[narrator] The alphabet... seafaring and trade... the foundations of globalization. Their roots go back thousands
of years to the Carthaginians. The Germanic peoples
shaped the map of Europe. The Arabs transmitted the rich knowledge
of the ancient world, revolutionizing mathematics and medicine. They all created a new world. The Carthaginians,
the Germanic peoples, and the Arabs: their achievements
produced modern Europe. They lived in a host of tribes as farmers,
traders and nomads. What first united them was Islam,
founded by the Prophet Muhammed. They conquered an empire
that spanned three continents. In their capital, Baghdad,
they founded the "House of Wisdom," an oasis of scholarship. They transmitted the learning of
the ancient world and the East to Europe. Whether it was medicine... architecture... or astronomy... as patrons of science, they were
far ahead of their contemporaries. Arabia. The largest peninsula on Earth, with endless seas of sand
from north to south. For millennia, it was home to nomads
who journeyed from oasis to oasis. Only in the southwest
did monsoon rains make the mountains
and coastal strip green and fertile. Traditionally, the people of this land
lived in small tribes and clans, without a state or a common leader. Although they had been there
since time immemorial, no common name for them
was recorded until the ninth century BC. That was when the first document
named them as "Arabs," probably derived from abara, which means, in Arabic and Hebrew,
"to wander or pass by." Before Islam, the Arabs
are one of the peoples in Arabia, probably the most dominant one. The main characteristics are
that they speak dialects of Arabic and they're mostly pastoralists, but also organized in tribes, though some are also town dwellers,
living in oases. They become almost like
an immigrant society, you'd say. They absorb many different peoples
from this huge area. All of them gradually, many of them,
start to define themselves as Arabs, in the sense that they speak Arabic
and they belong to this Arab empire. [narrator] In the dry north, there were
small kingdoms and some splendid cities, such as the stone city of Petra,
in what is now Jordan. Or Palmyra, a trading metropolis in Syria. Some of its remains were recently
vandalized by ISIS. In the fertile south of Arabia,
agriculture flourished. Kingdoms emerged there too. They benefited from the revenue
of the legendary Incense Road, the ancient caravan route
by which incense, silk and precious stones were transported
to the Mediterranean world. The trade brought riches. That is why the Romans called
the south Arabia Felix, happy Arabia; the north, Arabia Petraea,
stony Arabia; and the center, Arabia Deserta,
desolate Arabia. And that was the location of Mecca. The city lay in a dry valley. At most, passing caravans could hope to pick up some dates,
or animal hides there. Nevertheless, Mecca was an important
center of the Arabian world, as it had another asset: sacred springs. [man speaks Arabic] And a special shrine, the Kaaba,
which rose up between the mud huts. During holy months,
pilgrims came from everywhere to walk around the Kaaba
in a special ceremony and to pay homage to their gods. For the merchants,
this was the great opportunity. Everyone brought his wares to Mecca. Not only did the people of the city
have to be fed, but so did the pilgrims, and there was a trade
in religious mementoes. There were plenty of customers. After all, the Kaaba was the oldest
and most important sacred site in Arabia. So we don't really know
the ancient origins of the Kaaba. Possibly it was a meteorite, but it became a shrine for the Arabs
of West Arabia, in a pagan capacity, presumably, at first, but then it became associated, obviously,
in Muhammed's time, with the site of the one god. [narrator] In ancient Arabia, there was
one high god and many local gods. People feared the djinns,
demons who lived in the darkness. The chief god of Mecca was Hubal. At his side were Al-Lat,
a kind of goddess of war; Al-Uzza, the goddess of the morning star; and Al-Manat, the goddess of destiny. Trees and springs, and often stones,
were sacred objects. Some, like the black stone on the Kaaba,
were said to have fallen from heaven. Not all the tribes were pagan;
some were Christian or Jewish. The sites dedicated to the different gods
were administered by particular clans. In Mecca, the Quraysh clan
controlled the Kaaba and so, made up the city's elite. The Quraysh also had a monopoly
on the considerable revenue from the pilgrim trade,
so there were often disputes. Hey! Hey! Hey, leave! This is our area. You shouldn't be here.
