Original subtitles

(ORIENTAL MUSIC)

This is the untold story

of the making of the modern world.

A fresh perspective,

charting the spread of civilisation across the globe.

From the dawn of mankind

and the first cities and empires

to the belief in One God.

(Calls for prayer)

We follow the flow of civilisation

from the Middle East.

An extraordinary place that has been a vital link

between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia.

An economic, scientific and cultural centre of the world.

This is an epic journey of discovery...

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

from the east to the west.

Damascus, Syria.

The faithful are called to prayer at the Great Umayyad Mosque.

Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!

Allah Akbar...

This is a tradition that has marked out the hours of the day

in an unbroken sequence for 1300 years.

...Muhammad rasool Allah.

It is an appeal heard across the globe

by believers in one of the world's great religions, Islam.

It is testament to the enduring power

of the spiritual message of the prophet Muhammad.

But it is also evidence of another tradition in Islam,

its spirit of discovery and rational investigation.

Its embrace of science.

This is the story of the forgotten contribution

of medieval Islam to the history of world civilisation.

At the low point of European history,

Muslims brought together the knowledge of the world...

founded great institutions of learning...

and created the foundations of modern science.

The discovery of this knowledge kick-started Europe's emergence

from a Dark Age.

And it formed the basis of the revolution we call the Renaissance.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Built at the height of Europe's colonial dominance

in the 19th century.

Its Cast Gallery is filled with the ghosts of great European artworks

illustrating the West's own view

of its rise to global cultural supremacy.

These works mark stages in the progress

of what was called “Western Civilisation",

portrayed as a humane and rational approach to art and life,

which first flourished under Greece and Rome, then died out.

It was rediscovered, according to Western tradition,

by modern Europeans

in the time we call the “rebirth" or the Renaissance.

This story, cherished by the West,

is encapsulated in one of the most iconic images of Renaissance art.

This painting which was done by Raphael for the Vatican originally

encapsulates everything

that the Europeans thought about their Renaissance.

It's called “The School of Athens"

and these are the great philosophers debating the meaning of life.

In this painting, great figures of the Renaissance

masquerade as their ancient Greek forebears.

Raphael himself plays the painter Apelles.

Michelangelo appears as Heraclitus

and in the centre, Plato bears the face of Leonardo da Vinci.

One of the stories that this painting tells

is that there was a direct handover of Greek culture

to the European Renaissance.

It is a homage to the intellectual creativity

that flourished for 1000 years under Greece and Home.

But a millennium before Raphael's day

this so-called Classical Age had come crashing to an end.

In the 5th century barbarians from the north

had put an end to the glory of Rome.

Classical civilisation in the West

had been consumed by a tide of violence,

plunging Europe into a Dark Age.

The forum, the main square of ancient Rome,

where Cicero and Caesar had addressed the Roman populace,

reverted to agricultural land.

By Raphael's time it was known simply

as the Campo Vaccine, the cow pasture.

With the fall of Rome,

Western Europe had lost an entire culture of urban life,

and with it contact with the philosophy of ancient Greece.

The painting illustrates the longing of Raphael's contemporaries

to regain what was lost in that moment.

There is no hint that anything lay between or beyond

these two worlds but ignorance.

But even here there's a clue to another story.

What's fascinating is a rather shadowy figure

almost in the corner leaning over the back of Pythagoras.

Now this man was called Averroes

and he was an Islamic scholar.

And he's one of the very few hints that we get

of how much the Renaissance actually owed

to the Islamic world.

This solitary figure stands for the crucial missing link

between the Classical and Renaissance worlds.

In the Middle East there was no Dark Age.

There the Romans were a blip in a much longer history of civilisation.

The Eastern Roman Empire

fell to a dynamic new force that emerged from the Arabian desert.

The invaders brought with them a new religion, Islam.

Within a century the Caliphs in Damascus

had made themselves masters of an empire larger than Rome's.

The new Islamic world stretched from India to the west coast of Spain.

Unlike the tribes that invaded Home,

these new rulers could not be called unsophisticated barbarians.

In their capital Damascus

the buildings themselves tell the story of an empire

that was more concerned to develop the culture they found

than to destroy it.

