From Camels to Stars in the Middle East

Islamic Golden Age (2017)

By Eamon Gearon

Film Review

Eamon Gearon introduces this lecture series by describing a solo trip he took across the Sahara and the training he got from Bedouin nomads on caring for his camels and using the stars to navigate. Thee Arab names Islamic astronomers gave many of our stars (eg Betelgeuse, Sirius and Algol) during the Islamic Golden Age persist to the present day.

Gearon dates the Islamic Golden Age from 750-1258 AD, with its pinnacle 813-833 AD under Caliph al Ma’mun. He dates the start of the Islamic Golden Age to the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 AD by the Abbasid dynasty (who moved the Islamic capitol from Damascus to Bagdad). Although most scholars date the end of the the Golden Age to the Mongol’s 1258 sack of Baghdad Gearon maintains Baghdad’s ecumenical scholarship continued after that date.

During the Golden Age, Baghdad was the world’s largest city, enjoying unprecedented economic and political stability thanks to a vast empire extending across Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, Persia, the Levant, North Africa and Europe’s Iberian peninsula.

Under the first Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809 AD) the caliphate established houses of wisdom in Baghdad, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars,  translated classical texts on science, medicine, history and philosophy to build a collective body of global wisdom. This translation movement prevented the loss of much ancient wisdom from Greek and Roman times.The houses of wisdom also conducted experiments in optic, medicine and mathematics and built water fountains, mechanical toys and clocks. These ideas and inventions rapidly spread across the Islamic empire, leading to rival intellectual centers in Cordova (in Andalusia on the Iberian peninsula), Cairo and Samarkan.

In the 10th century Cairo became the global center for astronomy and math, guided by Ibn al-Hagtham (965-1040 AD), whose ground breaking experiments in optics influenced da Vinci. In the 12th century the center of Islamic scholarship moved to Cordova, influenced by

• Ibn Rashid (1126-1198 AD) – a Muslim scholar who defended Aristotle’s rationalism and applied it to Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy.
• Moses Maimonides (1135-1204 AD) – one of the greatest Talmudic scholars who helped usher in the golden age of Jewish culture in Andalusia. Their golden age ended in 1168,  when a new caliphate forced Jews to convert to Islam or leave the Iberian peninsula.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/5756987/5756989