Do you understand? I'm telling you to go! [narrator] Competition was frowned upon, so a wealthy few dominated and many others felt excluded. But the world of many gods
was swept away by one man who was born in Mecca in 570 AD:
Muhammed. He propelled the tribes of Arabia
into the center of world events because he founded a new religion. It is said that Muhammed often withdrew
to a cave in order to meditate. In his seclusion, he had
a supernatural encounter. Known to history as the "Night of Power," it marks the birth date of Islam, which means
"submission to the will of God." Muhammed said that the archangel Gabriel
had commissioned him to persuade men to cast aside paganism and convert
to belief in the one true God: Allah. To his followers, Muhammed was
the "Seal of the Prophets," the last and highest of all the prophets. There was Abraham, the patriarch of the three great religions
of the Book... Moses, the highest prophet of the Jews... and Jesus, the Savior of the world
and founder of Christianity. According to the Koran,
which Gabriel would go on to reveal, Jesus had prophesied the coming
of Muhammed as his successor. So it's said that there were some people
who were seeking after the truth or who had heard rumors
that there might be a prophet who would bring a new religion. It's difficult to say whether we should
believe these or not. But also, we know from the Koran
that he faced opposition. Quite a proportion of the Koran is taken
up by dialogue between Muhammed and an opposition who accuse him
of various things, of maybe just being a magician, a sorcerer, bringing false messages,
and so on. So, one imagines that he faced
quite a lot of opposition, and it took him some time
to win over followers. [narrator] Mecca's elite saw
Muhammed's message as a threat. For them, worshipping only one god
was out of the question. What's more, the gods that Muhammed
was cursing as idols, had been revered since the earliest times. The new prophet and his few supporters
got a hostile reaction. The community was divided. One day, his opponents made a decision:
Muhammed had to die. [in Arabic] Is this Muhammed? Who else, you idiot?
Come on. Finish him off. Damn it. He's not here. [man] Shut up!
I know where to find him. Let's go. [narrator] The attempt failed. Muhammed, knowing his days
were numbered if he stayed in Mecca, had urged his supporters
to get away while they could. [man whistles] His adversaries were too strong. And he had also planned
his own escape long ago. They've fled. [narrator] It was said that Gabriel had warned the prophet
and that God had protected him. Muhammed's flight from Mecca,
known as the Hijra, came in July 622 AD; the year that now marks
the beginning of the Islamic calendar. He took refuge in a mountain cave
and soon reached the city of Yathrib, which offered him protection. Its people hoped that he would
at last end their tribal feuds. And Muhammed's faith
and his new laws did unite them. They renamed their city in his honor to Madinat an-Nabi, Medina,
City of the Prophet. A couple of main reasons why Islam
is particularly attractive initially is, one, simplicity. There's none of this complicated
"three gods in one" or anything like that. God is one, that's it. There's a series of messengers who've been sent
from the time of Adam onwards, always bringing the same message,
so it's very clear and concise. There's also a clear sense of community,
which is still, you can sense today, in a sense, the ummah,
the Muslim community is one. All Muslims should help each other, and all people are members
of that one community. Just by right of believing. [narrator] In just ten years,
Muhammed succeeded in doing what no one had ever done: uniting all the tribes of Arabia
through faith in Allah. After a few battles,
Mecca too embraced Islam. Muhammed made a pilgrimage
to his hometown and walked around the Kaaba,
as millions of Muslims still do today. The shrine of the deities of antiquity
was seized for the new faith and became Islam's holiest shrine. After Muhammed's death,
Arab armies pushed north. They destroyed the Persian Empire and drove the Christian Byzantines
out of large parts of the Middle East and North Africa. They conquered an area stretching
as far east as Turkmenistan and the borders of China. In the west, they overran North Africa
and the Iberian Peninsula. They stormed Sicily
and invaded southern France. In the eighth century,
the Arabs ruled a world kingdom that was larger than the Roman Empire. Many different groups
join the Arab conquerors for many different reasons, but compulsion wasn't generally
one of them. The most usual scenario is that a group
that had been excluded from the mainstream for different reasons, saw their chance now to become
one of the conquerors, the top dogs. So for example, in Libya,
there is one particular tribe of the Berbers called the Lawata. They had been excluded when the Byzantines reconquered Africa
in the 540s and pushed basically outside
the Byzantine Empire. So they now saw their chance
when the Arab conquerors came along to join them and to become top dogs,
if you like, to join the elite. [narrator] By 700 AD, the Arabs ruled
over approximately 60 million people. At the very top of the empire
was the caliph. However, there were often heated disputes over who had the better right
to the position. [caliph groans] Below the caliph were
the provincial governors, whose main role was to collect taxes. Muslims paid only
a contribution to the poor. The bulk of the taxes were paid
by non-Muslims, classified as dhimmi, "protected persons." The revenue was administered
by financial authorities called the Diwan. They also distributed the taxes. The kind of upholstered bench often found
in these offices is still called a divan. Muhammed urged his followers
to strive for knowledge "from the cradle to the grave." There was probably no one who took this
as seriously as the Caliph Al-Ma'mun. [in Arabic] Look!