In 706 they began work on the first Great Mosque in Islamic history.

But they took as their starting point

a structure that is one of the world's oldest sacred sites.

3000 years ago this is where the mighty god Haddad

was feared and was offered blood sacrifices.

In the 1st century this was small part of the huge Temple of Jupiter

which remained the Temple of Jupiter until the 4th century

when this became the Cathedral of John the Baptist.

And it remained so until the 8th century

when this place became the greatest mosque of the new Islamic empire.

The Umayyad Mosque is testament to the place of Islam

within a much longer story of civilisation.

The new mosaics and minarets were built by Christian craftsmen

into the fabric of the old cathedral and pagan temple.

Just as we can see around us in the architectural evidence

that this new empire didn't knock down what was there before it,

but it actually built on it to a new level of sophistication,

it did the same to achieve

its new level of intellectual sophistication that it required.

This new religion had its own reasons

for respecting and developing the knowledge of the past.

In Islam, believers are taught to pray at five specific times a day

and so from the faith's beginning

it was very important to accurately measure the passing of time.

At the top of the minaret of the great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus

we have a beautiful sundial made by lbn al-Shatir in the 13th century.

Sundials used to adorn the courts and walls of the mosques

because the time of the five daily prayers in Islam

depended on the position of the sun in the sky.

To be able to predict this you need a sundial such as this one.

This sundial works on a system of hours

dividing the time from sunrise till sunset

and the 24 hour system we use today,

as well as indicating the times of the five calls to prayer.

(Praying in Arabic)

As well as determining the precise time,

Muslims needed to know their exact position on earth.

Also you need to be able to determine the direction to Mecca

because Muslims usually will pray directing themselves towards Mecca

wherever they are on the earth.

So they need to do time-keeping, global positioning,

based on the movements of the sun, planets and moon.

The efforts of the people who positioned this sundial

to understand the universe in scientific terms

were motivated, not discouraged, by their faith in the word of God.

It's motivated not only by its rituals and timekeeping needs,

but also with its intellectual stimulation

because the Koran is full of verses

that actually ask you to look at the sky

and use your rationale to ponder the reason behind the creation,

the reason why there is precise movement

for the celestial bodies.

The reason why there are irregularities,

why there is symmetry, just to think about the reason behind everything

and find out yourself.

There are many passages in the Koran for example,

that tell you to look around at the world and marvel at it,

but also come to understand it better,

because the world is full of signs

that it has been made by a wise and just and merciful creator.

So Muslim scientists in this medieval period,

thought of science as a way of studying

the work of God in the world.

The arrival, two centuries after Rome's fall,

of a new champion of rational enquiry

would breathe new lite into the dormant tradition

of ancient philosophy.

The Arab rulers were very interested

in not only preserving the culture and the learning in particular,

and with a certain emphasis on scientific learning

of the areas that they'd taken over,

but they wanted to gather this information together

beginning with the Abbasids in Baghdad.

In 750 the Abbasid dynasty

founded a new city on the banks of the Tigris.

They called it Madinat as-Salam.

But it was instantly known by its local name, Baghdad.

It was built on a perfectly circular plan

centring on the glorious palace of the Caliph.

Around it grew the greatest city of the age.

If I had to live in the 8th century I'd want to live in Baghdad.

That was the most exciting place, it's where the action was.

It's the centre

of the most powerful empire in the world at the time,

and there's a huge amount of money being poured into creating culture,

learning, building a new city.

It must have been fabulously exciting.

That city survives today

only in the buildings it inspired elsewhere,

like the lbn Tulun Mosque in Egypt.

It hints at the opulence of what was once a cosmopolitan metropolis

which drew in talent from around the world.

You have Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Sabaean

and other scholars all working together.

Different schools of thought were able to work together

in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom

which enabled them to produce something new.

Scholars were drawn in from around the empire and beyond

by the desire of the Abbasid dynasty and their courtiers

to create an intellectual culture

that rivalled the empires of the past.

At its epicentre was the royal library known, evocatively,

as the House of Wisdom.

The building itself has long since vanished.

