Islamic Golden Age

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1868, the author of a Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine looked at the mosques of Damascus and saw beauty already fading. The most beautiful of them, he wrote, were "like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying" and were relics of "the golden age of Islam." That phrase, the Islamic Golden Age, names a period of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing usually dated from the 8th century to the 13th century. A traveler reaching for nostalgia gave a name to something that had ended centuries before he arrived. But what was it that he thought had decayed? Where did this flourishing happen, who carried it, and what did they actually build before a single city's fall came to mark the end? The answers run from a library in Baghdad to a hospital that turned no one away, from a man falling blindfolded through empty space to a star map still spoken in our own night sky.

• 2. A Contested Name

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  There is no unambiguous definition of the Islamic Golden Age, and the boundaries shift depending on who is counting. The period is traditionally said to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from 786 to 809, and to have ended with the siege of Baghdad in 1258. Yet one 19th century author would stretch it across the whole duration of the caliphate, or "six and a half centuries," while another ended it after only a few decades, with the death of Umar and the First Fitna.

  During the early 20th century, the term surfaced only occasionally, often pointing to the early military successes of the Rashidun caliphs. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that the phrase came into frequent use, now mostly describing the flourishing of science and mathematics under the caliphates during the 9th to 11th centuries. Some scholars push the ending later still. A few extend it to around 1350 to take in the Timurid Renaissance, others to the 15th century to include Nasrid Granada, and others to the 16th century and the rise of the Islamic gunpowder empires.

  Khan, writing in 2003, drew a narrower line. He identified the proper golden age as the two centuries between 750 and 950, arguing that the loss of territories under Harun al-Rashid worsened after the death of al-Ma'mun in 833. Mohamad Abdalla notes that the dominant view among scholars is the "decline theory," the idea that a translation era gave way to two centuries of original thinking, followed by an "age of decline" that a survey of literature since the nineteenth century shows has become the preferred paradigm.

• 3. The Translation Engine

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  Caliph al-Mansur established the House of Wisdom as a library in Abbasid-era Baghdad in 825, modeled after the academy of Jundishapur. The institution drew scholars from across the Muslim world to render the classical knowledge of the known world into Arabic and Persian. The money spent on the Translation Movement for some translations is estimated at about twice the annual research budget of the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council. The best translators, such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, earned salaries estimated to equal those of professional athletes today.

  Christians, especially adherents of the Church of the East known as Nestorians, carried much of this work. They translated Greek philosophers and ancient science into Syriac and then into Arabic. The personal physicians of the Abbasid caliphs were often Assyrian Christians, and the Bukhtishu dynasty served as physicians to the caliphs across generations. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Christian physician, led many of the scholars at the House of Wisdom. The translated works included Galen, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Archimedes.

  The Persian contribution was, in the words of Bernard Lewis, "of immense importance" culturally, politically, and even religiously. Poets of Iranian origin composing in Arabic shaped Arabic poetry itself. A new technology fed all of this. Paper, easier to make than parchment and less likely to crack than papyrus, spread from China through mass production in Samarkand and Khorasan, reaching Al-Andalus in the 10th century. Islamic paper makers devised assembly-line methods of hand-copying manuscripts, turning out editions far larger than any in Europe for centuries. For probably the first time in history, a person could make a living from only writing and selling books.

• 4. Schools And Madrasas

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  "Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim," reads one of the hadiths attributed to Muhammad, and the scholar al-Zarnuji echoed it: "learning is prescribed for us all." Literacy rates in pre-modern Islamic societies were almost certainly high, at least compared to European counterparts. Education began young, with study of Arabic and the Quran at home or in a primary school often attached to a mosque, before advanced students moved to tafsir and fiqh.

  Beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, ruling elites founded institutions of higher religious learning called madrasas, hoping to secure the cooperation of the ulema. A madrasa complex usually held a mosque, a boarding house, and a library, maintained by a waqf, a charitable endowment that paid professors and student stipends. Yet the formal attestation of attainment, the ijaza, was granted by a particular scholar rather than the institution. It placed its holder within a genealogy of scholars, the only recognized hierarchy in the system. Formal study was open only to men, but women of prominent urban families were educated privately, and many received and later issued ijazas in hadith studies, calligraphy, and poetry recitation.

  The University of Al Karaouine, founded in 859, is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest degree-granting university. The Al-Azhar University grew from a madrasa of the Fatimid caliphate, whose rulers traced their descent to Muhammad's daughter Fatimah and named it using a variant of her honorific title Al-Zahra, the brilliant. Organized instruction in the Al-Azhar Mosque began in 978. The Spanish capital of Córdoba, which surpassed Constantinople as Europe's largest city, became a world-leading center of learning that produced numerous polymaths.

• 5. Charting The Heavens

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  In about 964, the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi described a "nebulous spot" in the constellation of Andromeda in his Book of Fixed Stars. It was the first definitive reference to what is now known as the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. Astronomy grew quickly here for two reasons. The Islamic world sat close to the ancient lands of the Greeks and their manuscripts, and religious observance required prayer at exact times, which sharpened the demand for precise timekeeping.

  Ptolemy's geocentric system placed the Sun, Moon, and planets in orbit around the Earth, moving on epicycles whose centers rode on eccentric deferents, with motion measured uniformly around a point called the equant. Ibn al-Haytham, a leader of physics in 11th-century Cairo, was among the first to criticize it. In the 13th century, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi built the Maragha Observatory in what is now Iran. He found the equant unsatisfying and replaced it with a geometrical technique called a Tusi-couple, which generates linear motion from the sum of two circular motions. Working in Damascus in 1350, Ibn al-Shatir used the Tusi-couple to eliminate the equant entirely and produce a model that was mathematically sound.

