Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

by S. Frederick Starr

In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds--remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia--drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China.

Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America--five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia.

Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asia, Islam, Philosophy, Middle East, Religion

697 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 13, 2013

About the author

Stephen Frederick Starr (born March 24, 1940) is an American expert on Russian and Eurasian affairs, a musician, and a former college president, having served as President of Oberlin College for 11 years.

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally picked this book off my shelf after reading the masterful Tarikh al-Hind by the Central Asian polymath Mohammad al-Biruni. I wanted to know out of what milieu such a brilliant mind could have emerged. I’m glad I finally read Lost Enlightenment, because it opened up many new vistas of thought and reoriented my understanding of world history. Though Central Asia is considered by most to be a relative backwater today – crushed for a century under the Soviet Union and still largely smothered today by domestic authoritarians – the region has a rich history, to put it mildly. Central Asia was perhaps the most intellectually dynamic region of the world until the rise of the modern West. It produced more great philosophers, scientists, artists and intellectuals than any other region, by far. Who could have known that such a grand civilization might be utterly effaced from memory?

Cities like Balkh, Merv, Nishapur and Samarkand are devastated and anonymous today. But between the 8th and 12th century they were the most populous, wealthiest and intellectually productive urban centers on the planet. The golden age of Arab learning was in fact largely the product of Central Asians who wrote in Arabic; at that time the language of globalization. The book is too long to restate all its contents. But I deeply enjoyed reading about the lives and works of Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, Omar Khayyam and many other thinkers documented here. These were men so brilliant that they literally calculated the dimensions of the earth, the size of heavenly bodies and even logically deduced the existence of the Americas by pure observation and calculation brought forth from their minds and the naked eye. If I could resurrect one person to spend a day in the 21st century it would probably be al-Biruni; just to fill him in on all the mysteries that he passionately mulled over so long ago.

Contrary to what we might assume from reading their books, these intellectuals lived in a time of upheaval and instability. They had to confront the vicissitudes of life: loss of income, exile, disease, the death of patrons and the terror of wars. They did their intellectual work amid these uncertainties. The medieval world was never placid, not for long at least. Ibn Sina spent much of his life running from Mahmud Ghaznavi, a tyrannical sultan who waged many brutal wars of plunder in northern India. At the time it was considered natural for power-hungry kings to collect as many intellectuals, artists, poets and architects as they could to aggrandize their court. Great art and learning is not always the product of a just social order, though Central Asia was sometimes relatively just. I do wish that modern tyrants at least cared about pure learning as such and sought to promote its practitioners, if only for reasons of vanity. (As an aside, upon reading in detail about Ghaznavi I find it unacceptable that the modern nation-state of Pakistan has named one of its ballistic missiles after him. He was a cruel and avaricious leader.)

Central Asia was destroyed by the Mongol invasions utterly and completely. It never really recovered. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires were in some sense the offspring of the last Central Asian dynasty led by the descendants of Tamerlane. For all their material glory however they were like the light of a dead star. Taking the lead of Ghazali, in the cultural sphere these empires prioritized art and spirituality over the pursuit of pure science. They never had an Enlightenment such as their Central Asians forerunners did. Over time they found themselves devoured by an upstart Europe that did intellectually awaken. This is what the pages of time have recorded and they cannot be rewritten.

Starr's writing is crisp throughout and sometimes even enthralling. The book is not perfect though. There are a lot of typos in my Princeton University Press version, enough that I took notice. The author builds mostly off secondary sources and some of his theses and preconceptions might strike the reader as contentious. Crucially, I still don't understand why the Arab invasions led to an intellectual effervescence in Central Asia. Despite its flaws however I find that on balance this book is a monumental achievement. It really did dust off something that was lost, and that deserves to be treasured by all of us.

[Alish · Rating 5 out of 5]

موقع خوندن تاریخ ایران معمولا به اسامی شهرهایی برمیخوریم که شاید مکان دقیق‌شون رو ندونیم ولی بتونیم حدس بزنیم که باید سمت خراسان یا نزدیک به مرزهای شرقی‌مون باشند:
مرو، بخارا، خوارزم، طوس، بلخ، نیشابور، ترمذ، غزنی، ختن، زرنج، گرگانج، خیوه، کاشغر، فاریاب، خجند و غیره
به خصوص وقتی درباره تاریخ سلسله هایی مثل طاهریان و صفاریان و سامانیان و غزنویان و سلجوقیان و خوارزمشاهیان میخونیم به نظر میاد این شهرها نقش مهمی درش بازی میکنند
هم مراکز قدرت‌اند و هم مراکز علم، هم بازارهای پررونقی دارند و هم ارتباطاتی گسترده با بقیه دنیا
بزرگترین دانشمندها و نویسنده‌ها و شعرا از این شهرها اومدند یا بیشتر فعالیت‌شون در اینجا بوده
از بیرونی و فردوسی و مولوی و جابر بن حیان گرفته تا خواجه نظام‌الملک و ابن سینا و بخاری و غیره و غیره
اما یه نکته که شاید برای خیلی‌ها عجیب باشه اینه که الان بیشتر این شهرها در ایران نیستند
حتی امکان داره هزاران کیلومتر با ایران فاصله داشته باشند
بلخ (زادگاه مولوی) الان در شمال افغانستان و نزدیک مرز ازبکستانه
خوارزم (زادگاه ابوریحان بیرونی) الان در ازبکستانه
ابن سینا اهل روستایی نزدیک بخاراست که اون هم در ازبکستانه
ابومسلم اهل اطراف مروه که الان در ترکمنستانه
رودکی اهل جاییه که الان در تاجیکستانه
غزنی و زرنج (پایتخت‌های غزنویان و صفاریان) الان در افغانستان‌اند
فاریاب (زادگاه فارابی) الان در قزاقستانه
در واقع میشه گفت غربی‌ترین این شهرها که هنوز در ایران هستند طوس و نیشابوره
این شهرها الان در کشورهایی هستند که روزگارشون اینه
ایران که نیازی به گفتن نداره، در افغانستان هم الان که دارم این ریویو رو مینویسم قدرت دست طالبان افتاده، ترکمنستان و تاجیکستان هم هنوز از دست شوروی خلاص نشده گرفتار دیکتاتورهای دیگه شدند، ازبکستان و قزاقستان هم همین سرنوشت رو داشتند و تازه چندسالیه وضعشون خیلی خیلی کم بهتر شده
این سرزمین که به لحاظ تاریخی به "خراسان بزرگ" و به لحاظ جغرافیایی بیشتر به "آسیای میانه" معروفه (البته این دو یکی نیستند ولی با هم هم‌پوشانی زیادی دارند) روزگاری مهم‌ترین قطب علمی و هنر و تجارت آسیا بوده
این کتاب درباره همین سرزمین بزرگ بحث میکنه
نویسنده سعی کرده توضیح بده که 1) چرا این سرزمین یک دوره طلایی رو گذرونده. 2) چرا این دوره طلایی ادامه پیدا نکرد
در واقع کل کتاب جوری نوشته شده که انگار نویسنده سعی داره اطلاعاتی به ما بده که جواب رو پیدا کنیم
برای همین با بسیاری از کتاب‌های دیگه‌ای که سعی کردند فقط یه سری دستاورد فکری و فرهنگی برای این دوره ردیف کنند فرق داره
خیلی از کتاب‌های این مدلی به نوعی ایران رو مرکز ماجرا قرار میدند و سعی میکنند دستاوردها رو حول اون تعریف کنند و شکست‌ها رو هم نادیده بگیرند
اما اینجا نویسنده آسیای میانه رو مرکز قرار داده و هم پیروزی‌ها و شکست‌ها رو ریخته وسط
نویسنده به متون و پژوهش‌های تاریخی هم اکتفا نکرده و باستان‌شناسی رو قاطیش کرده و اینطوری یک تصویر منسجم و کامل از اونچه که "عصر طلایی آسیای میانه" خونده شده ارائه داده
از بهترین کتاب‌های مرتبط با تاریخ ایران بود که خوندم

[Dmitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fortuitous anomaly is found here. Its author S. Frederick Starr is a polymath, not unlike the largely forgotten scholars who live within its pages. In addition to holding a Ph.D. in history from Princeton he has worked as an archaeologist in Turkey and was president of Oberlin college for eleven years. And he has been an accomplished professional New Orleans '20s style jazz clarinetist.

Starr was an advisor to three presidents on Russia and Central Asia, working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Policy Council as a counterterrorism expert. He has collaborated with the Donald Rumsfeld Foundation to foster relationships between the US and Central Asia (?!). These former Soviet Republics were staging grounds for the Afghanistan war and other area conflicts.

What has this to do with tenth-century polymaths? One can picture Starr as a CIA agent or ersatz diplomat in a latter day Great Game. Or as a American version of TE Lawrence whose day job excavating antiquities disguises a plot for regional insurgency. It doesn't concern recent politics. Instead it tells an arcane story of medieval scholars from present day areas of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan.

The key figures include such prominent men as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) the astronomer and physician, and his faithful correspondent al-Biruni, the mathematician, astronomer, and historian. The era was known as the Islamic Golden Age which kept alive the classical science of Aristotle, Euclid, ​and Ptolemy by translating to Arabic what would be lost in Greek and Latin, ​and by introducing its own innovations.

In addition to scientists, the milieu produced literary giants such as Ferdowsi, composer of the Persian epic Shanameh, Omar Khayyam, famed poet (and mathematician) and Rumi, the Sufi poet who remains a bestselling author today. There were many other important figures in wide ranging fields, too numerous to recount here, who are now mostly obscured from our memory in the west.

Intellectual history is often neglected in the proliferation of political and military tomes. This story has been waiting patiently to be told. The writing is unpretentious if guilty of hyperbole at times. It is a fault that can be forgiven, as his enthusiasm is easily understood. The account is expansive, stretching to some 600 pages of text, but moves along quite quickly. It is an exceptional book, and it deserves to be a favorite for years to come.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. Starr examines Central Asia as a civilization in its own right—not just a crossroads in between civilizations. In exploring the contributions of this civilization (which include technological, economic, scientific, philosophical, political, and religious innovations) and its scale (which for centuries included many of the largest cities on earth), Starr puts together an account that fills in a whole realm of the world’s story, which was previously a big blank in my mind.

[Steve]

S. Frederick Starr (b. 1940), a longtime expert on Central Asia and former president of Oberlin College, enthusiastically and compellingly relates the economic, geographic and intellectual history (with brief forays into the political and social history) of a region of the earth about which I am shamefully ignorant. A great blankness between the demise of the Greek kingdom of Bactria (a remnant of Alexander's brief empire) in the 2nd century BCE and the Great Game of the 19th century, excepting some information about the Silk Road and the Buddhist center of Dunhuang, was what I knew about Central Asia, though some of the names of the great cities like Samarkand and Bukhara floated romantically and vaguely through my mind. That is going to change, and this book gives the reader a great leg up.

With a primary focus on the period 750 - 1150 CE, after the Arab invasion, which he calls Central Asia's Golden Age, Starr freely goes back a few thousand years in order to establish context (which I personally always want to know), and another vast expanse of the struggle, joy, pain, accomplishment and loss of humankind is opened up. Nothing new in that, but there are novelties in the ways that the simultaneously adaptable and stubbornly pig-headed human being reacts to the rather different physical and human surroundings unique to Central Asia. In fact, because these huge cities (the most populous of their time) were centered at oases in an otherwise dry environment, technical knowledge and competence in science, engineering and business were crucial to their very existence. This led to authoritarian control (in order to be able to amass the huge amount of resources and man power necessary to construct and maintain the enormous and enormously complicated irrigation systems over centuries of time) but also to a technocratic, mercantile culture not at all unfamiliar to us. Indeed, as Starr writes,

[O]ne might say that Central Asia was ... a place where many people were concerned with what the Greek thinkers called tekhne, or "the way things are made or the manner in which a goal is attained." Today it has become fashionable to be dismissive of this quality,(*) on the grounds that it has become the only concern of many modern men and women. But ... this was scarcely the case in Central Asia fifteen hundred years ago.

And then there is the literary, philosophic, religious and scientific culture, something which is extremely vulnerable to loss but which can last longer than any edifice of stone and which can touch and move human beings at a far remove in time and space...

That is the focus of the rest of the book, where Starr discusses the accomplishments of some of the most important thinkers and creators of the Golden Age after setting the stage of the rich pre-Islamic culture of a Central Asia at the crossroads of the cultures of India, China, the Middle East and Greece, mixing and interacting with the autochthonous culture (e.g. Zoroastrianism is native to Central Asia(**)). The Central Asians were open to all ideas, and their thinkers analyzed, debated and synthesized the foreign ideas into new forms, at least until the Arab invasion. And as long as there have been records, they appear to have been great compilers and codifiers, commentators and translators. Unfortunately, the records are far from complete because the Arabs in their zeal burnt hundreds if not thousands of pre-Islamic libraries throughout Central Asia. Happily, their reach did not extend into what is now western China, so not all was lost.