But fortunately evidence for its contents

survives 3000 miles away to the west.

In the archives of the Bodleian Library in Oxford,

manuscripts survive which reveal how the scholars of Baghdad

helped save Greek knowledge from oblivion.

I'm looking at a copy of Euclid's Elements.

This is one of the most revolutionary works

in the history of mathematics,

written by Euclid in ancient Greece

around the time of Aristotle and Plato.

If you look through it you can see that it's full of diagrams

being a book about geometry.

And for other ancient Greek authors and even down to the current day,

the Elements sets out a kind of model of science,

a kind of science where you build up from these first principles.

The interesting thing about this copy of the Elements though

is that it's not in Greek, it's in Arabic.

This is a medieval manuscript

and it's a copy of a translation of Euclid's Elements into Arabic

that was made in the 9th century

as part of a huge translation movement

in which works of Greek science and philosophy

were translated into Arabic in Baghdad

under the Abbasid Caliphs.

Under the patronage of the Abbasid rulers in Baghdad,

a systematic process began

by which the great works of Greek philosophy

were sought out and translated into Arabic.

This was an unprecedented move by one culture to absorb, en masse,

the wisdom of another.

The translation movement of which this copy of the Elements

was such an important part, was absolutely massive.

So it included texts from pretty much every area

of Greek literary endeavour.

Obviously mathematics, but also for example astronomy,

works on music and also of course philosophy.

So if you wanted to read the works

of say Aristotle or Ptolemy or Galen or Euclid in the 9th century,

mostly you could not do it in Europe.

Most of the activity in science and philosophy

was going on in the Arabic-speaking world

and especially in Baghdad at this time.

You have to imagine a fairly diffused

and complex set of groups

spread out across not only Baghdad

but the whole what we would call Middle East.

And all of these groups would have been discussing

what for them were the hot topics of the day

which meant things like Aristotelian metaphysics

and Galen's views on medicine.

The translators of Baghdad were doing nothing less

than creating a new language of world knowledge.

The philosophy of Aristotle,

Galen's revolutionary work on medicine,

Ptolemy's astronomy,

Euclid's Elements,

and Pythagoras' geometry

would now be texts the world read not in Greek but in Arabic.

And Baghdad didn't live on Greek wisdom alone.

Syriac Christians, Zoroastrians from Persia

and even followers of ancient paganism all contributed ideas.

From India the Arabs learnt the modern system of numbers,

and new information on the paths of the stars.

The translation movement condensed the knowledge of the globe

into a single language

which could be read and studied from Spain to India.

As time went on, the centralised authority of Baghdad

began to devolve to new centres of power,

each with its own emir or caliph

and with it went this new culture of learning.

In 909, the new Fatimid dynasty came to power in Egypt.

Within a century they had built a new city

on the banks of the Nile.

Quickly Cairo became one of the great cities of the Arab world.

At the heart of this bustling new city,

the Fatimids built the Al-Azhar Mosque.

But this was not just a place of prayer,

this was a purpose-built institution

dedicated to the education of the people.

This is a place that calls itself proudly

the oldest university in the world.

One of the biggest prayer halls in Al-Azhar.

In here people would normally pray during prayer times,

at columns like this for instance.

Throughout the medieval period you'd see professors sitting

and having circles of students around them.

They would explain particular subjects

or give lectures on particular source books.

You would have normally the most advanced students

sitting closest to the professor,

and then the less advanced students,

and all these lectures were open to the public.

Anyone could walk and sit in there and listen to the professor.

At the feet of these columns

sat some of the greatest minds of their time.

Students would choose the professors they want,

who taught different subjects ranging from the law,

Koran, jurisprudence, philosophy, mathematics,

and some of these professors were very popular,

that we have larger crowds coming from the streets

and larger and larger number of students sitting.

They would have to sit on higher places

in order to make themselves heard to all these crowds.

The foundation of Al-Azhar by the new rulers of Egypt

set the tone for a flourishing of rival centres of learning

in the new competing courts of the Muslim world.