  The astrolabe, a Greek invention, became an essential Arabic instrument, a handheld two-dimensional model of the sky for solving problems of spherical astronomy. The earliest astrolabe in existence today comes from the Islamic period, made by Nastulus in 927-28 and now held in the Kuwait National Museum. The night sky still carries the evidence in its names. Betelgeuse, Rigel, Vega, Aldebaran, and Fomalhaut come directly from Arabic origins or from translations of Ptolemy's Greek descriptions, and are still in use today.

• 6. Numbers And Method

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  The Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi has been described as the father or founder of algebra, and shaped the development of arithmetic and Hindu-Arabic numerals. Omar Khayyam, another Persian, is credited with identifying the foundations of analytic geometry and found the general geometric solution of the cubic equation. His Treatise on Demonstrations of Problems of Algebra, written in 1070, was eventually transmitted to Europe. Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi found algebraic and numerical solutions to various cubic equations and developed the concept of a function. Jamshid al-Kashi's estimate of pi would not be surpassed for 180 years.

  Ibn al-Haytham, known in Europe as Alhazen, has been described as the "world's first true scientist" for his approach to experimentation. He discovered the sum formula for the fourth power and used it to find the volume of a paraboloid. Avicenna set out rules for testing the effectiveness of drugs, insisting that an effect be seen constantly or after many repetitions to count. The physician Rhazes pushed further toward controlled trials. "If you want to study the effect of bloodletting on a condition," he advised, "divide the patients into two groups, perform bloodletting only on one group, watch both, and compare the results."

  Geometry shaped the visual world too. Islamic art uses girih tilings built from five tile shapes, a regular decagon, an elongated hexagon, a bow tie, a rhombus, and a regular pentagon, all with equal-length sides and angles that are multiples of 36 degrees. In 2007, the physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt argued that 15th-century girih resembled quasicrystalline Penrose tilings. Al-Kindi, known in Europe as Alkindus, gave the earliest use of statistical inference in a manuscript on deciphering cryptographic messages, containing the first description of frequency analysis.

• 7. Bodies And Hospitals

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  Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis, in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon, was the first known scholar to contradict the Galen School's claim that blood could pass between the heart's ventricles through the septum. He argued instead that all blood reaching the left ventricle had first passed through the lung, and predicted small pores between the pulmonary artery and vein. That prediction preceded Marcello Malpighi's discovery of the pulmonary capillaries by 400 years. The Commentary was rediscovered in the twentieth century in the Prussian State Library in Berlin.

  Rhazes built much of his reputation on careful observation. In neurology he stated that nerves had motor or sensory functions, describing 7 cranial and 31 spinal cord nerves, and classifying the spinal nerves into 8 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 3 sacral, and 3 coccygeal. He distinguished smallpox from measles, two diseases previously lumped together as a single cause of rashes. Asked to choose the site for a new hospital in Baghdad, he hung pieces of meat around the city and recommended the spot where the meat putrefied slowest. Al-Zahrawi, sometimes called the "Father of surgery," wrote three textbooks on surgery, one cataloging 278 instruments, and was the first to describe an ectopic pregnancy.

  The earliest known Islamic hospital was built in 805 in Baghdad by order of Harun al-Rashid. By the 15th century Damascus had six hospitals, and Córdoba alone had 50 major hospitals. Hospitals were forbidden by law to turn away patients who could not pay, and by the 10th century laws kept them open 24 hours a day. They were the first to require medical diplomas to license doctors, tested in two steps by a chief medical officer. The 13th-century Qalawun hospital in Cairo, endowed by the Egyptian governor Al-Mansur Qalawun, declared in its waqf that it would keep all patients "until they are completely recovered," with all costs borne by the hospital, "whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor."

• 8. Sound Lutes And Cities

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  Ziryab moved from Baghdad to al-Andalus, where he set up a school of music and was among the first to add a fifth string to the oud, between 822 and 852. He was a renowned polymath whose contributions to western civilization included formal dining, haircuts, and chess. At the end of the ninth century, the philosopher Al-Farabi established the foundations of Arabic music theory based on the maqammat, or musical modes, drawing on Ziryab's music. In his Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir, the Major Book of Music, Al-Farabi detailed how to tune an oud using mathematical ratios.

  The 13th-century poet Rumi, also known as Mawlana, wrote some of the finest poetry in the Persian language and remains one of the best selling poets in the United States. Other Persian poets carried far beyond their world. Hafez was read by William Jones, Thoreau, Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Engels, while Saadi was cited by Goethe, Hegel, and Voltaire. One Thousand and One Nights, an anthology of folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Abbasid Caliphate, gave the world Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Sinbad the Sailor.

  Builders left their own arguments in stone. The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and dating largely from the 9th century, is the ancestor of all the mosques in the western Islamic world excluding Turkey and the Balkans. The Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq, completed in 847, paired rows of columns with a huge spiralling minaret. Moorish architecture reached its peak with the Alhambra, the palace and fortress of Granada, its interior adorned in red, blue, and gold, its walls covered in geometrically patterned glazed tiles. The Banu Musa brothers, in their 9th-century Book of Ingenious Devices, described an automatic flute player that may have been the first programmable machine, its sounds produced through hot steam and adjustable to various patterns.