All language subtitles for East to West 4of7 The Muslim Renaissance

(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