Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a chronology in which no major scientific advances take place between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance. In between, so we are told, western Europe and, by extrapolation, the rest of the world, languished in the Dark Ages for 1,000 years.
In fact, for a period stretching over 700 years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, and the official language of the vast Islamic empire that, by the early eighth century, stretched from India to Spain.
I have long been possessed with the strong desire to bring this story to a wider audience. That I do so now lies with my belief that it has never been more timely, nor more resonant, to explore the extent to which western cultural and scientific thought is indebted to the work, 1,000 years ago, of Arabic and Muslim thinkers and scientists.
When I first decided to tell of the scientific achievements in the Golden Age of Islam I had no idea how much interest it would generate. After all, as a British professor of theoretical physics, what did I know about the history of medieval Arabic science?
Perhaps I am being a little disingenuous here. Although an academic, I do devote half my time to broadcasting and popular science writing. In addition, as my surname may betray, I have Arab roots. I was born in Baghdad to an English mother and Iraqi father. I grew up there but left as a teenager when Saddam came to power. We were lucky. We quickly settled in Britain and I haven’t looked back – until recently, when the cultural urge to revisit my heritage beckoned.
Two years down the line, I find myself fronting a major BBC television series, half the way through a book on the subject and invited to give talks around the world.
But before I lay out my stall, allow me a few words to counter the inevitable accusations from some quarters that my account will be in some sense “pro-Islamic”; that having grown up in Iraq I see the Muslim world through the rose-tinted glasses of the biased partisan on a mission to show what a wonderful and enlightened religion Islam is. The truth is that I am not religious, yet if Islam emerges from my account in a positive light, as a belief system unencumbered by many of the misconceptions and misinterpretations of today, then so be it.
Sadly, there is no doubt that the term “Islam”, to the ear of many non-Muslims around the world today, too comfortably equates with the modern negative image it has. The implied contrast is of the West as a rational, tolerant and enlightened secular society. This is, of course, not only a lazy view, but also one that makes it difficult to acknowledge that 1,000 years ago the situation was reversed. Think of the Crusades. Who were the “good guys” then? The Golden Age of the vast Islamic empire took place during the rule of the Abbasids from their capital, Baghdad, which I take to be between the mid-eighth and mid-11th centuries. For most people, this period is known only through the romanticised, exotic tales that run through the Arabian Nights, many of which are based on the time of Harun al Rashid (763–809), the larger-than-life caliph who ruled over this vast empire at the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries.
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090110/WEEKENDER/98751999/1041
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