Islamic Golden Age

History of concepts The metaphor of a golden age began to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history , in the context of the western aesthetic fashion known as Orientalism . The author of a Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine in 1868 observed that the most beautiful mosques of Damascus were "like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying" and relics of "the golden age of Islam". [ 1 ] There is no unambiguous definition of the term, and depending on whether it is used with a focus on cultural or on military achievement, it may be taken to refer to rather disparate time spans. Thus, one 19th century author would have it extend to the duration of the caliphate, or to "six and a half centuries", [ 2 ] while another would have it end after only a few decades of Rashidun conquests, with the death of Umar and the First Fitna . [ 3 ] Improvements to the astrolabe were one of the achievements of this era During the early 20th century, the term was used only occasionally and often referred to as the early military successes of the Rashidun caliphs . It was only in the second half of the 20th century that the term came to be used with any frequency, now mostly referring to the cultural flourishing of science and mathematics under the caliphates during the 9th to 11th centuries (between the establishment of organised scholarship in the House of Wisdom and the beginning of the crusades ), [ 4 ] but often extended to include part of the late 8th or the 12th to early 13th centuries. [ 5 ] Definitions may still vary considerably. Equating the end of the golden age with the end of the caliphates is a convenient cut-off point based on a historical landmark, but it can be argued that Islamic culture had entered a gradual decline much earlier; thus, Khan (2003) identifies the proper golden age as being the two centuries between 750 and 950, arguing that the beginning loss of territories under Harun al-Rashid worsened after the death of al-Ma'mun in 833, and that the crusades in the 12th century resulted in a weakening of the Islamic empire from which it never recovered. [ 6 ] Regarding the end of the Gola, Mohamad Abdalla argues the dominant approach by scholars is the "decline theory.": The golden age is considered to have come into existence through a major effort to acquire and translate the ancient sciences of the Greeks between the eighth and ninth centuries. The translation era was followed by two centuries of splendid original thinking and contributions, and is known as the "golden age" of Islamic science. This so-called "golden age" is supposed to have lasted from the end of the ninth to the end of the eleventh century. The era after this period is conventionally known as the "age of decline". A survey of literature from the nineteenth century onward demonstrates that the decline theory has become the preferred paradigm in general academia. [ 7 ] ^ Josias Leslie Porter , A Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine , 1868, p. 49 . ^ New Outlook , vol. 45, 1892, p. 370, For six centuries and a half, through the golden age of Islam, lasted this Caliphate, till extinguished by the Osmanli sultans and in the death of the last of the blood of the house of Mahomet. The true Caliphate ended with the fall of Bagdad. ^ The Literary World , vol. 36, 1887, p. 308, the golden age of Islam, as Mr. Gilman points out, ended with Omar, the second of the Kalifs. [ title missing ] ^ "The Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh centuries were the golden age of Islam" Life magazine, 9 May 1955, [1] . ^ S. George, Linda (1998). The Golden Age of Islam . Benchmark Books. ISBN   978-0-7614-0273-2 . ^ Khan, Arshad (2003). Islam, Muslims, and America: Understanding the Basis of Their Conflict . Algora Publishing. p. 19. ISBN   978-0-87586-243-9 . ^ Mohamad Abdalla, "Ibn Khaldun on the Fate of Islamic Science after the 11th Century", Islam & Science 5.1 (2007). online Archived 7 November 2023 at the Wayback Machine

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Arts and culture Literature and poetry Main articles: Islamic literature and Islamic poetry See also: Arabic literature , Persian literature , and One Thousand and One Nights The 13th century poet [ 1 ] Rumi (also known as Mawlana ) (Romanized: mwlana) (Arabic word meaning "the great of our crowd")) wrote some of the finest poetry in the Persian language and remains one of the best selling poets in the United States. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Other famous poets of the Persian language include Hafez (whose work was read by William Jones, Thoreau, Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Engels), Saadi (whose poetry was cited extensively by Goethe, Hegel and Voltaire), Ferdowsi , Omar Khayyam and Amir Khusrow . One Thousand and One Nights , an anthology of folk tales from Asia and Africa compiled in the Arabic language during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, has had a large influence on world literature and popular culture with such classics as Aladdin , Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor . The folk-tale 'Sinbad the Sailor' even draws inspiration directly from Hellenistic literature like the Homeric epics (translated from Greek to Arabic in the 8th century CE) and Alexander Romances (tales of Alexander the Great popular in regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa). Art Main article: Islamic art Marquetry and tile-top table, 1560 Calligraphy , an essential aspect of written Arabic , developed in manuscripts and architectural decoration. This form of visual art can be found adorning the walls of palaces, the interior and domes of mosques as well as the surrounding structure of minbars . [ 4 ] Calligraphy would use a variety of stylised and standardised scripts, two major scripts among them being kufic and naskh . Ceramics, metalwork and glassware were also brilliantly decorated with geometric patterns and vibrant colors. [ 5 ] Manuscript illumination was an important art, and Persian miniature painting flourished in the Persianate world , and went on to influence miniature art in the Ottoman and Mughal court between the 16th–17th centuries. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Very few surviving records of wall painting exists, especially ones that represented the human face. A rare example of this are the early 9th-century fragments from the ruins of the Dar al-Khilafah palace at Samarra from the Abbasid period. These are fragments of larger wall paintings depicting harem women, period-era clothing and animals. [ 8 ] Music Main article: Arabic music The ninth and tenth centuries saw a flowering of Arabic music. Philosopher and esthete Al-Farabi , [ 9 ] at the end of the ninth century, established the foundations of modern Arabic music theory, based on the maqammat , or musical modes. His work was based on the music of Ziryab , the court musician of Andalusia. Ziryab was a renowned polymath, whose contributions to western civilization included formal dining, haircuts, chess, and more, in addition to his dominance of the world musical scene of the ninth century. [ 10 ] The Sumerians and Akkadians, the Greeks, and the Persians all used math to create notes used on lutes and lyres and other stringed instruments. Using the idea that a plucked or bowed string produces a note, they noticed the difference in tone when a string is stopped. "The great discovery" was hearing the double octave, that halving a string produces a note one octave above the string. [ 11 ] Written as a ratio 2:1. [ 11 ] They measured the ratios of string lengths on one side and the other of where the string was pressed, creating ratios. Those ratios allowed them to compare sounds, for example third intervals, fourths, fifths. They were able to tune one string against another in those intervals on lutes, lyres, harps, zithers. Lutes gave them the further ability to create those intervals on a single string, by adding frets at mathematically spaced distances, based on the ratios. Unlike modern instruments, where frets may be permanently fixed into the neck, as on a guitar, the older instruments used gut strings tied around the neck for frets, and this made their instruments adjustable. Early musicians could tune their instruments to different modes . Lute players could tune the strings to different intervals , and could further adjust the frets for the modes. Drawing of a lute by Safi al-Din from a 1333 copy of his book, Kitab al-Adwār . The oldest copy dates to 1296. The mixing cultures of Central Asia and Arabia produced several thinkers who wrote about music, including something about the lute in their works, including Al-Kindi ( c.  801  – c.  873 ), Ziryab (789–857), Al-Farabi ( c.  872  – c.  950 ), Avicenna ( c.  980 – 1037), and Safi al-Din al-Urmawi (1216–1294). They wrote in Arabic, what had become the useful lingua-Franca of their time, and took part in Muslim society and culture. However they were brought up in Central Asia. The Arabs had a musical scale, described by al-Farabi, in use by some through the 13th century A.D. [ 12 ] That tanbar scale, which divided the string into "40 equal parts" may have been a leftover from Babylon and Assyria. [ 12 ] However, the Arabs traded with and conquered the Persians, and they adopted Persian scales for their lutes, just as they adopted Persian short-necked lutes. [ 12 ] Ziryab moved from Baghdad to al-Andalus , where he set up a school of music and was one of the first to add a fifth string or course to oud, "between 822 and 852). [ 13 ] Al-Andalus, where he settled would become a center of musical instrument development for Europe. Al-Kindi was a polymath who wrote as many as 15 music-related treatises. He was among the first to apply Greek musical theory to Central Asian-Arabian short lutes. [ 13 ] He added semi-tones between the nut and the first string. [ 13 ] He also added a fifth string to his oud in the east, as Ziryab had done in the west. [ 13 ] Al-Farabi "fully incorporated the works of Aristoxenus and Ptolemy into his theory of tetrachords", and wrote among books in many subjects, the Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir , the Major Book of Music , in which he detailed how to tune an oud, using mathematical ratios. [ 14 ] He gave instruction for both 10 frets and 12, telling where to place the tied (and moveable) gut-string frets on the neck. [ 14 ] His way of tuning allowed a "12-fret 'ud tuning — which results ... 