This became part of the political competition

between different sovereigns

throughout the Middle East during this period

it's a sort of a pattern that kept repeating

with all these new small kingdoms or principalities or new empires,

where rulers and sovereigns and even rich people and big generals

would build mosques, madrassas

in order to allow for teaching

and for the... and they would host and sponsor scholars

to come and teach in their schools.

Across the Muslim world

madrassas and universities sprang up to rival Al-Azhar.

In Fes, Morocco,

the Kairaouine University was the first,

and it gave birth to a whole university town,

with smaller institutions of learning,

many of them architectural wonders like the Bou lnania Madrasah.

The madrasah's every surface

bears witness to the intellectual sophistication of those times.

The Bou lnania Madrasah housed and fed students for free

until as recently as the 1960s.

It was part of an enduring and international culture of scholarship.

The Islamic world in the Middle Ages

represented a massive free trade zone

in which scholars at the courts of different rulers

and the universities they founded,

could exchange and review each others' ideas.

With spectacular results.

This was an environment which did more

than just preserve and pass on the works of ancient philosophy.

The Arab civilisation didn't just serve

as a freezer for the Greek civilisation.

With their interest in this knowledge

in astronomy and mathematics

they were able to, you know, come up with new things,

they were creative people.

From the beginnings of the translation movement,

the scholars of the Arab world

were generating revolutionary new ideas.

As soon as the scientific works

were being received into the Arabic language,

immediately you find scholars

building on those works and coming up with their own ideas.

So you have mathematicians coming up with new proofs

and proving things that had never been proven before.

You have doctors

immediately going beyond what they found in Hippocrates and Galen

and you have philosophers

who are devising their own philosophical ideas.

The new world of Arab philosophy

would produce a new kind of intellectual,

with a distinctive approach to learning.

These were men whose research was not confined to the library.

One of the men who taught at the columns of Al-Azhar

was lbn al-Haytham, known to the West as Alhazen.

He is the founding genius of the modern science of optics,

the man who first demonstrated the key properties of light.

I can demonstrate this here differently,

using this glass tube.

We're going to be able to see

that the light travels through this tube in a straight line

and is escaping here and hitting the screen at this point.

This basic truth that light travels in straight lines

was first proven by lbn al-Haytham.

He also established rules of the process we call reflection.

This tube is reflective

so the ray of light is now reflected

to hit the other side of the tube here again

and again and again, zig-zagging its way out.

If I change the angle

you can see the light still travelling in a straight line,

hitting this end here

and then bouncing to hit this edge here

then bounce back again, zig-zagging its way through this tube.

Zig-zagging through this tube is exactly what happens to the light

inside an optical cable.

lbn al-Haytham developed his theory of optics

into a holistic vision of how human beings see.

He conducted a brilliant experiment,

to which he gave the name Al-Bayt al-Muthlim

which means Dark Room,

or in Latin, Camera Obscura.

We have a beautiful view of a nice church just outside the window here.

Now if I close these blinds

turning this into a dark room

and through this pinhole I created in this blind

I'll be able to capture an image of this church

on this transparent screen.

However, it's an inverted image

as lbn al-Haytham explained and demonstrated is,

that the light reflected from the bell tower of this church

is going to travel in a straight line diagonally

through the pinhole to hit the bottom of the screen,

whereas the light travelling from the bottom of the church

is going to reflect and travel in a straight line

through the pinhole to hit the top of the screen.

And now if I let this eye look through this pinhole

I'm going to be able to see the image of the church again

inverted back on the retina of this eye.

The brilliance of lbn al-Haytham

was to see this was the secret to the workings of the human eye.

This was due to his unique methodology.

By positing a theory, testing it with experiments,

then publishing results,

Al-Haytham and his colleagues in the Arab world

had taken what the Greeks called natural philosophy

and changed it into something different,

something that was starting to resemble what we call science.

He carried a huge amount of experiments

to prove the things that many people thought, they're obvious.

He wanted to establish everything experimentally

before moving on to the next stage.

Which is very close to the modern way we practise science.

So he's actually one of the founders of the modern scientific approach.

lbn al-Haytham was part of a scientific revolution

that emerged from the mosques and madrasahs of the Islamic world.

