🤩 Europe owes a very great deal to Islamic culture and has been irrevocably shaped by it. One of the most ardent advocates of the inestimable and enduring importance of medieval Hispano-Arab and Sicilian culture in the intellectual, cultural and economic evolution of Europe was the independent American scholar S.H Scott, who published his three volume History of the Moorish Empire in Europe in 1904. This lone scholar, working in isolation in the early twentieth century, created an erudite and extensive testament to the endur-ing glories of Muslim Spain and Sicily. His viewpoint of informed enlighten-ment turns much received wisdom on its head to formulate the most fulsome possible advocation for the lasting influence of Muslim civilization in Europe, highlighting the rarely acknowledged debt owed to that great empire by mod-ern Europeans. From early Islamic times, with the help of Jewish and Christian subjects, Muslims had collected the great books of science, medicine, and phi-losophy and translated them into Arabic from Greek, Latin, Persian, Coptic, Syriac and Sanskrit. These translations inspired educated Muslim thinkers and scientists to make their own contributions to philosophy, medicine, chem-istry, astronomy, algebra, optics, art and architecture. We might think of the tenth-century Cordoban physician Abulcasis, known as the father of modern surgery, who invented the forceps and encouraged the knowledge of anatomy in surgical procedures, or the Andalusian polymath Averroes (d. 1198) who pioneered the study of optics and pathology.