Raymond Levine
Lost Enlightenment: Polymaths from the Centre of the World

Raymond Levine | Lost Enlightenment: Polymaths from the Centre of the World | 04.18.24

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- Good evening everyone and welcome to our second lecture of the evening with a very intriguing title, “Lost Enlightenment Polymaths From the Centre of the World.” It’s my very great pleasure to introduce Raymond Levine to you. Raymond is one of my oldest friends. We go back to university days, and there’s not much we don’t know about each other. He was head of a law firm, has retired after 50 years in the law, but his passion has always been history, philosophy, literature. So I challenged him, I said, “Why don’t you come and teach for us?” Because he’s done a lot of lecturing in law. So, Raymond, welcome. And I haven’t revealed any secrets about you. So welcome to Lockdown University and thank you very much for coming.

• Well thank you, Trudy, for that kind introduction. Much appreciated. So we are going to talk tonight about a Lost Enlightenment. I’ve subtitled it “Polymaths From the Centre of the World,” and this is a story of a golden age of Islamic culture and learning, what it was and what it wasn’t and some thoughts on how it’s affected the developments of European civilization and culture. Most Jews, when thinking of the Golden Age, will recall Al-Andalus in the glory days of the Umayyad emirs. In other words, Spain, from the mid-eighth century until the 12th century CE. That is not the subject of today’s talk or at least only tangentially. The period we are looking at is the same, eighth to 12th century CE, but the place, Central Asia, and it must be stressed the people involved were different.

By the time of the Battle of Talas in modern Kyrgyzstan in 751 CE and the succeeding decade, which saw the Umayyads established in Spain, people’s adhering to Islam as their religion ruled a continuous region stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of China. The battle of Talas was of huge significance as it kept the Chinese out of Central Asia and secured Islamic hegemony over that region. In Europe, the Islamic armies had failed to take tours in Central France in 732 and had been driven back over the Pyrenees where various Islamic groups ruled almost unchallenged until the Reconquista of the 11th to 13th centuries. This was therefore a vast region of influence, but it was never really an empire, in that there was no unified political regime. The reasons for that are complex and more than enough for another talk, but for our purposes we should focus on just one factor.

The inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, a large geographic area that then as now largely infertile and incapable of supporting large populations were not numerous in relation to the surrounding lands. Estimates vary quite significantly, but some say only 20,000, and of course not all of them would’ve travelled with the conquering armies. Whatever the number, it’s inconceivable that the population of this vast area of influence, the Atlantic to China, could have been predominantly of ethnic Arabic Arab origin. What the Arabs did was conquer by military and diplomatic means this enormous territory with the initial aim of converting the indigenous people to Islam, and then preserving their achievements by imposing a type of militarily backed overlordship.

Now if this seems a lot like the European expansion into the Americas, Africa and Asia in the 15th to 19th centuries, then perhaps we should call it by the same name, colonialism. So when speaking of Arab culture and learning, we should ask the question, is this really Arab or is it the work of others who adopted Islam as their religion, but were not ethnic Arabs? The place where the Arabs could justifiably claim credit is Spain. The earliest Islamic forces not only conquered but settled there and created a unique culture. But even there, over the centuries, they were not all Arabs. Many were Berben and other North African tribes who had converted to Islam, possibly seduced by the promise of booty and a better and new life in a more fertile land. And who could blame them? The indigenous population were mainly Christian and a small number of Jews. And over time many of them converted to Islam.

Others did not, and the Arab conquerors of Spain followed the tradition of the Persian and Roman empires before them in tolerating other religions and ethnic groups. Now, a place where the Arab claim was significantly weaker is Central Asia. Even at the Battle of Talas, already mentioned, the vast bulk of the Arab army was made up of fighters from Central Asia with an Arab high command, if you like, perched on top. However, the supreme commander, Abu Muslim al-Rahman ibn Muslim al-Khurasani, known as Abu Muslim, was an Iranian from a village near Merv in Central Asia. This is the region we look at today together with some of its major personalities and intellects. Some are well known, even in the West, while others are not, but should be.

At this point, I have to acknowledge my main source for tonight’s talk. I’m going to hold it up to my screen, and I hope you’re able to see it. It’s called “The Lost Enlightenment,” and it’s written, I hope you can see his name at the bottom there by an American academic called Frederick Starr. It’s a most wonderful book. And if you do find things of interest tonight in this talk, I hope that some of you will read it. It has far more detail than I can ever hope to absorb or cover in a lecture. But, it is really well worth the read. And for the sake of the record, I don’t know the gentleman, and he hasn’t paid me for this plug. So, moving on. Firstly, we should understand where Central Asia is. It covers the eastern part of today’s Iran, all Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan.

Now, we’re vaguely aware of their location, but search for them on a map of Asia or Europe, and you will find them if at all, somewhere out on the periphery. Can we now see slide two, please? Now, look at the picture on your screen, and you will see that they’re right at the centre of the Eurasian land mass, an entirely different perspective. Secondly, we need to have some understanding of what Central Asia was. To the extent that there is any generally accepted view, this is of an arid region, often desert and mountain and in short, not a place which could support a rich and learned culture. Wrong. No, not entirely. In large areas, conditions were indeed harsh, and life couldn’t have been easy for the nomadic people who lived there.

