In 1998, the United Nations declared year 2001 as the UN Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. This paper serves as a modest attempt in that spirit, with focus on the evolution of social thought in medieval Islam and its influence upon the Latin-West. The paper argues that the European Renaissance depended critically upon the intellectual armory, itself built upon the rediscovered Greek heritage, acquired through knowledge transfer from the early Islamic Civilisation. The mainstream literary paradigm, however, tends to neglect those connections, or at best, grudgingly acknowledges them but remotely and peripherally. Further, the paper documents the extensive influence upon Latin-European scholarship provided through the writings of several key Islamic scholastics. Briefly covered are the works of Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, and, especially, Ibn Rushd, the Islamic Aristotle, whose contributions revolutionised the Church-dominated, authoritarian mold of medieval Europe. With extensive documentation and some quotes from well-known medievalists, the paper calls for greater integration of such civilisational connections in literary history so that, among other things, we can better understand the contemporary confrontational global environment.

For much of the millennium before the rise of Portugal and Spain, Venice flourished as the hub of Europe's trade with the lands to its east and south. The profound mutual influences that resulted have inspired multiple scholars and historians to cast fresh looks at Venice and its history during pre-modern and modern times, as a meeting point for commerce and culture, especially with the Muslim World.

The book Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context by Charles Burnett is a collection of previously published articles on the transmission of Arabic learning to Europe. It concentrates on the identity of the Latin translators and the context in which they were working. The articles are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the earliest known translations from Arabic at the end of the 10th century, and continues until the transfer of the translation activity to Frederick II's entourage in the 13th-century Sicily.

The following essay aims to alert communities as to the particular significance of the Muslim civilisation and its historical role in contributing to the birth of modern civilisation. The author, Professor Salim Al-Hassani, a specialist of Muslim Heritage and a pioneer of its defense, focuses first on various instances of distorted history in scholarship, school curricula and media culture. He shows how unjustified is the suppression of centuries of history from history books and how the jump from Hellenistic times to Renaissance is rather the manifestation of ignorance and misconceptions. Presenting selected examples, he then proves that this suppressed period, belonging to the classical period of the history of Islam, and which lasted for about a millennium, knew a creative contribution to civilisation by men and women of different faiths. Those knowledge, science and art creators built on ancient knowledge and were the drive of one of the richest periods of history in terms of science, culture, technology and art.