Just as I told you, master. [narrator] Al-Ma'mun ruled in Baghdad
in the ninth century. He had a dream: to make his city the greatest center
of scholarship in the world. [smashing] It happened again. [snaps fingers] Come and have a look. Isn't this amazing? Yes, master. Always. Always. [narrator] It was Al-Ma'mun's
great grandfather who had laid the city's foundation stone. Baghdad was built between the Euphrates and the Tigris
on an important trade route in what is now Iraq. The metropolis was probably planned
as a round city. All its districts were arranged
on a ring-shaped ground plan, and all its roads led
to a gigantic central square that contained the caliph's palace
and the central mosque. Baghdad quickly expanded
beyond its original walls. In 800 AD, the city had
around a million people, making it one of the largest
cities in the world. It was a magnet for specialists
and scholars from far-flung lands, a haven of invention and scholarship. It seems that the Caliph Al-Ma'mun
was completely obsessed with science and scholarship. Uh, he brought together a group
of astronomers. He commissioned them
to write new star charts. He was aware of the astronomy
of the ancient Greeks and wanted to go beyond it,
so he commissioned the building of new observatories
in Baghdad and Damascus. It's said he had a dream early in life that the Greek philosopher Aristotle
came to him and told him to seek knowledge wherever he could. And from that moment on,
I think he devoted his life to science. [narrator] Caliph Al-Ma'mun
founded the Arab Empire's most famous scholarly institution,
the House of Wisdom. There, Arabs and Persians, Christians
and Jews collected and translated the most important writings
from all over the world. What do we have, ibn Harun? Very well, sir. We have, my Lord,
the science of mathematics. The science of mathematics. Good. We have astrology from Persia. Good. Astrology. From India, too. As you can see, my Lord. And also from India we have... Brahmasphut. It's something about mathematics. Mm. Ibn Harun... Anything interesting from the Greeks? -[bell jingles]
-[door opens] Euclid! He has just returned
from Constantinople, my Lord. After a great effort, my Lord, I have brought you Euclid. And also here is Pythagoras. I have long waited for this moment. This is amazing! You are a great man, ibn Nazim,
you are a great man. Thank you, my Lord. Give him the money. Translate these books
as soon as possible. Clear? They had inherited the discovery
of the manufacture of paper from China. They were producing books
in large numbers. And they realized they sat
in a part of the world which was at the center of so many
earlier flourishing civilizations. And I think they felt that somehow they needed to catch up
with the rest of the world. The Greeks, the Byzantines, the Romans,
the Persians, the Indians. They had a lot of catching up to do, to gather and assimilate
all this knowledge. [narrator] The scholarly work in Baghdad
reached its peak in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Banu Musa brothers
were talented all-rounders who invented what must be the world's
first programmable machine, an automatic horse trough. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a doctor,
is considered the father of ophthalmology. -[bystander vomits]
-He even operated on tumors. The philosopher Al-Kindi was
the greatest universal scholar of Baghdad. He analyzed secret scripts,
but also worked on music theory. The Persian mathematician
and astronomer Al-Khwarizmi made Indian numbers known to the Arabs
and introduced the decimal number system. The numbering system we use today,
one to nine, and zero, the decimal system, goes back to India. So, more accurately it should be
referred to as Hindu-Arabic numerals. But certainly it was passed on
to the Arabic-speaking world and then on to Europe. Great mathematicians like al-Khwarizmi were very keen
on using this decimal system. And, indeed, European mathematicians
like Fibonacci, who travelled widely in the Middle East
and learned about Al-Khwarizmi, then translated his work into Latin
and took it back to Europe. [narrator] Roman numerals could not be
used for direct calculations. For that, coins and lines were needed. For example, adding 126 on the left
and 157 on the right. Each number is divided into
hundreds, tens and ones, with the fives and fifties
on lines in between. Three ones make three. Two fives make ten,
so one coin has to be moved up. With the three tens, the fifty,
and the two hundreds, it makes 283. It's pretty complicated. With the new numerals, it was much easier: 126 plus 157 equals 283. What Al-Khwarizmi did
for the very first time was talk about "the unknown quantity." Today we would call it "x," in algebra. He said, for example, if you have
