In »The Birth of Science: Panta Rhei« (Velbrück 2011), Manfred Schmutzer investigated the necessary framework which led to the emergence of sciences in antique Greece. In this book, he consequently investigates why it is that the voluminous knowledge of the antique was not inherited by the Europeans, but rather by the sons of the deserts of Arabia: how was it possible for a new kind of science to develop in the »new Islamic World« on the basis of the antique, which Europe would later leave behind? He works in a detailed manner through the social developments beginning in the 5th Century AD, and shows that Islamic science and philosophy from that era are astoundingly contemporary.
