Did Islam start the European Renaissance?
Since there never actually was a European Renaissance, no. The term “Renaissance” was invented by the anti-German Italian patriot Petrarch, who – oblivious to the fact that he was half German himself – blamed “the barbarous Germans” for the ruin of “classical Italian civilization” (Rome) and he called the independence movement of the Italian states of his time (1300) “the Renaissance.” The term was resurrected by 19th Century secular humanists who decided to use it to designate a wholly imaginary (they were the ones doing the imagining) “rebirth of classical Greek humanism” (which never even existed in ancient Greece, let alone the High Middle Ages) putting an end to the “superstitious and theocratic Medieval period” which wasn’t actually terribly superstitious or theocratic. The fact is that the intellectual, philosophical, and theological categories of Europeans remained pretty unchanged from the so-called “Dark Ages” until the Reformation. Islam did destroy/over-run late classical c
