From the 12th century onward, knowledge flowed into Latin Christendom from Arabic‑speaking cities and beyond. To be admitted into European libraries and universities, it had to pass through a filter: Latinization.

Translators and scholars reshaped foreign names so they could be declined in Latin, copied by scribes, and slotted into catalogues and syllabi. Muḥammad al‑Khwarizmi became Algoritmi and eventually “algorithm.” A word almost no one now traces back to a specific man from Khwarazm. Ibn Sina became Avicenna. Ibn Rushd became Averroes. Al‑Biruni became Alberonius…

This wasn’t always intended as erasure. It was a form of assimilation: making unfamiliar authorities look and sound like they belonged on the same shelf as Aristotle and Augustine. But over time, it thinned out their identities. The Latin names peeled the thinkers away from their languages, their cities, their intellectual and religious traditions.

The scholar became a “citizen of the library”: a placeless figure filed under Philosophy or Medicine, floating just above history. Ibn Rushd’s fierce debates with Islamic orthodoxy vanished; what remained was “Averroes the Commentator,” safely absorbed into scholastic tradition.

For many readers today, these names appear as part of a vaguely “Western” canon. We keep the books and the ideas. The roads that led to them we let fade from the map.