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Islamic Golden Age

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

The Islamic Golden Age was a period of Islamic rule when the Islamic world was deemed to be more tolerant or learned than its neighbours, particularly Medieval Europe.

Some commentators have derided the idea as a myth, intended to distract attention from Islam's present situation. Islamic regimes, such as the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad under Harun ar-Rashid or al-Andalus were very wealthy in comparison with their neighbours and preserved a large amount of Greek philosophy and transmitted Eastern ideas such as Indian numbering (still known as Arabic numerals).

However critics have claimed that most of this scholarship was in fact conducted by non-Muslims, particularly Christians and Jews, and the wealth that made this possible was not amassed by trading or production but by conquest and a poll tax on non-Muslim subjects. Other critics have claimed that an Islamic golden age was simply a way of saying that some Muslim societies attained higher levels of civilization and culture than they did at other times.

Three speculative thinkers, the Persians al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam. They were highly unorthodox and it is open to question whether they could be considered Islamic philosophers. The caliphate and other Islamic governments emphasized rigid Koranic orthodoxy and deployed Greek philosophy and science solely to buttress its authority. Persecution, exile and death were frequently meted out to philosophers whose writings did not conform to the Islamic canon. An example was the treatment of Averroës who attempted to reconcile Aristotle's writings to Islam.

From Spain the Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew and Latin, contributing to the development of modern European philosophy. The Egyptian philosophers Moses Maimonides (who was Jewish) and Ibn Khaldun were also important, and from Carthage Constantine the African translated Greek medical texts while Al-Khwarzimi's collation of mathematic techniques was considerable.

The golden age of Islamic art lasted from AD 750 to the mid-11th century, when ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and woodwork flourished. Lustered glass became the greatest Islamic contribution to ceramics. Manuscript illumination became an important and greatly respected art, and portrait miniature painting flourished in Persia. Calligraphy, an essential aspect of written Arabic, developed in manuscripts and architectural decoration.

It is argued that all this flourished in spite of Islam rather than because of it. Muslims had overrun societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Hindu and Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. Bernard Lewis wrote in What Went Wrong? that Islamic governments inherited "the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle east, of Greece and of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India."

The value of these intellectual achievements have also been questioned. There was a lot of speculation and very little application, whether in technology or politics.


Last updated: 10-24-2004 05:10:45