A large number of Islamic manuscripts were brought to New York from the National Library of Israel to star in an exhibition titled Romance and Reason: Islamic transformations of the classical past. Featuring more than 70 manuscripts—24 of which came from the Library of Israel—the exhibit, located at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on Manhattan's Upper East Side, opened this week and is set to run through May.
The works are divided into two rooms: The first, “Romance,” shows poetic retellings of the stories on Alexander the Great; the other one, “Reason,” focuses on a series of Islamic thinkers' writings on science and medicine. Both rooms convey the idea that medieval Islamic intellectuals were deeply inspired by the classical world. What they did, however, was not a mere translation of the classics into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, but rather a complex, at times critical, elaboration of the ancient texts into a new tradition of poetry and scientific research.
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