The writings of the Golden Age fared rather better, since the infidels had already been swept away, though, for example, 90% of Rudaki's poetry has been lost by other causes.(***)

Among the leading figures of this Golden Age Starr discusses is Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad Fārābī (c. 972 - c. 951), who interests me greatly. He was a natural philosopher trained in Aristotelean thought who further extended the "First Teacher's" work to the point that he became known as the "Second Teacher." One argues whether he was of Persian or of Turkish descent (that he was born and raised in Central Asia is agreed upon by all contending parties), but he lived most of his life in Baghdad and wrote in Arabic. He was well informed about the work of many classical Greek philosophers and developed a logic incorporating elements of Aristotelean and Stoic logic, as well as a philosophy which broke with both Aristotle and Plato.

Farabi's philosophy was dominant in the Arabic world until the even more interesting Avicenna (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sīnā: c. 980 - 1037) worked out a replacement strongly influenced by Farabi's thought. Ibn Sīnā (as Starr refers to him) was born in Bukhara of Persian descent, wrote in Arabic and New Persian, and was an even greater polymath than Farabi. His book on medicine became required reading in medieval Europe, but his contributions are manifold.

An even more dominant figure was Ghazali (Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī: c. 1058 - 1111), born in Khorasan, the northeast corner of the current Iran, of Persian descent. If I may be permitted to oversimplify, where Farabi and Avicenna were open to non-Islamic ideas and engaged in the nonideological study of nature, Ghazali used his intelligence and philosophical skills to kill the budding Hellenic-Islamic philosophy permanently and to see to it that iniquitous logic was left behind in favor of the mysticism of the Sufis. He was also, dangerously for his opponents, a superlative theologian and jurist. He saw to it that no one was left standing. He is now regarded as a Mujaddid, or renewer of the faith. I rest my case. The book's title is motivated by the consequences of Ghazali's activities; Starr calls Ghazali The Dark Genius. Let Ghazali speak for himself.

The majority of men, I maintain, are dominated by a high opinion of their own skill and accomplishments, especially the perfection of their intellects for distinguishing true from false and sure guidance from misleading suggestions. It is therefore necessary, I maintain, to shut the gate, so as to keep the general public from reading the books of the misguided as fas as possible...on account of the danger and deception in them. Just as the poor swimmer must be kept from the slippery banks, so must mankind be kept from reading these books; just as the boy must be kept from touching the snake, so must the ears be kept from receiving such utterances.

Thanks, Dad, but we've heard this before...

Nobody dared make a peep until Averroes (ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd: 1126-1198), safe at the other end of the Islamic world in Spain and Morocco, ventured a rebuttal in favor of logic and reason. It wasn't well received in the Islamic world, but he did find a sympathetic audience when it was translated into Latin...

As in China, many of the scholars Starr writes about were also leading literary figures, usually poets. Among the stars of the Golden Age firmament who are known primarily as poets is Omar Khayyám (Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Abu'l-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām Nīshāpūrī: 1048 - 1131), born in Nishapur, educated in Samarkand and professionally active in Bukhara. Though everyone has heard of his poetry, he was also a leading mathematician, coming up with a geometrical method to solve cubic algebraic equations, to mention just one advance.

These are but four of dozens of other figures discussed in some detail in Lost Enlightenment. As is clear already, this is an extremely rich book treating the history and high culture of the inhabitants of a region most of us know little about but which is affecting all of our lives. Need I say more?

(*) Ridiculous complaint valid only in what is left of the ivory tower; what is actually fashionable today is to be dismissive of any quality other than tekhne, except celebrity and wealth.

(**) In the words of the authority Mary Boyce, "the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body." The experts are still arguing about when Zoroaster lived - the dates range from the 6th century BCE all the way back to the 11th century BCE!

(***) In the past few days I read some rather infelicitous translations into English and German of the extant poetry of Abu Abdollah Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (c. 880 - c. 941), who, as I understand it, is viewed as the first literary star of the New Persian language written with the Arabic script, which replaced Middle Persian (Pahlavi). ("New" is relative - the language is the Persian (Farsi) spoken in Iran now, but supposedly it hasn't changed much at all in the last thousand years. That is hard for me to credit, but so says Starr.)

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/839...

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very comprehensive study of a long period of central Asian intellectual history, pre-Arab to Tamerlane’s descendents rule in Mughal India, the Ottoman empire and Safavids’s Persia. The first half is a rapid-fire combination of Islamic history, focused on the region but informed by wider events, and the broad outlines of the intellectual currents. The second half delves more deeply into individual thinkers and their works, in the context of the writers' relationships to each other, political events, and religious trends. These scientist-philosophers include Omar Kayyam, Ibn Sina, Biruni, the Banu Musa brothers, al-Khwarizmi, and al-Razi (spelling may not match Starr’s; I listened to it; see below).

I enjoyed the second half more because of the profiles of individual scientists and philosophers, but one does need the context to understand how their accomplishments fit into the general advance of mathematics, science, medicine and philosophy. Also, it helps the reader understand the disaspora of scientists as 1) succeeding empires moved courts and the center of intellectual life from one city to another over the period and 2) armies destroyed one city after another. Starr is careful to detail both the ethnic and geographical origin of his scientists. It seems that this is because there are rival claims to many of them; I can’t tell if his efforts to claim a central Asian origin for all of them (as opposed to Arabic, Perisan, Indian, Ottoman, etc.) are well-founded or stretching a bit to make his case. I think more the former.

Starr closes by revisiting the questions he posed at the start of the book, especially: why the Golden Age declined. On the one hand he asks if this is a valid question, as all Golden Ages fade away. On the other, he systematically skewers most leading theories. [I am not equipped to evaluate his arguments; most depend on timing.]

Starr argues in the end that the gradually deepening divide between Sunnis and Shiites eventually led to both sides defining an accepted version of the truth and refusing to support, or even tolerate, free inquiry. This was a particularly big change from the tradition of using logic in a wide variety of disciplines, that was most linked to the Shiite side. The long-standing logic-based approach stemmed from translations of Aristotle. It was championed by Mu’tazilites and philosopher scientists like Biruni and Ibn Sina. Before the deep split occurred the debate centered around whether logic could solve problems of religion. Some said logical approaches to philosophy and religion could be reconciled. Others said they couldn’t so thinkers should focus on either philosophy and science or on religion. Starr holds up al-Ghazali as the one who finally formalized in an particularly effective way the heretical nature of logic that heralded the drift toward Sufi mysticism and anti-logic that was underway.

A note: I can’t double check the review because I listened to this rather than read it. I would strongly recommend reading this on paper, so you can see the spelling, illustrations, map(s?), and flip back to check on names and places you’ve lost track of. The audiobook reader was very good, but this is text you need to see. A good historical atlas by your side would be helpful.