Islamic scientists effectively invented modern chemistry

giving us the words alchemy, alembic, alcohol and alkali.

Physicians like lbn al-Nafis and the great Avicenna

wrote works which remained canonical until the 19th century.

The Arabs invented astronomical instruments

which would eventually guide Europeans to the New World.

And they measured the circumference of the Earth and mapped its surface

with an unprecedented accuracy.

An atmosphere of ideas and invention,

pervaded society from India to the west of Spain.

It was only a matter of time

before it came to the notice of Europeans.

In the year 1000,

Christian Europe was a culture at a crossroads,

a society beginning to emerge from a dark age,

but still centuries from the self-confidence of the Renaissance.

Its scholars remained cloistered in monasteries,

restricted to a very limited intellectual diet.

The work that we have in front of us is what's called in Latin,

De Temporum Ratione, On the Reasoning of Times.

And it is devoted to working out the times of the church festivals,

in particular Easter.

This work represents the cutting edge of European astronomy

at the turn of the millennium,

but compared to what was happening in the Middle East

it was hopelessly limited.

What it doesn't have is anything theoretical.

There's no theoretical astronomy here.

He doesn't tell you about the course of the sun or the moon

through the heavens,

and he doesn't talk about the planets or the fixed stars at all.

The problem for European authors

was the tiny corpus of source material they had to draw on

compared to the libraries of the Islamic world.

We're talking about rather small libraries,

I mean if a cathedral has a library of a 100 books,

that's a large number.

And when you compare this, for example,

with the contemporary library in Cordoba

which, according to reputation, had 80,000 volumes,

this is miniscule, miniscule number of books.

European thought was separated by a vast chasm

from the vibrant world of Islamic science.

It was a gull that would be spanned in the most unlikely way.

In 1095, Christian knights set out

on the first of centuries of Holy Wars against Islam.

For 200 years, Christianity and Islam were religions at war.

But ironically this new contact

was also bringing the two faiths closer together.

In the wake of the warriors and monks of the First Crusade

came another kind of pilgrim.

It seems as it there were other people joining the Crusades

who were just very fascinated about new avenues,

new opportunities which were being offered on an intellectual level.

Christian scholars came back from the Crusades

with a fascinating glimpse into the wisdom of the Arabs.

But it was not so much in the Holy Land

as in the contested regions of Southern Europe

that first contacts evolved into a steady flow of ideas.

The Crusades were aimed not only at Jerusalem,

but also at Sicily and Spain.

There are a number of different points of contact.

Perhaps the areas where you see the most or the greatest amount

of say transmission of knowledge, transmission of culture,

would be in areas like Sicily or Spain

where first you have a Muslim society

that then is re-conquered or replaced by a Christian authority.

And they absorb a lot of what had been left behind.

In Spain, a world of intricate design,

luxury and sophistication awaited,

which in the 11th century

Christians were only starting to discover.

Its palaces survive as monuments to Islamic wisdom,

that can literally be read like a book.

Each surface bears the trace

of some philosophical idea or geometrical theorem.

(SPANISH MUSIC)

But the historical tide was starting to turn.

In 1085 an event occurred that would affect world history forever.

The Christian King Alfonso VI entered the frontier city of Toledo.

This moment marked the beginning of the end for Muslim Spain.

But it signified a new dawn

for the intellectual life of Christian Europe.

When he entered Toledo,

Alfonso found books in quantities that astounded Christian eyes.

Tending these books was a literate population

of Jews, Christians and Muslims,

who knew both Arabic and Spanish.

After 1085,

Toledo became the centre of a massive process

of translation of Arabic works into Latin.

Scholars, frustrated by the restrictions of European learning,

flooded to Toledo

to read for themselves the famed works of the Arab masters.

Daniel of Morley, who knows Adelard's works very well,

he tells of a story of going to Paris

and finding that the scholars there

are exceedingly boring

because all they do is have very big manuscripts in front of them

and they're making little annotations in the margin.

These manuscripts in fact seemed to be works of law.

And so he says “I went to Toledo because I heard

“that they studied the Quadrivium there,

“maths, astronomy, arithmetic, and I was not disappointed."