two times "x" and add one to it, if that answer is five, he then gave the set of instructions
that allow us to determine what "x" is. So, for example, here we would say, well, let's subtract one
from both sides of the equation. So, on the left we only have two "x," and if I take one away from five,
I have four. The next step is to divide both sides
of the equation by two. So all I have now is "x"
and on this side I have two. And here we have our answer. The "x" is revealed for this
particular case to have the value of two. We only get there
by following al-Khwarizmi's algorithm. [narrator] Neither mathematics nor physics
could work without formulas. Einstein expressed
his theory of relativity in the famous formula E = mc². The modern age would also
be unthinkable without algorithms. Every computer and calculator works
on the basis of algorithms. Translated into programming languages,
they are the basis of the digital world. There is hardly anyone these days
who doesn't use apps or a computer. They are indispensable,
even in the remotest parts of the world. The introduction of Arabic numerals put an end to calculations
with Roman numerals. The word "cipher,"
from the Arabic for zero, still reminds us of
the mathematical legacy of the Arabs. The knowledge of the scholars
of Baghdad reached Europe, both peacefully... and by conquest. In 711 AD, an Arab and Berber army
crossed from North Africa into Spain. The Arabs defeated the Visigoths, who had ruled Spain
since the fall of Rome. They conquered the whole
of the Iberian Peninsula and even entered France. With the conquest of Spain, the expansion of Arab power
in the northwest reached its peak. The new ruler was
from the Umayyad dynasty. He founded the Emirate of Córdoba, the first Arab empire to be independent
of the caliphs in the East. Córdoba, the new Umayyad capital, soon became
the largest metropolis in Europe. The caliphs commissioned huge buildings... masterpieces of Moorish architecture. One of them was the Córdoba mosque, now a cathedral and a World Heritage Site,
like the Alhambra Palace in Granada. Andalusia benefited enormously
from the new rulers. The Arabs introduced many previously
unknown crops, including citrus fruit, artichokes, cotton and rice, and they taught the farmers
how to irrigate more effectively. They introduced the hundreds of windmills
that are, today, the symbol of Andalusia. [in German] Rising productivity
and increasing trade made the Andalusian cities
very wealthy. The Umayyad rulers used this wealth
to promote culture, that is, to invite scientists
and creative people to their courts. This also applied to philosophy,
mathematics, astronomy, and all kinds of subjects,
medicine, of course. And Córdoba began to exert
a magnetic attraction, particularly in Europe, where people suddenly
became aware of a cultural flowering
that simply wasn't happening in Europe. [narrator] Scholars, artists
and creative people were drawn to the Córdoba court,
as if by a magnet, from all over the Arab Empire. Word got around that the arts and sciences
were promoted there and that talent was handsomely rewarded. [man] Wa-oo! [narrator] The new star was
a musician and free spirit by the name of Ali ibn Nafi,
known as Ziryab, "the Jaybird," because of his beautiful voice. [in Arabic] Where is it? Where is my oud pick? Sahar! [narrator] Ziryab came to Spain
from Baghdad via North Africa in 822 AD. He was a cosmopolitan,
with a knowledge of many fields. He wrote poetry to accompany his melodies, and he showed society in the Emirate
what the Eastern lifestyle was like. [tunes oud] Ziryab introduced the people
of Córdoba to Eastern fashions and taught them
to change their clothing according to the occasion and the season. He urged men to groom their beards, to clean their fingernails
and to use deodorant. He showed them
how delicious asparagus was, how to play chess, and how
to drink wine out of crystal glasses. He advocated the three-course menu. -[crowd cheers]
-He was the trendsetter of his age, a cultural guru. [crowd oohs] But above all,
Ziryab revolutionized music. The oud he brought with him
evolved into the guitar, the key instrument of Spanish music,
particularly flamenco. And he established
Córdoba's first music school, for men and women. [in Arabic] Hello, Master Ziryab. Welcome. Great to have you here. Abed al-Rahman... Start with the first verse. ♪ My darling ♪ ♪ Regardless of time or distance ♪ ♪ Or travel ♪ ♪ Or absence ♪ ♪ You are always close to my heart ♪ Dreadful singing! Hunaida, show him how to sing it. [sings in Arabic] [narrator] The scholars of Andalusia
stimulated innovations in every field. Ziryab's patrons