'double-octave' scale", with 22 notes in each octave. [ 14 ] Architecture Main article: Islamic architecture The Great Mosque of Kairouan (in Tunisia ), the ancestor of all the mosques in the western Islamic world excluding Turkey and the Balkans, [ 15 ] is one of the best preserved and most significant examples of early great mosques. Founded in 670, it dates in its present form largely from the 9th century. [ 16 ] The Great Mosque of Kairouan is constituted of a three-tiered square minaret, a large courtyard surrounded by colonnaded porticos, and a huge hypostyle prayer hall covered on its axis by two cupolas. [ 15 ] The Mosque of the Prophet , standing on the site of Muhammad's first mosque in Medina . The present-day building is the result of many reconstructions and expansions up to modern times. [ 17 ] The Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq was completed in 847. It combined the hypostyle architecture of rows of columns supporting a flat base, above which a huge spiralling minaret was constructed. The beginning of construction of the Great Mosque at Cordoba in 785 marked the beginning of Islamic architecture in Spain and Northern Africa. The mosque is noted for its striking interior arches. Moorish architecture reached its peak with the construction of the Alhambra , the magnificent palace/fortress of Granada , with its open and breezy interior spaces adorned in red, blue, and gold. The walls are decorated with stylized foliage motifs, Arabic inscriptions, and arabesque design work, with walls covered in geometrically patterned glazed tiles. Many traces of Fatimid architecture exist in Cairo today, the most defining examples include the Al Azhar University and the Al Hakim mosque . ^ Lewis, Franklin D. (1 November 2007). Rumi, Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi (2nd ed.). Oneworld Publications. p. 9. ISBN   9781851685493 . ^ Haviland, Charles (30 September 2007). "The roar of Rumi – 800 years on" . BBC News . Archived from the original on 30 July 2012 . Retrieved 10 August 2011 . ^ "Islam: Jalaluddin Rumi" . BBC . 1 September 2009. Archived from the original on 23 January 2011 . Retrieved 10 August 2011 . ^ Madden, Edward H. (1975). "Some Characteristics of Islamic Art". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism . 33 (4): 423– 430. doi : 10.2307/429655 . JSTOR   429655 . ^ Mason, Robert B. (1995). New Looks at Old Pots: Results of Recent Multidisciplinary Studies of Glazed Ceramics from the Islamic World . Brill Academic Publisher . ^ Verma, S.P. (2000). "Mughal Painting, Patrons and Painters". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress . 61 : 510– 526. ISSN   2249-1937 . JSTOR   44148128 . ^ Fisher, Carol Garrett (1984). "A Reconstruction of the Pictorial Cycle of the "Siyar-i Nabī" of Murād III". Ars Orientalis . 14 : 75– 94. ISSN   0571-1371 . JSTOR   4629330 . ^ "BBC Radio 4 - A History of the World in 100 Objects, Inside The Palace: Secrets At Court (700 - 950 AD), Harem wall painting fragments - Episode Transcript – Episode 52 - Harem wall painting fragments" . BBC . Retrieved 26 April 2022 . ^ Haque, Amber (1 December 2004). "Psychology from Islamic Perspective: Contributions of Early Muslim Scholars and Challenges to Contemporary Muslim Psychologists". Journal of Religion and Health . 43 (4): 357– 377. doi : 10.1007/s10943-004-4302-z . S2CID   38740431 . ^ Epstein, Joel (2019). The Language of the Heart . Juwal Publishing. ISBN   978-1-0701-0090-6 . ) ^ a b Dumbrill, Richard J. (2005). The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East . Trafford Publishing . pp.  ii– iii. ISBN   978-1-4120-5538-3 . ^ a b c Farmer, Henry George (April 1937). "The Lute Scale of Avicenna". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland . 69 (2): 245– 246. doi : 10.1017/S0035869X00085397 . JSTOR   25201498 . S2CID   163662254 . ^ a b c d Farmer, Henry George (April 1937). "The Lute Scale of Avicenna". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (2): 247– 248. JSTOR   25201498 . ^ a b c Forster, Christiano M.L. "Musical Mathematics on the art and science of acoustic instruments, Chapter 11" . chrysalis-foundation.org . Retrieved 19 September 2018 . Before we continue with Al-Farabi's 12-fret 'ud tuning — which results in a 22-tone "double-octave" scale ... Al-Farabi concludes 'After these, no note of the 'ud remains which needs to be reproduced. In each octave, there are twenty-two notes; and these are all the notes used by the 'ud. Some of them are more frequently used than others.' ^ a b John Stothoff Badeau and John Richard Hayes, The Genius of Arab civilization: source of Renaissance . Taylor & Francis . 1 January 1983. p. 104. ISBN   978-0-262-08136-8 . Retrieved 11 April 2014 . ^ "Great Mosque of Kairouan (Qantara mediterranean heritage)" . Qantara-med.org. Archived from the original on 9 February 2015 . Retrieved 11 April 2014 . ^ Bloom & Blair 2009 , Medina harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBloomBlair2009 ( help )

