CULTURAL HERITAGE: - Macedonian Information Centre

araBiC ManuSCriPtS in MaCedonia - 23
the numerals that today in Europe are called the Arabic numerals - to
be differentiated from the more complicated Roman numerals - and for
which the Arabs themselves use the term “Indian”.
So, the Arabic language, in rather a short time, transformed itself
from the language of poetry of the pre-Islamic period into the language
of science, culture and thought in general, capable of expressing the most
complicated scientific terms and of transferring the philosophical ideas
and concepts.
After the process of assimilation of the heritage of the civilizations
found on the conquered territories through the translations into Arabic,
came the time of the original Arabic or, more precisely, Islamic contribution
to the development of the scientific thought. At that time, the Arabs, in the
ethnical sense, represented just a drop in the sea of various peoples living
within the borders of their Empire. The Persians proved to be the most
productive; to the Islamic world that, at that time, was under the political
and military domination of the Arabs, they gave the best philologists,
the most freethinking philosophers and the major actors of the cultural
movements in general. All of them wrote their most important works in
Arabic, the language of the learned people of the Islamic world, used for the
communication from Spain all the way to India, in the similar way as Latin
used to be the language of science and culture in the Christian Western
Europe of the Middle Ages. The Persian Ibn Sina, known in Europe as
Avicenna, wrote his scientific works in Arabic, while the poetry, in which
he was also interested, he wrote in the Persian language. The same can be
said for the next generations of scholars from the Persian speaking area.
In that way, in the period between the 9th and the 11th century, there
were more works on philosophy, medicine, history, religion, astronomy
and geography written in Arabic that in any other language 2 .
WHERE HAVE THE ARABIC MANUSCRIPTS
COME FROM TO MACEDONIA
AND WHAT DO THEY CONTAIN?
Our region came in touch with the Islam and the Islamic civilization
through the Ottoman Empire that, on the peak of its power, during the
reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520 – 1566), controlled the area
from Budapest to Crimea and from Baghdad to the Nile’s third cataract 3 .
The Ottoman Empire was a mixture of different elements inherited from
the Persians and the Byzantines, but in the first place, from the Arabs. The
Turks adopted from the Arabs their religion – with its socio-economic
2 Idem, p.22
Pitcher, Donald Edgar, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire, Leiden, E.
J. Brill, 972, Map XXI