What does it mean to think? Arabs and Latinos

Let us open some ancient books, Arabic or Latin, those books we don't read yet unjustly oppose. There we will find medieval writers obsessed not with fighting thought, but with questioning it, with posing questions about it. They truly think, they burn their lives in thought: they lay life—their lives—on a table before them, step back a little, then scrutinize it, and ask questions. And we understand them: they are simply striving to understand their essence, what they are doing, and what it is that fills them with hope, that they live and die for.
What do they mean by thinking? Descartes offers his own answer, for humankind: I am a thinking thing, that is, "a thing that doubts, imagines, affirms, denies, wills, and does not will; I am also a thing that imagines, and a thing that senses." But what do they say, those who lived and spoke before him? What will their answer be, within their own languages? What is this answer, perhaps unsettling, left to be forgotten, and thus: new, for us? This is what we seek, freely, and by knocking on every door.