Watching the daily news stories of never-ending troubles, hardship, misery and violence across the Arab world and central Asia, it is not surprising that many in the West view the culture of these countries as backward, and their religion as at best conservative and often as violent and extremist.
I am on a mission to dismiss a crude and inaccurate historical hegemony and present the positive face of Islam. It has never been more timely or more resonant to explore the extent to which Western cultural and scientific thought is indebted to the work, a thousand years ago, of Arab and Muslim thinkers.
What is remarkable, for instance, is that for more than 700 years the international language of science was Arabic (which is why I describe it as "Arabic science"). More surprising, maybe, is the fact that one of the most fertile periods of scholarship and scientific progress in history would not have taken place without the spread of Islam across the Middle East, Persia, north Africa and Spain.
I have no religious or political axe to grind. As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shiite Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body. However, having spent a happy and comfortable childhood in Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s, I confess to strong nostalgic motives for my fascination in the history of Arabic science.
If there is anything I truly believe, it is that progress through reason and rationality is a good thing -- knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance. I proudly share my world view with one of the greatest rulers the Islamic world has ever seen: the 9th century Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far Abdullah al-Ma'mun.
Many in the West will know something of Ma'mun's more illustrious father, Harun al-Rashid, the caliph who is a central character in so many of the stories of the Arabian Nights. But it was Ma'mun, who came to power in 813AD, who was to truly launch the golden age of Arabic science. His lifelong thirst for knowledge was such an obsession that he was to create in Baghdad the greatest center of learning the world has ever seen, known throughout history simply as Bayt al-Hikma: the House of Wisdom.
We read in most accounts of the history of science that the contribution of the ancient Greeks would not be matched until the European Renaissance and the arrival of the likes of Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century. The 1,000-year period sandwiched between the two is dismissed as the Dark Ages. But the scientists and philosophers whom Ma'mun brought together, and whom he entrusted with his dreams of scholarship and wisdom, sparked a period of scientific achievement that was just as important as the Greeks or Renaissance, and we cannot simply project the European Dark Ages on to the rest of the world.
Of course some Islamic scholars are well known in the West. The Persian philosopher Avicenna -- born in 980AD -- is famous as the greatest physician of the Middle Ages. His Canon of Medicine was to remain the standard medical text in the Islamic world and across Europe until the 17th century, a period of more than 600 years. But Avicenna was also undoubtedly the greatest philosopher of Islam and one of the most important of all time. Avicenna's work stands as the pinnacle of medieval philosophy.
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