The Legacy of Arab Science

by Tahir Shah

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.

Genres: History

25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 20, 2013

About the author

Tahir Shah was born in London, and raised primarily at the family’s home, Langton House, in the English countryside – where founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Baden Powell was also brought up.

Along with his twin and elder sisters, Tahir was continually coaxed to regard the world around him through Oriental eyes. This included being exposed from early childhood to Eastern stories, and to the back-to-front humour of the wise fool, Nasrudin.

Having studied at a leading public school, Bryanston, Tahir took a degree in International Relations, his particular interest being in African dictatorships of the mid-1980s. His research in this area led him to travel alone through a wide number of failing African states, including Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Zaire.

After university, Tahir embarked on a plethora of widespread travels through the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, and Africa, drawing them together in his first travelogue, Beyond the Devil’s Teeth. In the years that followed, he published more than a dozen works of travel. These quests – for lost cities, treasure, Indian magic, and for the secrets of the so-called Birdmen of Peru – led to what is surely one of the most extraordinary bodies of travel work ever published.

In the early 2000s, with two small children, Tahir moved his young family from an apartment in London’s East End to a supposedly haunted mansion in the middle of a Casablanca shantytown. The tale of the adventure was published in his bestselling book, The Caliph’s House.

In recent years, Tahir Shah has released a cornucopia of work, embracing travel, fiction, and literary criticism. He has also made documentaries for National Geographic TV and the History Channel, and published hundreds of articles in leading magazines, newspapers, and journals. His oeuvre is regarded as exceptionally original and, as an author, he is considered as a champion of the new face of publishing.

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Reviews

[Toni]

'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.'
If one doen't know the past one doesn't know the present. If one knows neither past or present, how is one to gauge the furture, let alone know it.