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very comprehensive and easily readable intellectual history of Central Asia between 800 - 1400 ad. To a large extent, it overlaps with the history of Islamic Enlightenment as many intellectuals from this land were the prominent thinkers. But also it focuses on the very interesting region and its impact on the future civilisations. It is evident from the book that many thinkers in the region were the learners and developer of Ancient Greece's heritage before the 11th century when more fundamental religious views started by Ghazali have substantially narrowed the scope of a debate and its sheer possibility. Their work has delivered this heritage back to Medieval Europe. It is strange the thinkers did not look more towards India and China but focused on the Mediterranean civilisation. Only Al-Biruni expressed a huge interested in India and wrote a priceless book about.

[Omar Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! You must get this book and read it. A very detailed examination of the Central Asian enlightenment by someone who has spent a lifetime studying the subject. From Al-Farabi to Ibn Sina and Mohammed Zakriya Al Razi to Omar Khayyam. With enough historical information thrown in for the reader to know what was going on in politics around the same time. A must read book.
My only negative comment is that in trying to rescue the honor of Central Asia, Starr is determined to keep it distinct from Persia. I am not sure that works and it seems like a very artificial and unnecessary distinction. If he had lumped Persia in with Central Asia and added some more material in the process, this book would get 6 stars.
A great companion book would be "Empires of the Silk Road" by Christopher Beckwith.
Now I wish someone would do something similar for India, but that wish may remain unfulfilled, given the extreme polarization and politicization of writings about Indian history. Extremist Hindutvadis on one side and "Progressive Historians" on the other and with most Europeans also entangled in the same controversies. Still, one can always hope.

[Justin Evans · Rating 1 out of 5]

May I humbly dissent? Everyone loves this book. I do not.

This is an important topic, and any reader will surely learn a lot from this book. However: boy, is the ideology strong in this one.

It comes in two parts: first, neoliberal silliness; second, embarrassing pan-nationalism. I read this a while ago, but here's a sentence I chose at random just now (page 206): "Khurasan and the adjoining lands of Central Asia had become a very open marketplace of ideas, where free thinking and skepticism abounded and nothing was sacred." So, just to be clear: *all* of Central Asia was basically a bastion of 'Western Civilization' and enlightenment values as of about 820. The next paragraph refers to the (entire) region's "bold spirit of innovation." Elon Musk couldn't put it better himself, if he knew that Khurasan existed and wanted to tweet positively about it.

The book is filled with howlers. Some of them are just baffling mistakes: on page 203, Starr refers to Aristotle as an atomist, despite Aristotle arguing strenuously against atomism and for his own theory of hylomorphism. On page 133, he suggests the term 'Barmicide feast' means 'really lux,' when it means 'fake,' like 'Potemkin village.'

Some of the howlers are enthusiastic slip ups, as when Starr asks 'what other world epic before Ferdowsi weighs in at fifty thousand carefully composed couplets in verse?', as if the poetry of the South Asian subcontinent didn't exist; later, Starr writes, nothing written before Ferdowsi "focused with greater frequency or intensity on the father-son relationship," which would be news to any of the classical Confucians. And Thomas Aquinas would be surprised to learn that he "justified" his "doctrines" with Ibn Sina's works (254).

But the worst howlers are the ones informed by the ideology of neoliberalism and pan-nationalism. On page 212, Starr says the "Karijites" (Kharijites) thought that"ability [sic] rather than genealogy should be the basis for worldly power in Islam," thus turning a group of fanatical puritans into 21st century meritocrats, as if their objection to the Umayyads was that they weren't very good technocrats, rather than a fundamentalist piety that would make contemporary fundamentalists look like puppy dogs. The Kharijites thought *religious and moral purity* were more important than genealogy. So, why turn the Kharijites into bien pensant bureaucrats? Because they had power bases in Central Asia, whereas the Umayyads were Arabs, and everything that ever went wrong in Central Asia (before the Soviets anyway) was caused by ignorant, smelly, pious Arabs.

Lest you think I'm overstating things, here's a random rhetorical question: "How might the Islamic world have been different had they developed a sense of tragedy, and of the fatal flaws that appear in human lives as the working of Destiny?" We'll never know, Starr says, but he pretty gosh darn strongly implies that "they" (whoever the f 'they' are) would have gone through a reformation and enlightenment and become properly functioning members of the Great Democratic World Order by now, instead of lurking in Central Asia and learning to fly planes into 'our' buildings.

Again, Starr writes that "Like authoritarian rulers everywhere, the [Muslim] Abbasids hoped to regulate society from above by merging their laws with the strictures of faith," which doesn't exactly fit my understanding of the atheist authoritarians of the Stalinist world, but hey, never miss a chance to obliquely engage in Arab/Muslim bashing by suggesting that "they" are all authoritarians, am I right?

I wasn't going to get this carried away, but writing this review reminded me just how fatuous and bigoted this book was, and how angry I was that such an important subject didn't have a better scholar to serve it. Avoid.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A graduate level approach to a history and a region that most of us are only vaguely aware of.

A lot of modern-day propaganda tries to tear apart the world by fabricating a great divide between the East and West and creating a nonsense about living civilizations and fated clashes. For example, see the vile book by Anthony Pagden Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West, or anything by Oswald Spengler such as The Decline of the West, or Arnold Toynbee.

This author, Starr, knows how to tell the story correctly and provides the reader the needed perspective and context in order to understand the relevance and the utter balderdash that Pagden and his ilk pretend to tell when they tell history from their bigoted perspectives.

It is so easy for modern-day readers to only see history from their modern-day perspectives with their modern-day biases and forget to see the history for the story that is being told in its own time’s perspective. Starr understands that there is a real story to be told and tells it. I would even say that this book would cover a graduate level course in history on this topic.

There are connections that the author understands with relevance to modern day. Avicenna with his appeal to intuition as the dominant form of knowledge (as Aristotle says in the first line of The Metaphysics and quoted in this book, “everyone strives for knowledge”), and though Starr did not mention Avicenna’s “Floating Man’ or how he relates to Descartes' cogito he does know how Thomas Aquinas appeals to Avicenna and Hegel does too. Starr was good at connecting the Scholastics and Hegel with the Central Asian Enlightenment thinkers.

In a lot of ways this book was above me, because it is so hard to find books as good as this one about that period of time and that area of the world, and the ones that do cover this topic are usually so bias that they are useless (see Pagden’s book cited above). Starr covers history, politics, war, religion and philosophy and most of it is fairly new to me, and thus it made it hard to understand the details from time to time, but that is the fault of me not the writer.

I’ll fault the author on a couple of minor things. He did not have to provide such a strong apologia for his subject matter as frequently as he does, because the history did speak for itself, but clearly the author thinks it was necessary to defend the relevance of his subject area. Also, he thinks that Marco Polo really did aid the Kubla Khan in China and to read Marco Polo’s Travels is to see them as full of dubious claims (read for yourself and decide for yourself).

