector in Seville writing around the year 1100, warned his fellow Muslims against the selling of Arabic books to Jews and Christians, because, he claimed, they translated those books and then claimed their authorship as their own. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 58
Categorization
- XREF: The inversion of the usual narrative — here the Hebrew/Arabic tradition fears Latin appropriation — connects to all Irwin’s chapters on how European Orientalism borrowed while denying its sources.
Related
- Arabic-sounding Spanish translations signaled authenticity to Morisco readers. (similarity 0.81)
- Medieval Europeans could not distinguish the Qur’an from other Islamic books. (similarity 0.80)
- Arabic literacy forced Moriscos to choose between revealing knowledge and risking death (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Christian apologists explained Arab scientific achievement as stolen Latin learning (similarity 0.79)
- Early European translations of Islamic texts ignored most major source works besides the Quran (similarity 0.78)
- Medieval Christians claimed the Qur’an was partly invented by forced Jewish and Christian helpers. (similarity 0.78)