Obviously it was very exciting for him

and he wrote a book describing his experiences in Toledo

and saying how much more clearly

the Arabs explained things than did the Latins.

An event of historic significance was unfolding in Toledo.

The long forgotten works of the Greek philosophers

and the masterpieces of Arab science

were starting to materialise... in the West.

As scholars returned home from Toledo

they brought with them this priceless wisdom.

The impact was immediate and obvious.

A society which until recently had lain in the Dark Ages

began to construct a grand new culture of its own.

800 miles from Toledo, in the west of England,

traces have been found of the influence of Muslims

on Europe's re-emergence.

In Salisbury Cathedral,

symbols have been discovered

which are blandly familiar to us today.

But in 13th century Europe were a new and exotic Eastern import.

This is a three written on a beam, a roof beam

which we know was put up round about 1240, just after 1240.

As far as we know this is the first use of a Hindu-Arabic numeral

in an architectural context.

And if we look at the neighbouring beams

we will see here a two,

and on the next beam there's a four.

And on the other side too

we have one, two, three, four marked,

but with an N after each numeral,

which suggests that those are the north beams.

So these numerals were put up by the carpenters

in order to indicate the order in which the beams should be placed.

This numbering system,

in which nine numerals were complemented by a zero,

which you could add to 1 to create 10, 100

and infinite possibilities beyond,

was invented in India and adopted by the Arabs

in the 8th century.

It's flexibility and ease of use amazed Europeans.

When people became aware

of these Hindu-Arabic numerals and their potential,

the fact that they had place value,

and the fact that there was a single number

for a single meaning, with a single meaning,

it was natural that they should use them

instead of the Roman numerals which were much more cumbersome,

which where you need three or four strokes for each numeral and so on.

These numbers themselves were only the tip of an iceberg of new ideas

which entered Europe at this time,

and allowed Europeans to build cathedrals

of the scale and grandeur of Salisbury.

It's nice to think that they were used

alongside or in conjunction with

much more advanced mathematical techniques,

actually applied to the building

of a gothic cathedral such as Salisbury Cathedral,

which in itself is based

on much more rigorous mathematical planning

than earlier cathedrals.

Cathedrals like Salisbury

tell in themselves the story of Europe's adoption of Islamic wisdom.

They were both the centres of learning

where ideas first penetrated,

and the places where those ideas were turned into stone.

And so we can think of the whole cathedral community,

the architects, the builders, the carpenters,

and the scholars, the teachers, the clerics,

all being part of an intellectual movement

which indeed owes a lot to Arabic science.

Under the influence of the Arabs

scientific thought was starting to infiltrate

Europe's ecclesiastical centres of learning.

In the process, they were starting to evolve into something else.

Across Europe

institutions were founded on the principles of secular learning

inspired by the Arabs.

They were called universities.

Europe was waking up from its intellectual slumbers,

fed by the sheer quantity and range of works

coming in from Toledo.

The works that more than any other would transform European thought,

were the translations from Arabic

of the long lost writings of Aristotle.

The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle

were fundamentally important to the University movement

because Aristotle dealt with things

like rationale and reason and logic and proof of your argument.

These concepts would form the basis of Western Europe's transformation

into a civilisation based on rational enquiry.

But to decipher the works of Aristotle,

Western Europeans would need the guidance

of the people who had done it before.

There's a problem with Aristotle

because actually his works are immensely complicated

and you often need help understanding and interpreting them.

The work that guided Europeans

through their first struggles with Aristotle

was the work of the Muslim philosopher lbn Rushd,

known to the West as Averroes.

What happened at the same time

as these translations were being made in Toledo,

was that Averroes,

not so far away, in Cordova in Islamic Spain,

was writing commentaries on Aristotle's works.

Aristotle was always regarded as being difficult to understand

and very laconic, missing things out.

He needed interpretation.

And Averroes somehow understood Aristotle

better than anybody else.

So if you'd been in any university in Europe in the Renaissance

then the students would have had Aristotle in one hand

and the commentary of Averroes in the other.

In fact he wasn't called Averroes often,

he was known simply as “The Commentator...