also sponsored ibn Firnas, a court poet and multi-talent. He initiated the first known
attempt to fly. The later Caliph al-Hakam II
had a library built that is said to have housed
400,000 books, more than in the rest
of Western Europe put together. Many Moorish scientists were polymaths,
writing on astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and mechanics. Not only Muslims,
but also Jews and Christians took part in this research, and even women,
working as translators or librarians. The term "Arabic science"
to define this period is very important. Notice, we don't call it "Arab science," because many of these scholars
weren't Arabs. They came from different parts
of the empire. Many of them, for example, were Persian. We also don't refer to it
as "Islamic science," because many of those scholars
were not Muslims. There were Christians,
Jews and many others. So it doesn't matter what religion
these scholars practiced or which part of the empire
they came from, but what united them was the lingua franca
of the empire at the time: Arabic was the official language. It was the language
of the holy book, the Koran. And therefore everyone, if they wanted
to succeed in science and scholarship, had to write in the Arabic language. In the same way that today
international science is English. [narrator] The heritage
of Moorish Andalusia is evident in many areas. It contributed words like "alcohol,"
"mattress" and "carafe." The Andalusian style of singing to the oud
influenced the medieval troubadours, who travelled Europe with their lutes. It therefore sowed the seed for the music
of the modern singer-songwriters. The Eastern lifestyle influenced customs
at European courts, which adopted both chess
and the new table manners. Voltaire, Goethe and Lessing
even glorified Andalusia's golden age as a model of tolerance. Córdoba was also
an important center of medicine. Doctor Al-Zahrawi was one
of the leading medical practitioners. Ahmed! Yes, sir? [narrator] There were already
50 hospitals in the city, and it had its own medical school. [patient groans] It hurts! Can you see his face? Come closer. And now? Take another step. And now? I can't see clearly. A cataract, then. You want to pierce my eyes?
How is this helpful? Your lens is becoming clouded. We have to fold it down behind the pupil
so light can come into your eye again. Very scary! Will I be better afterwards? Usually it is. I've done this operation
a number of times. [narrator] Al-Zahrawi was considered
an expert in his specialty of surgery. He even made his own instruments
and invented new ones. The scalpel, scissors and dogleg clamps were used in operations
on the nose and ears, and in the throat or the urethra. The lancet was used to treat cataracts, by pushing the clouded lens
to the bottom of the eye. Most of the instruments from that time are barely distinguishable
from their modern surgical equivalents. [in Spanish] Medicine certainly had
a major advance. Pharmacy or chemistry
also had a major advance. And the Arab-Islamic world of that time
was in some sense the real heir of Greek science
and that of the Roman world, and fortunately that science, with great improvements
and obvious progress, was transmitted to the Christian world through the Translation Movement. [narrator] The first Christian centers
of medical learning grew up on the borders of the Arab Empire
from the 11th century on. In Montpellier, in what is now France,
and in Salerno in southern Italy, they had close contacts
with the Arab medical schools in southern Spain and Sicily. In this way, the vast knowledge
of the Arabic-speaking doctors became more widely known. [in Arabic] How are you? I'm well. I'm not blinded by the light. I can even make out colors! But I still can't see clearly. You'll have to get used to that. It's not going to be 100%. It's important to see,
even if it's a little bit. Wait here. I have something for you. [narrator] Al-Zahrawi is
also regarded as a pioneer of the use of medication
to treat pain, and in psychotherapy. He also manufactured medicines
based on opium. Make infusions out of these herbs
and anoint your eyes, they'll heal. And this... [chuckles] ...is for getting you in the mood. [chuckles] Thank you, sir! [chuckles] That isn't to say it was a fully
scientific method as we think of it today. Consider, for example,
that there were astrologers who calculated the exact dose of medicine that a person should take, owing to the influence of factors... Well, apart from those
somewhat peculiar things that we find a little strange, the leap that occurred
through observation, through the improvement of drugs in Islamic medicine was very large. [narrator] The Arabs had learned
