In the New York Review of Books, William Dalrymple reviews a group of books on Islam and its relations with Christian Europe, among which is Richard Fletcher's The Cross and the Crescent. Here are the paragraphs on the scholarly work in al-Andalus:
It is not known how Gerard [of Cremona] and Ghalib [the Mozarab] met and became friends, but
soon after Gerard's arrival the two began to cooperate on a series of
translations from Toledo's Arabic library, which had survived the
looting of the conquering Christians.
...Gerard and Ghalib's mode of translation was not one that would be
regarded as ideal by modern scholars. Ghalib rendered the classical
Arabic of the texts into Castilian Spanish, which Gerard then
translated into Latin. Since many of the texts were Greek classics that
had themselves arrived in Arabic via Syriac, there was much room for
error. But the system seems to have worked. In the course of the next
half-century, Ghalib and Gerard translated no fewer than eighty-eight
Arabic works of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and
logic, branches of learning that underpinned the great revival of
scholarship in Europe sometimes referred to as the Twelfth-Century
Renaissance.
Other translations from the Arabic during this period filled
European libraries with a richness of learning impossible even to
imagine a century before: they included editions of Aristotle, Euclid,
Plato, and Ptolemy, commentaries by Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and
astrological texts by al-Khwarizmi, encyclopedias of astronomy,
illustrated accounts of chess, and guides to precious stones and their
medicinal qualities.