Averroes was only the greatest of a pantheon of Islamic scholars

to whom the Europeans turned to understand the new sciences

they were beginning to study.

Under their influence,

Europe was becoming a different kind of place.

As the 12th became the 13th then 14th century,

Europe discovered a new curiosity and dynamism.

The reconquest of Spain

was completed just as Europe discovered a new world

across the Atlantic.

The world's centre of gravity was moving west.

The place that symbolises this era more than any,

still has the power to astound.

Millions of people visit Florence to celebrate a city

where European civilisation finally came of age.

This was the city of Dante and Petrarch,

of Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli.

A place where new ideas were being forged

that would take Europe out of the Middle Ages.

Traditionally the inspiration for this

is thought to have come from ancient Greece and Rome,

but even at this defining moment

the Renaissance masters were still standing on the shoulders

of the giants of Muslim philosophy.

This debt to Muslim learning

extended even to the greatest scientific discovery of the era.

Nicolaus Copernicus is the man to whom we owe the idea

that the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

In this book,

Copernicus believed that the Sun is at the centre

and all the planets, but the Moon, orbit the Sun.

His theory rested on a particular diagram

which explained why planets sometimes seemed to move not in circles

but in straight lines.

There is a first circle,

and a second circle

which centre is moving around the first one,

and the planet is moving on the circumference of the second circle.

And the combination is motion

along the diameter of this device.

This diagram explains what is essentially an optical illusion,

that one circle moving within another circle

appears to be moving up and down a straight line.

Copernicus believed this is what we saw when we observed the planets.

So this is a mathematical, geometrical device,

that Copernicus uses several times inside the book

for explain the possession of the equinoxes for instance

but also for explain part of the model of Mercury.

The diagram showing the movement of Mercury

was only one of many times Copernicus used this device

to explain the solar system.

But extraordinarily

it appears that this utterly crucial idea was not Copernicus' own.

It already existed in the Muslim world.

This is the so-called Al-Tusi couple,

because it was already conceived

by an astronomer in the 13th century

that was an Arabic astronomer that was called Al-Tusi.

Al-Tusi was an Islamic astronomer based in Iran.

If you put his diagram side by side with that of Copernicus

the debt of the European scientist to Al-Tusi becomes clear.

It is an open question if Copernicus

knew something about the Islamic astronomer or not,

but what is certain is that his models of the planets

are very similar to those of the Arabic astronomer,

just changing the position of the Earth and the Sun.

This discovery reveals that our modern vision of the solar system

owes a crucial debt to centuries of astronomical work

by Islamic scientists.

It is only one of a host of Islamic ideas

on which the European Renaissance was based.

It was not just the substance of science

that the Renaissance learnt from Muslims.

It was the philosophy that lay behind it.

Copernicus' discovery was immediately controversial

as it contradicted the teachings of the church

that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

The clashes that followed

have come to define a conception of secular rationalism

that the West regards as peculiarly its own.

But this too had an Islamic precedent.

There had been famous debates in Europe

about the validity of secular and religious thought

and whether those two could run along together,

whether you could have scientific and philosophical exploration

and also believe in God.

But actually these were already arguments

that had been played out in the Islamic world.

Averroes was not only a commentator on Aristotle,

he was also the man who taught Western science

how to face down conservative opposition.

He said there are two paths to real knowledge.

One through rational thought and one through divine revelation.

And he met quite a bit of resistance from the Muslim authorities.

Averroes' arguments in his defence

were used by the scholars of the first European universities

to justify the study of natural philosophy.

Averroes' argument is very simple.

He says that philosophy is the search tor the truth,

and that it God is true the two can exist side by side.

Now his ideas were immensely influential in the West

for centuries after,

and they were used when people were trying to justify

religious and secular learning existing side by side.

The Europeans of the Middle Ages

had discovered in the philosophers of the Muslim world

pioneers of an idea that still shapes the modern world

that the universe can be understood through reason,

without harm to religion.

Perhaps the opponents of Averroes

should have listened to the words of one Christian translator...

“Of course God rules the universe.

“But we may and should enquire into the natural world.

“The Arabs teach us that."

Subtitles © SBS Australia 2012