from the Greeks about the theory of the four "humors": black bile, yellow bile,
phlegm and blood. Personality, illness and treatments were
based on the mixture of these humors. If black bile predominated,
the person was melancholic. Yellow bile indicated
a choleric temperament, and too much phlegm, a phlegmatic one. Plentiful blood produced the most positive
temperament, the sanguine. A good treatment rebalanced
the individual humors. The medicine is definitely more advanced
in the Islamic world than in the European north. That's mainly because the caliphate
is hugely richer than northern Europe. So it has the money to spend. It also has access to the rich traditions, both of Greece, ancient Greece, so the works of Galen,
Hippocrates and so on, which had been translated in the course
of the late eighth and ninth centuries, but also the Persian and Indian worlds. This is always important
to remember for the Islamic world. It's not just drawing
on the Mediterranean, it's also drawing on Persia and India, which are also extremely ancient,
rich traditions of knowledge. And the Islamic world
is able to combine these. [narrator] The new knowledge
of medications became a model for the first pharmacies
of Middle Ages Europe. The Arabs founded the medical
specializations of dentistry, pharmacology, anatomy and surgery, all of them disciplines that were still
to be developed in the West. Arabic textbooks were
compulsory reading for centuries, above all Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, and, of course,
the encyclopedia of Al-Zahrawi, who was better known
to Europeans as Abulcasis. It was only when bacteria,
viruses and parasites were discovered that the next completely new era
of medicine began. Europe lay in the shadow
of the Islamic world for centuries. In the 11th century, however, the Christian reconquest
of the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista, launched from
the green mountains of Asturia, had its first major victories. In addition, an appeal for help
arrived from Byzantium. The Byzantine world is under
really serious threat from the Turks. In 1071, the Byzantines suffer
a catastrophic defeat at Manzikert, so they are really keen to try
and get extra military help, and so they appeal to the West
and try and make it appealing. "Wouldn't this be wonderful if we could
recapture for the Christians the Holy Land
and the Holy City of Jerusalem?" [narrator] And indeed,
at the end of the 11th century, knights and peasants, men in search
of salvation and men without means, all set out to win back the Holy City. The Crusade ended in a victory
and a massacre. But peace did not come to Jerusalem. The city was taken and retaken many times in a war that went on
for almost 150 years. [shouting] As is so often the case, power politics
were in play behind the fighting. In Europe, the popes are fighting a battle
with the secular authorities, particularly the Holy Roman Emperor,
to try and assert their primacy. So they see this as an occasion to grab the upper hand and they say, "We can actually
make political decisions." So they also decide to back this idea
that the Byzantines put to them. And they, the Pope, encourages
sermons to be preached about Muslim iniquities, terrible things
they're doing to the Christians, and how it's important to us now
to retake for Christianity the Holy Land of Palestine and Jerusalem. [narrator] In Spain, too,
the struggle went on. The Christians wrested more
and more land back from the Muslims, in a virtually uninterrupted
small-scale war. The Emirate of Al-Andalus was fragmented and could do little
to counter the onslaught. In 1085, Christian knights took back
the first large city, Toledo. After Córdoba, it was the most important center
of Arab scholarship on European soil. The conquerors grasped
that a great treasure had fallen into their hands. In what became known
as the Translation Movement, they threw open the city's libraries
to their own scholars. Christian scholars, primarily monks, came from all over Europe
to unearth the treasure. They set to work side by side
with their Jewish colleagues. Multilingual teams labored
on the huge task of translating documents by Arabs,
Persians and Greeks as literally as possible
from Arabic into Latin. Toledo was important because
it had a very large Christian population before it had a very broad Arab culture. They had large libraries. The Christians came
into very direct contact with the Arab culture. Many people were fluent
in the two languages. They spoke Arabic well
and understand Latin very well. They were ideally placed to effect
that transfer of knowledge from the Muslim world
to the Christian world. [narrator] By the beginning
of the 13th century, the most important books
