The Legacy of Arab Science

At school the majority of us were taught that between the Classical world of the Romans and the Greeks, and the European Renaissance, there was a time in which learning and knowhow of any kind simply stopped. This so-called era of the ‘Dark Ages’ was – we were told – a void, a time of scholastic tumbleweed.

But in reality nothing could have been farther from the truth. In ninth century Baghdad, the son of Harun al-Rashid brought together all the books in the known world at a research centre called ‘The House of Wisdom’. He had these works translated into Arabic, and studied by Muslims, Christians and Hindus and Jews. The combined knowledge of human history was dissected, re-evaluated, and improved upon.

The result was a vast and astonishing contribution to the arts and sciences, made possible by a fraternity of polymathic geniuses. Their work was brought to an abrupt halt by the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, but not before it had sparked the European Renaissance.

The mobile phones in our pockets and the computers on which we surf the internet, our low-tech maps and our high-tech GPS systems, all of them were made possible by the House of Wisdom.

In his fascinating essay THE LEGACY OF ARAB SCIENCE, Tahir Shah discusses the often-forgotten contribution of the Arabs of the Abbasid Age, reflecting on how their breakthroughs helped shape the world in which we live.

This essay is just over 6,700 words in length.