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Decline Cultural factors Economic historian Joel Mokyr has argued that Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali (1058–1111), the author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers , "was a key figure in the decline in Islamic science" and that this led to a cultural shift shunning away from scientific thinking. [ 1 ] In a 2014 opinion piece published by Al Jazeera , student of Islamic jurisprudence Mohamed Ghilan argued that al-Ghazali was not generally against science, only its encroachment upon religious matters. [ 2 ] Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science George Saliba has pointed out that the golden age did not slow down after al-Ghazali, and argued that the golden age of astronomy should be located in the post-Ghazali period. [ 3 ] : 245  Others extend the golden age to around the 16th [ 4 ] to 17th centuries. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Political and economic factors See also: Great Divergence Ahmad Y. al-Hassan has rejected the thesis that lack of creative thinking was a cause, arguing that science was always kept separate from religious argument; he instead analyzes the decline in terms of economic and political factors, drawing on the work of the 14th-century writer Ibn Khaldun . [ 4 ] Several other contemporary scholars have analysed the decline in terms of political and economic factors. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] Current research has led to the conclusion that "the available evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that an increase in the political power of these elites caused the observed decline in scientific output." [ 10 ] The decline could be part of a larger trend where the non-Western world fell behind the West in the Great Divergence . In 1206, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire which, during the 13th century, conquered most of the Eurasian land mass, including China in the east and much of the old Islamic caliphate (as well as Kievan Rus' ) in the west. The destruction of Baghdad and the House of Wisdom by Hulagu Khan in 1258 has been seen by some as the end of the Islamic Golden Age. [ 11 ] However, while cultural influence used to radiate outward from Baghdad, after the fall of Baghdad, Iran and Central Asia saw a cultural flourishing by benefiting from increased cross-cultural access to East Asia under Mongol rule . [ 12 ] [ 13 ] ^ Mokyr, Joel (12 June 2018). Mokyr, J.: A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. (eBook and Hardcover) . Princeton University Press. p. 67. ISBN   978-0-691-18096-0 . Archived from the original on 24 March 2017 . Retrieved 9 March 2017 . ^ "Bringing Muslims back to science" . Al Jazeera. 11 April 2014 . Retrieved 11 June 2022 . ^ Saliba, George (2007). Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance . The MIT Press . doi : 10.7551/mitpress/3981.001.0001 . ISBN   9780262282888 . ^ a b Hassan, Ahmad Y (1996). "Factors Behind the Decline of Islamic Science After the Sixteenth Century" . In Sharifah Shifa Al-Attas (ed.). Islam and the Challenge of Modernity, Proceedings of the Inaugural Symposium on Islam and the Challenge of Modernity: Historical and Contemporary Contexts, Kuala Lumpur, 1–5 August 1994 . International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC). pp.  351– 99. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. ^ El-Rouayheb, Khaled (2008). "The Myth of "The Triumph of Fanaticism" in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire". Die Welt des Islams . 48 (2): 196– 221. doi : 10.1163/157006008x335930 . ^ El-Rouayheb, Khaled (2006). "Opening the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten Arab-Islamic Florescence of the 17th Century". International Journal of Middle East Studies . 38 (2): 263– 81. doi : 10.1017/s0020743806412344 . S2CID   162679546 . ^ El-Rouhayeb, Khaled (2015). Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . pp.  1– 10. ISBN   978-1-107-04296-4 . ^ Cite error: The named reference Saliba was invoked but never defined (see the help page ). ^ Cite error: The named reference King was invoked but never defined (see the help page ). ^ "Religion and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science" . scholar.harvard.edu . Archived from the original on 22 December 2015 . Retrieved 20 December 2015 . ^ Cooper, William W.; Yue, Piyu (2008). Challenges of the Muslim world: present, future and past . Emerald Group Publishing. ISBN   978-0-444-53243-5 . Retrieved 11 April 2014 . ^ Cite error: The named reference bulliet was invoked but never defined (see the help page ). ^ Cite error: The named reference subtelny was invoked but never defined (see the help page ).

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