This is a good scholarly book that is accessible to the lay reader and I give the author credit for wrapping up a very difficult subject and area that is not well known by most Americans. This book would be a must for any graduate history student no matter what their field of study.

I like books that teach me things I don’t already know and this book did that on every page.

P.S. I'm going to have to read "The incoherence of the Philosophers", and the Averroes response "The Incoherence of the Incoherence". This book talks at length about them and they sound like something I would really enjoy reading.

[Tariq Mahmood · Rating 5 out of 5]

So how did the Islamic golden age finish?



Arabs from the desserts find themselves masters of cities with a long established tradition of dialectic. In this intellectual warfare their own Islamic tradition based on Quern and the Prophet is not sophisticated enough to tackle the superstars from the Zorastanis, Manicheans, Buddhists and the Nestorian opponents. Without ready recourse to their own champions, they opt for the next best option. They co-opted from the newly converted crop elitist zealots to fight in their corner. These elitist are really Islamic apologists who develop a very sophisticated and effective modus operandi for countering the established religious rhetoric based on reason and intuition. But this is sophisticated dialectic was for the elites not the common classes. This focus Reason and intuition by the Mutazilites was seized upon by wider intelligentsia spawning an age of enlightenment. But here where it went all wrong, when the Caliph of the time Al Mamun decided to enforce his will on the people by making this very elitist argument mainstream. He launched an Inquisition (Minha), ostentatiously to break the hold of traditions over the common people, but it backfired horribly. Considered the question he posed to all Ulema.
'Did the scholar believe the Koran to be have been created or uncreated'.
This question when placed in the public domain would have naturally caused discontent among the masses. The elites should have known this reaction before signing up role of the Inquisitor. Their partnership with the Caliph led to open hostility against their sophisticated Kalam arguments. And this led to a demise of this wonderful movement nipping the Islamic enlightenment bubble a lasting blow. The Rationalists slowly receded into the backgrounds growing more despondent under the Seljuqs till the final blow was dealt by the Mongols. The Mongols destroyed all cites of learning forcing the few rationalist elites to the West. Any resurgence during the Mongol rule was dealt the very final blow by the rise of Sufism which as by its nature very appealing to both the urban and steppe converts of Islam. Sufism focused on inner enlightenment and direct communion with God basically glorifying intuition over reason and revelation. This produced a slavish and pliant Muslim which openly avoided conflict and actually embraced suffering as a means of attaining salvation. Sufism was eventually countered by the orthodox who wanted to re-convert all Sufi Muslims back into strict Islamic orthodoxy. So the current Islamic world is split between revelation and intuition; between orthodoxy and doubt; between the known and the unverified (conspiracy theories). Unfortunately the central tenet reason which is instrumental for enlightenment is nowhere to be seen :(

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship]

I don’t remember what I was looking for when I first added this book, but when I actually started reading it, it was after having read a bunch of books about the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and I was looking for an answer to those books: something focused on the scientific developments of the time, and which would show me which of those European breakthroughs are actually attributable to Central Asia, perhaps with mini-biographies of relevant scholars as well as discussion of the science involved.

This book is not that. It’s a summary of roughly 1000 years of Central Asian history, and it’s largely a traditional political and military history, though it also contains substantial sections discussing intellectual history, from religion to the arts to the sciences. The core time period is from roughly 750 to 1150 A.D., but the author begins long before and finishes long after in order to fully trace the cultural currents in which he is interested. Because the scope is so broad, most of what the author relates seems to take place on a grand historical level rather than a small human one. A primary thesis is that what’s often called the “Arab” or “Muslim” golden age of learning was really neither. While Muslim Arabs had conquered Central Asia, most of the influential scholars were of Central Asian rather than Arab origin, and this time period was one of religious pluralism, with Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Nestorian Christians, Jews, and others in the mix.

Certainly there’s a lot of interesting information here, though because it wasn’t what I was looking for, after page 210 I skipped ahead to read just the sections more relevant to what I was looking for. It’s readable, but I have a pretty high standard for how entertainingly history can be written, and so to me it was on the dry side. It did make me want to re-read Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, which covers much of the same material (though in a more compact version) with better storytelling abilities. This is a brick of a book that will take some time to read, and perhaps one day I’ll come back to it and read the rest.

[Tanroop · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seriously impressive work that exposed me to a part of the world, and a period of history, that I knew nothing about.

I considered giving this 4 stars; I felt Starr honed in on the minute details of mathematic or scientific innovations too much at times, for example. However, that probably has more to do with my own weaknesses in those areas. Conversely, the sections on the fraught politics of Central Asia, the great historians like Ferdowsi, and the poetry of people like Omar Khayyam were all absolute delights.

While it may not be perfect, this book broadened my intellectual horizons in myriad ways. S. Frederick Starr has produced a gem here, the kind of work that any scholar would be incredibly proud to have written.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Central Asia is sometimes described as a "crossroads", something of a back-handed compliment - the implication being that the region links a lot of interesting places, but isn't really a place in itself. In recent centuries it has languished, and Starr quite reasonably calls Afghanistan "one of the most backward countries on the planet". Yet there was a period in which the region led the world in scientific discovery, artistic creativity, and religious tolerance. Starr - a noted Russianist and former president of Oberlin - has set out to chronicle that time, writing a book he says he wished to read. Although setting up as his model Joseph Needham's magisterial Science and Civilisation in China, his book is far shorter (that one being still unfinished after twenty-seven volumes) and also more interested in philosophy, theology, and the arts. (There is still a decent amount of science).

It was surprising to me that much of the output of the Islam's "Golden Age", even in Abbasid Baghdad, came from Persian and Turkic thinkers, almost all polymaths. One was al-Khwarizmi, who created the modern form of algebra (a European garbling of a term he used, just as his name was later twisted into "algorithm"). al-Khwarizmi's innovation was to make Diophantine equations into their own field, as independent mathematical objects, not as geometrical referents (as in Greek mathematics) or expressions of number theory (as for the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta). Another, al-Balkhi (from the Afghan province of Balkh) was a pioneer in the scientific study of mental health who distinguished neurosis from psychosis and "proposed a combination of positive thinking and a kind of talk therapy" a good five hundred years before anyone would follow up on it.