of the ancient world were completed: the works of the brilliant Ptolemy; the standard works of
the fathers of mathematics, Archimedes and Euclid; and the philosophy of Aristotle. In addition, there were the writings
of Persians, Indians and Arabs, ranging from mathematics and optics,
to medicine and philosophy. The translation of their books
raised Europe's knowledge to an entirely new level. The King of Castile, Alfonso the Wise, was among the most significant patrons
of the Translation Movement. He even had scientific and literary works
translated into Spanish, setting an example for other countries to commission translations
into their own languages. It promised education for all,
even for laypeople who did not know Latin. A collection of fables had a lasting
impact: the Kalila wa-Dimna. It was read throughout Europe, and there are echoes of it
in Reynard the Fox and the fables of La Fontaine. So far, it has been translated
into more than 60 languages. Kalila wa-Dimna was very important
because that knowledge, that literary tradition
that had arrived in the Arab world from the Persian world, which had
taken it from the Hindu world, was the basis of half of the story collections in Castilian in practically all of the Middle Ages. We find that these works
were imitated or reused in many collections of stories. [narrator] The knowledge of the Arabs
spread like a wave from Spain and Sicily, which was under Arab rule
for a long time, but also from Istanbul. An intellectual golden age followed, leading to the founding of several
universities during the Middle Ages. Scholars, educated
in the writings of Aristotle, had a decisive influence
on Western philosophy. Inspired by the Arabic books on optics,
monks ground the first "reading stones." In 15th-century Florence,
central perspective was discovered, thanks to the theory of light rays
put forward by a Muslim scholar in Cairo. It revolutionized much more than
the painting of the Renaissance. And in the 16th century, Copernicus, who deduced that the earth
goes round the sun, was still studying the works
of Arab astronomers. The prime of the Arab caliphates
was nearing its end. The descent of the Mongols spread terror
both in the East and in Europe. It was a severe blow when Genghis Khan
and his successors first advanced as far as the Mediterranean and then conquered large parts
of the Middle East. In 1258, they took Baghdad
and razed it to the ground. The House of Wisdom, the most important center
of Arab scholarship, was destroyed at the same time. The wealth of knowledge
built up by generations was lost. Countless books
were thrown into the Tigris. It is said that the river
ran black with ink. The Caliph of Baghdad was killed. And later, the Crusaders in Spain
reclaimed the last piece of European soil from Arab rule, the Emirate of Granada. To this day, the Alhambra symbolizes
the Moorish culture in Spain. Its walls had just been completed
when the Christians reclaimed the city. Their construction was therefore
the climax of a glorious age, as well as a symbol of its end. The Arab Empire is long gone. The stories of a once magnificent Baghdad and its caliphs with their thirst
for knowledge are embellished and retold, but they no longer have
any connection with the lives of most people in the Arab world. More than 400 million people
now live in the Arab League countries, spread over Africa and the Middle East. Most of them live modestly. Only a very few are part
of a vast, glittering world. For the most part, Arab society
is no longer cosmopolitan. Many conservatives
reject science as Western and incompatible with their faith. A faith that was once taken out
into the world from Mecca by the Prophet Muhammed,
who reportedly said, "The ink of the scholar is holier
than the blood of the martyr." I think given today's political climate, it's certainly important for us
in the West to appreciate that there was a time
when the Arabic-speaking world led the rest of us when it came
to science and scholarship. But it's also important
in the Islamic world, particularly for the next generation
of young Arabs, to appreciate their own cultural heritage, that their ancestors once
could have been spoken of in the same breath
as the greatest scientists, such as Newton, Einstein and Galileo. [narrator] Beside its Greco-Roman
and Judeo-Christian roots, Europe also has roots in a third culture:
the Arab-Islamic one. It was Arab scholars and rulers
who collected the knowledge of the ancient world
over a thousand years ago and continued to develop it. They promoted "global scholarship," the free exchange of ideas
beyond political and religious borders, to develop knowledge
that still serves all of humanity.
