Sharjah International Foundation for the History of Arab and Muslim Sciences

 

As part of ongoing academic efforts to reassess the history of human thought and its civilizational interactions, this research paper introduces a new approach to understanding the formation and movement of knowledge across cultures through a critical re-examination of the traditional model long used in academic studies to explain the reception of Greco-Roman philosophy in Islamic thought and its later transmission to medieval Europe.

For decades, this conventional framework has relied on the concept of the “transfer of knowledge,” portraying philosophical and scientific ideas as having moved from the Greek world to the Islamic East before eventually returning to the Christian West through translation and cultural mediation.

While this model has offered significant pedagogical value, it implicitly rests on the assumption of a sharp cultural divide between East and West and tends to portray civilizations as separate and self-contained entities. In contrast, the paper proposes the concept of the “migration of knowledge” as a broader and more dynamic intellectual framework that emphasizes continuity and interaction within a shared epistemic space extending from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period.

From this perspective, Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Christian intellectual traditions are understood not as isolated systems, but as participants in a common philosophical discourse shaped by continuous processes of adaptation, reinterpretation, and reformulation across changing linguistic, religious, and institutional contexts.

The study further examines ancient cosmology as a compelling case study for this conceptual shift, demonstrating that cosmological models were not mechanically transmitted, but were continuously reshaped throughout their “migration” across successive intellectual environments during the medieval and Renaissance periods.

By reframing East–West intellectual interactions as a process of “knowledge migration” rather than mere “knowledge transfer,” the paper seeks to highlight the fluidity, continuity, and deep interconnectedness of ancient cosmological thought across different historical eras and intellectual traditions.