In the philosophical realm, some important figures were al-Farabi and ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), the great Aristotelians who were also Maimonides' source for Greek thought, and al-Ghazali, who led a counter-rationalist movement championed by his book Tahāfut al-Falāsifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers"). This book disparaged ibn Sīnā for following the philosophers even when they contradict the truths of the Qur'an, also influenced Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and later philosophers such as Pascal and Hume (the latter of whom found in al-Ghazali his own scepticism about determining causality). (The Rabbis of the Talmud express the same attitude toward the contradiction in an incident from the Mishna (Negaim 9:3, 11:7) when Rabbi Eliezer told Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra, who came to offer a learned proof: "Is it to uphold the words of the Sages? He said, yes...[After he finished] he said, you are great in wisdom, for you have upheld the words of the sages." This isn't from the book, but it does contain one Talmudic reference: of the great city of Merv, the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 31b, using its Greek name of Margiana, Μαργιανῇ) says that it was visited by Rabbi Shmuel ben Bisna, "and they brought him wine but he did not drink it...they brought him beer but he did not drink it". Apparently these Jews were lax in their observations of the laws of kashrut.) Later ibn Rushd (Averroes) would write a refutation called Tahāfut al-Tahāfut ("The Incoherence of the Incoherence"), but it failed to achieve the same acclaim. Of al-Rāzī, a surgeon and "the father of paediatrics", Starr says "his scepticism would have been considered scandalous even in eighteenth-century France".

A few poets also make an appearance: Ferdowsi, author of the Persian national epic Shahnameh (an incident in which is the basis of Matthew Arnold's poem "Sohrab and Rustum"), Rūmī, and Omar Khayyam, the last another polymath whose quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) became famous in English through FitzGerald's translation, though their seeming libertinism appears to be only one facet of a man who at times expressed deep piety.

Of the tomb of Sanjar, built in Merv for its Seljuk ruler, Starr relates this:

Emulating the model of Sanjar’s tomb, lesser Seljuk rulers erected a number of great domed tombs in the west of Iran, all of them based on the same engineering concepts that were so monumentally applied at Sanjar’s tomb in Merv. From these the concept spread to the Caucasus, then to Anatolia and eventually to the Mediterranean. In 1367 the city fathers of Florence selected a plan for completing their cathedral that included a double dome of the type pioneered by the Seljuks. Completed by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1436, the dome marked a turning away from the Gothic style of architecture and hence a decisive step leading to the Renaissance. In the early nineteenth century the French-born architect Auguste de Montferrand, planning the Cathedral of St. Isaacs in St. Petersburg, Russia, drew inspiration from Brunelleschi’s dome but changed the construction material from brick to cast iron. In 1866 the American architect Thomas U. Walter completed the new dome of the United States’ Capitol in Washington, DC, which he based on Montferrand’s dome in Russia. Thus it can be said that three of the most renowned buildings in the West are all lineal descendants of Sanjar’s tomb in Central Asia.

A lot of the great works of the Central Asian Golden Age are still untranslated - Starr notes that only seven books by the great al-Biruni have been published, out of over fifty. (Perhaps it is remiss of today's scholars not to be working on this, instead of yet another monograph on Locke?)

The end of the Golden Age came with the Mongol invasion, coupled with the ravages of plague. A Bukhara scholar told of the destruction of the city’s Friday mosque and of horses trampling the pages of the Quran, said: "Be silent. The wind of God’s night blows." (Good advice for troubled times.) The sheer scale of depopulation approached ninety percent in some places, and the Mongol armies destroyed the hydraulic systems which were crucial for life in the region's cities, and which were difficult for the remaining few to reconstruct. (Near the beginning Starr discusses theories about changing climate having affected the change - it is certainly very striking to read of lush orchards and vineyards in areas that are today almost desert-like - and suggests that this change may have been not in temperature or rainfall but in landscape, with deforestation leading to soil erosion and then gradual desertification.) By the time Tamerlane swept through, the damage had become permanent. (I recently read Jack Weatherford's somewhat revisionist Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which suggests that the Mongol leader wasn't as bad as he is painted - as long as people didn't resist, or worse, feign co-operation and then rebel - but that Tamerlane was truly the thuggish, skull-tower-building menace he is portrayed as. Few people seem to have much good to say about him, although Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great is a striking exception. He is also (per Starr) a national symbol in post-Communist Uzbekistan, eager to reclaim its independent heritage, perhaps an unfortunate choice.) Starr also suggests that Sufism, which emerged around this time, may have been especially suited to the more liberal and tolerant inclinations of the Saffavid and Mughal Muslims, who had accepted Islam but harboured dim memories of cities in which Christians, Buddhists and Zoroastrians worshipped side by side. He also suggests that it may have had some affinities with Tengrism, the Mongol religion centred around the sky-god, but this seems a reach.

Of course, it is also possible that we don't need a reason for the Age of Enlightenment's end. It was

five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day

Maybe that was enough.

[Kaśyap · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful and informative work on the cultural and intellectual history of Central Asia. Documents the great advances in mathematics,sciences and philosophy that were made in this region approximately between the period of 800 AD and 1400 AD. A good addition to the other histories on Central Asia that focus on warfare and political history.

The author spends the first three chapters on introducing us to the geography of the area and setting the stage of Urban intellectual cultural centers of the region. Being the heartland of Eurasia and an entrepôt of trade between the civilisations of China, India, Middle-East and the Mediterranean, Central Asian cities have long developed highly sophisticated, highly literate and intellectual societies that always showed openness to new ideas from outside and developed a rich tradition of Zoroastrian (which is native to Central Asia) and Buddhist learning.
The latter chapters deal with the rise and demise of the Golden Age of Central Asia from around 750 BC until the end of the Timurid period. The author here shows how this regions rich heritage from the past, worldly cultural contacts that made them the inheritors of the classical traditions from Greece and India and affluence from trade created an ideal environment for arts and sciences to flourish. He shows how the leading thinkers even during the golden age of Baghdad were of Persian and Central Asian origin. He also treats Central Asia as a unique Urban intellectual culture distinct from Iran proper. It seems an artificial distinction as Khorasan and Khwarezm regions always had an Iranian culture and have always been considered continuous with Eastern Iran.

The intellectual demise seems mainly to be caused by the death of pluralism and the rise of the madrassas, religious dogma and orthodoxy followed by the devastating Mongol conquests. But the author here especially seems to blame Sufi mysticism and is chiefly critical of Al-Ghazali for the decline of Central Asia. This book is mainly concerned with the high culture of the Islamic central Asia. I think we will get a better picture if we also consider the popular culture of the society during this same period, and how it changed and evolved.

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every once in a while you come across a non-fiction book that takes an area of academic research and through the efforts of an engaging author takes on all the thrill and excitement of a murder mystery page-turner. This is not one of those books. Even though I find the subject intriguing and Professor Starr is clearly a master of the subject, apparently in several languages, there were often eye-glazing, mind-numbing paragraphs full of unfamiliar names that I had to slog through like a Bactrian sand dune. Nevertheless, I found the effort rewarded by a much better understanding of Central Asian history.

