United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When Amrou, the lieutenant of the Khalif Omar, conquered Egypt, and annexed it to the Saracenic Empire, he found in Alexandria a Greek grammarian, John surnamed Philoponus, or the Labor-lover. Presuming on the friendship which had arisen between them, the Greek solicited as a gift the remnant of the great library a remnant which war and time and bigotry had spared.
Emboldened by this familiar intercourse, Philoponus presumed to solicit a gift, inestimable in his opinion, contemptible in that of the Barbarians the royal library, which alone, among the spoils of Alexandria, had not been appropriated by the visit and the seal of the conqueror.
It seems as if Alexandria was preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of commentators, not of originators. It is worthy of remark, that Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism.
The spirit of Amrou was more curious and liberal than that of his brethren, and in his leisure hours, the Arabian chief was pleased with the conversation of John, the last disciple of Ammonius, and who derived the surname of Philoponus from his laborious studies of grammar and philosophy.
Such a companion he found at Alexandria in a native of the place, a Christian of the sect of the Jacobites, eminent for his philological researches, his commentaries on Moses and Aristotle, and his laborious treatises of various kinds, surnamed Philoponus, from his love of study, but commonly known by the name of John the Grammarian.
In this way they found the works of Philoponus, Yahya ben Adi and others; and adopted also the opinions of the pre-Socratic philosophers, which they thought would be of help to them, though these had already been refuted by Aristotle, who came after. Such are the atomic theory of matter and the belief in the existence of a vacuum.
One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library, took care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever strongly Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be destroyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very different.
Word Of The Day