Islam has not always been a space of social backwardness, scientific ignorance, and fundamentalist fanaticism throughout its long history.

Today's enlightened Western Christianity, which rightfully repudiates these weaknesses reminiscent of its own medieval past, would never have reached its current level without the crucial cultural contribution of another Islam, which illuminated the dark ages of the European Middle Ages a thousand years ago: when, through the bridges of Salerno, Palermo, Naples, and above all Muslim Spain, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geography, alchemy - experimental science in general - were introduced from the advanced Islam to the developing Europe.

Five hundred years after the departure of the first civilizers of the West, the Romans, the Mohammedan world gave it a second, peaceful but decisive cultural push. In both cases, the essence of the knowledge and expertise that were transferred was the Greek education.

The three original essays in this volume seek to open the not coincidentally delayed discussion around this "missing link" of the history of civilization: the Greek heritage of Islam.