As a parochial American, I lived through decades of fear of monolithic Communism. When that threat disappeared like an elephant in a Las Vegas magic show, it took us little more than a decade to replace it with the fear of monolithic Islam. Our simplistic reasoning generally goes something like this: Muslims are Arabs, Arabs are terrorists, ergo Islam is bad. The analysis of Central Asian history provided by Professor Starr illuminates the ethnic and religious diversity of this area over the past two millennia and hopefully, for American readers, lead to a less value-laden judgment of its inhabitants.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely outstanding. The other reviewers have said it all.

[Ashutosh Mehndiratta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly fascinating. One of those books that will change the way you think about world history, history of Islam, Central Asia, the Middle East.

[Bengü Güven · Rating 2 out of 5]

İlber Ortaylı’nın tavsiyesiyle okuduğum bir kitap.
Kitap çok dolu, çok nitelikli. Yazarın ve çevirmenin emeğine, eline sağlık. Ancak yazı fontunun küçük olması ve sürekleyicilikten uzak olması okumamı çok zorlaştırdı. Uzun sürede (sanırım bir buçuk yıl kadar) ara ara biraz biraz okuyarak bitirebildim.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starr set himself an ambitious goal in uncovering the Central Asian roots to the Islamic Enlightenment of 800-1200 AD, yet he exceeds these goals by giving the reader unique insights into the cultures of the Central Asian regions prior to the Muslim invasions, as well as a look at tangential Zoroastrian and Buddhist cultures that continued to oppose Islam even after the first wave of cultural changes. This book is wide and deep in scope, covering early Nestorian and Sassanian cultural contributions, and moving all the way to the era of the Khanates and of Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) and his descendants.

Starr is a humble historian who is unafraid of giving full credit to other historians, including less-cited ones in Russia, Uzbekistan, and from various Arabian and Persian sources. He is also unafraid to challenge the assumptions of scholars he disagrees with. For example, in the concluding chapter he dismisses the arguments of two European researchers who passionately insist there was no Islamic effort late in the Muslim renaissance to discredit reason and agnostic freethinking, to the point of putting some apostates to death. There most certainly was, Starr says, and it is folly to deny it.

Starr gives insights into such realms as Sogdiana, Bactria, Khwarasm, and other lands along the Silk Road about which most Americans, and even most Europeans and many Asians, know next to nothing.

The book is not without occasional flaws. The editing seems rushed, as occasional minor factual errors or changed spelling creep in. There are beautiful color plates of relics from the region, but it is hard to believe a book like this does not include maps. Still, these are minor quibbles to make against a book that is largely phenomenal.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a treasure full of information regarding the Central-Asian golden age. Did you know Biruni predicated that a large land mass or continent exists between the Atlantic and Pacific ocean without setting out to sail in the 11th century? I found the scholars and their views to be very interesting. The debate between Ibn Sina and Al Biruni was fascinating. Starr also describes the life and works of many popular polymaths like Omar Khayyam and at the same time less known Sons of Musa and other's works are also discussed. He presents some fine arguments on why the golden age took place in the region in the given timeline. However, in my view, it is not without its flaws. I find Starr to be slightly biased towards the Central-Asians and some criticism of Al-Ghazali is not properly back by enough sources. Overall, its a good read!

[S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Author’s obvious anti-Arab and Islamophobic bias is evident from the internal contradictions in the book itself. For example, in the beginning the author mentions how Arabs were intolerant of other religions and yet few pages down the line he mentions that right up until the eleventh century there were large active Zoroastrian temples throughout the region. There are also many obvious inaccuracies in the book not to mention author’s own speculative baseless conjectures. Author dares to compare his work to those of Gibbon and Needham yet they were subject matter specialists who based their work on primary sources in original languages whereas the author speaks neither Arabic, nor Persian, nor Turkish and his work is mostly based on secondary sources through the prism of obsolete Russian/Soviet orientalists.

[Metin Yılmaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yaklaşık üç dört aylık bir okuma sonucunda kitabı bitirmenin haklı gururunu yaşıyorum. Verdiği bilgi açısından enfes bir kitap. Fakat çeviriden mi kaynaklı bilmiyorum kitap hiç akıcı değil. Üstüne üstlük puntoları da minicik olunca okumak hepten zor bir hal alıyor.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book by an accomplished Professor of Russian and Eurasian affairs who has also done time as a university administrator. His bio also identifies him as a musician. Professor Starr’s book is on the intellectual and cultural history of Central Asia from the Arab conquests in the 7th century up through the end of the Timurid rulers in the early 15th century. The general argument is that the region was the site of a major and sustained period of enlightenment lasting from after the conquests until roughly the eleventh century and that the achievements of this enlightenment were among the most significant in world history up until the Renaissance in Europe and the onset of modernity after that.

Huh?? So what is the big deal? If one reads world history, even a little, the accomplishments of the Arabs in science, mathematics, history, philosophy, and medicine are well recognized and were essential to the awakening of Europe in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and afterwards, right? Don’t we already know this?

Ok, the hook of the argument is that the major contributors to this “lost enlightenment”, while they wrote in Arabic, were generally not Arabic and they did not make their contributions in Arab lands, with some exceptions, of course. The focal contributors to this enlightenment were Central Asian and general worked in Central Asian locales. They were Iranians (or more broadly Persians), they were Turkic people, some from what became western China. Some were from India. Where is Central Asia? This area includes eastern Iran, western China, and the territories further north in between along what came to be known as the “Silk Road”. These include the countries that are sometimes referred to as the “Stans”: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan (along with Afghanistan). That’s right - a major enlightenment lasting five centuries arose in an area that has not prospered for centuries and that was fought over by Russia, Britain, and others, as well as being a focus of Chinese expansion infrastructures investments today (the “Belt and Road” initiative). So this underpopulated and underdeveloped area that has been the focus of colonization battles was actually a central cultural driving force of world history for a long time. This is the prequel to Marco Polo and the Mongols.

Now that is an interesting story! Who knew?

This is a big book and there are too many stories to even attempt a summary. The big stars receive a bio and Starr goes over some of their major works in some depth. The writing style is quite good and the book is easy to follow, although a bit long. This is really helpful, especially since many of the works presented are not readily available at a reasonable price - some are though. So to work through this, it would be helpful to keep a chronology handy and look up additional supporting/context information as needed to provide background. To work through this takes some time. For example, after finishing this, I am putting Valerie Hansen’s book on the Silk Road back on my queue to get more detail.

There are plenty of heroes and plenty of villains as well but the overall story is far from clear - that is always an issues with macro history. What about the Mongols, for example? They certainly did not help matters, but negative developments were apparent before they invaded. What about restrictive Islam and “faith versus reason” issues? Sure. This is also involved and the parallels with similar developments in Europe are fascinating.

The major strength of this book for me was that it made me reevaluate developments that I thought I knew about but which were much more interesting and complicated. That makes it worth the effort.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Long book with useful information that I had not read before. Though it sometimes feels like another of those “everything was don first in this region but nobody realizes it” account.

[فریبا ارجمند · Rating 5 out of 5]

یک کتاب عالی با ترجمه خوب

[Muhammet Okumuş]

Yayınladığından buyana okuma listemde olan bu kitabı bitirdim ve izlenimlerimi paylaşmak isterim. İslam rönesansı diye nitelendirilen 750- 1200 yılları arasında orta asyanın siyasi ve kültürel-bilimsel değişim ve gelişim sürecini anlatan kitap, büyük düşünürler ve bilim adamlarının yetiştiği dönemin detaylı bir panoramasını gösteriyor. Orta Asya'da islam fetihlerinden sonra aydınlanma devrinin başladığını ileri süren yaygın kanaatin aksine, bu coğrafyanın tarihsel olarak bu potansiyeli içerdiğine ilişkin bir iddiası olan yazar, islam dininin yayılmasının bu gelişmeyi yavaşlattığını iddia etmekle beraber, bu tezini açıkça öne sürmüyor. Kitabı okuduktan sonra bende bu şekilde bir kanaat oluştu. 750-1200 yılları arasında yaşanan aydınlanma devrinin ,Gazali'nin yazdığı kitaplar ile akıl yerine ilham ve iman'ı öne çıkarması ve ibn-sina ,razı,ravndi ,biruni gibi düşünürleri zındıklıkla suçlaması ile yaşanan gelişmenin yavaşladığı, moğol istilası ile bilimsel gelişme sürecinin sona erdiğini belirtiyor.
Bilim ve din ve özellikle islam dini ve bilim ilişkisi konusunda düşünen,fikir sahibi olan kişiler için de faydalı bir kitap olduğunu düşünüyorum. Dili akıcı, çevirisi başarılı olmuş. iyi okuşlamalar.

[📚 Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting in-depth look at a location and time period that's often overlooked. I became very interested in this era after reading a biography of Genghis Khan and after learning that a lot of Russian history stems directly from the Mongols (Golden Horde and all that). This made me curious about what else was going on in Central Asia in the centuries right before and after Genghis, in addition to the societies that birthed people like Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Omar Khayyam, and the people who invented math concepts like algebra and the algorithm. I knew little about the Stans and the rest of Central Asia, and this book seemed like a good place to start as its scope was so wide. All in all, I enjoyed much of it, though I had to take breaks when it got a bit dry (as is almost unavoidable in a history book of this nature). I learned a lot and this book has inspired me to keep learning about the aspects of these cultures that I find most interesting.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really enjoyable read and led to me buying more books and hoping they were going to be as good as this one, which is the mark of a really good history book. So my quibble, which is that the book doesn't really deliver on what it says it will, is a little beside the point.
The strength here is the elaboration of the achievements of the featured polymaths, the astronomers, mathematicians, medicos, architects, philosophers and poets who changed the way we think. He also recreates the heady intellectual world they worked in, from the intellectualism that build Baghdad, through to the inter-polis culture that Birani and Ibn Sina worked in, travelling to work with, or avoid, patrons of varying stripes. Starr's portrait of Omar Khayyam was simply intoxicating, and led me off on new reading/exploratory paths.
However, what the book doesn't do is explain where this culture comes from. I had expected a much longer section on the pre-Islamic history of Central Asia, something that really elaborated where this culture of learning had come from. Yet, this part of the book is brief and reads like a prologue, with quick speculation but no clear conclusions.
To date, most of the history books I had read covering this time treat it as a part of Persian/Iranian history. Some of the action certainly takes place in the locations now part of Iran, most notably Nishapur. But whether you treat this as Iranian or Central Asian history comes to a very different way of viewing the world. Are cultures bounded by their geography, or their language and/or ethnic and/or cultural markers? Is the legacy of Baruni, Khayyam, Abu Sina et al found in modern Iran, or in Central Asia, or somewhere else entirely? Obviously, at a point this is a silly distinction. The impact of cultural developments shifts over large distances and through linguistic and cultural barriers.
But it would also be silly to deny that for some, this is profoundly important. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings - much of which is set in Central Asia - plays a foundational role in Iranian culture, as well as Central Asian culture - and is vitally important in Indian culture as well. Much of what we now consider geographic designators 'Greek' for example, were once cultural descriptors applied to different communities scattered over a large area. You only need to look at debates over which country can claim Alexander the Great to know that where we come from, what culture we inherited can be a powerful force.
For Starr, returning many of the scholars now designed as Persian or Arab to the Central Asian roots is also about emphasising the role of geography in determining culture. However, after dropping Jared Diamond's name (the poster child - well, usually sole credited academic - for geography-centric social analysis) he doesn't really follow up on why. This was disappointing because I am very much interested in what argument might be put for this region, beyond the obvious melting pot/meeting point between the various ends of the Eurasian land mass. The role of this region in Proto-Indo-European languages is still a question of debate, and seems highly relevant, for example. (I am particularly interested here, because there is also an argument for Palestine as a cultural centre due to its position as the land crossing between Eurasia and Africa, and places of intersection produce great philosophy/theology/scholarship, what does that say about how people work? And our modern tendency to shut the doors of countries?)
The other part of Starr's focus is to challenge modern assumptions about an area of the world now considered one of the least capable of producing ideas/scholarship and new technologies. The idea that this region was once the center of Eurasian civilization, with the largest cities, the most intoxicating intellectual culture, and the highest appreciation for beauty and achievement does challenge racist assumptions. And at this, the book is so much more succesful by weaving such a compelling picture of a world that encouraged and celebrated an academic class, and the immense results from that culture.
In the end, I think it is important to understand the fluidity of cultures. While Starr is clearly partly driven by frustration at the attribution of the early achievers to Arab thought, in his own book, Baghdad is a location of greater achievement by Central Asian scholars than the cities than the cities they were imported from. To me, this seems likely to be because of the creation of the Baghdad project itself, and the concentration of mathematicians necessary to create it. Arab patronage, Persian linguistic and cultural norms, Central Asian trained approaches: not only did all these things come together, but they were hardly as seperable as they may seem here. The beauty of this approach in challenging the traditional Persian claim on this cultural flowering is not to steal it for someone else, but that it opens up that we all, and none of us, can claim responsibility. Maybe real achievement comes from mixture, and maybe that is the lesson we most need today.

[Cengizhan Alagöz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genel anlamıyla güzel bir kitap. Ama yazarın açık bir İslam düşmanı olduğu çok belli oluyor. Orta Asya’daki aydınlanmanın islam ile son bulduğunu belirten ifadeler mevcut. Yine de çoğu konuda objektif diyebilirim. Göz ardı edilen Orta Asya’daki aydınlanmayı anlatan nadir yabancı kaynaklardan.