However, whilst it didn’t lie in the great river valleys of the world, it was at least in parts well watered. Before the Russians destroyed the environments in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Oxus and Jaxartes Rivers now known as the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and both flowing into the Aral Sea, those rivers irrigated many parts of the region. And it is these areas which provided the cement which held together the entire intellectual adventure. More surprisingly, perhaps, cities were sustained around the huge oases with populations enormous by the standards of European cities of the same era. Bukhara is estimated to have had a population of several, perhaps as high as 500,000 in the 10th century. Nishapur about the same at that time. And Merv, like Ravenna in Italy, a world heritage site, was said to have 200,000 in the mid-12th century.

At the turn of the ninth century, a little earlier, these would’ve been far outstripped by Chang'an in China and Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphs, each of which may have had up to a million. A century later, they had been joined by Cordoba, the capital of al-Andalus, making it the largest city in Europe, surpassing Constantinople. By contrast, the population of Charlemagne’s capital at Aix-la-Chapelle was less than 10,000 and London, not much bigger. So it would be wrong to consider Central Asia as a backward piece of nomad’s land full of primitive iterate nomads. In fact, it was a highly civilised part of the world with trading and cultural links with China, India and to some extent Europe. Can we now have slide three, please? Now, this slide is interesting.

I know some of you will be bored stiff by maps, but this shows in more detail with a few place names, provinces and tribal names superimposed. And it shows the Seljuk or the eastern part of the Seljuk Empire around the year 1200. The green line is the rough boundary of the Seljuk domains. And the red lines are the main routes, especially the main trade routes. Those of you with sharp eyesight will see at the top right there’s a little legend which says Silk Road to China. What an understatement. But, it also shows some of the original cities that I’m going to mention. I appreciate you may not be able to see that too clearly on your screens, but we may from time to time just come back to this map and refer to it.

So moving on, Arnold Toynbee recognised its importance when writing his great work, “A Study of History.” I know he is not too highly regarded these days, but I like him, and I’m going to quote from his work. He designated Samarkand, which is now in Uzbekistan as one of only two cultural roundabouts. That is, places where cultures meet and exchange ideas, much like modern universities before they discovered political correctness. Samarkand has fascinated other cultures ever since it was visited by Alexander the Great in the 320s BC. And later by Buddhist pilgrim’s from China, Christian friars from Flanders, English and Venetian merchants, and of course, numerous conquerors. The other cultural roundabout was Damascus, where the Umayyad Caliphate was first established.

They’re linked by the Silk Road, because mingling of people usually follows trade and mark the geographical points where the roots branch out to China, India and Western Asia in the case of Samarkand, and then onwards to Europe and Egypt in the case of Damascus. This is no accident according to Toynbee that all the major religions of the world grew up close to these roundabouts. This mingling of cultures is a key point in explaining the flourishing of what has been called an enlightenment in Central Asia and to which we must now turn. So before we move on to talk about some of the leading characters who can be called polymaths, as most of them were, we should try to identify who they were as a group. Now, the first point to note is that this is a region like many others, which has undergone mass migrations for millennia.

As a result, the ethnic composition of its people has changed over time. Much like Europe during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, with a mass migration of what were and still are known as the barbarian tribes, today we might call them more politely, Frenchman, Germans or Italians. That said, it seems clear that from long before the Islamic invasion, the dominant ethnic group in Central Asia were Iranian. This implies neither political nor even linguistic unity. That varied over time. And there were many Iranian dialects in use in any given period. But, all these dialects were part of the Iranian language group, itself one of the Indo-Aryan languages. As culture tends to follow language or rather the politics, a convincing case can be made for saying the people of Central Asia during our period were predominantly Iranian, although it can certainly be argued they had a separate identity from inhabitants of the Iranian plateau further west.

Later in the period, a number of Turkic people increased, perhaps pushed westward and southward by climate change as one eminent historian has suggested. A significant number of the later thinkers and writers were of Turkic origin, having long been settled in Central Asia and had time to absorb its culture. Once again, there has been a lively discussion over whether they should be regarded as Turks in the same way as other Turks further west or whether they too should be recognised as Central Asian. In a way, this is a somewhat sterile debate. It is an argument over which label to apply without altering the substance of who achieved what and where, which is surely what matters most. Nevertheless, what is incontrovertible is that they were not Arabs. Why then have learned historians and academics identified them as such? Well, the main reason appears to me to be because they wrote in Arabic, which after the Arab invasion became the lingua franca of the lands under Islamic control.

We’ve seen the same in Europe with Latin becoming the lingua franca from Roman times up to the European Enlightenment in the 17th to 18th centuries. In the 20th century, English became the lingua franca as the language of commerce, tourism and information technology. We could add diplomacy much to the chagrin of the French. An interesting footnote is that the lingua franca replaced by Arabic in Central Asia was Aramaic, the language of the Talmud and brought to central Asia by Syriac merchants and later by historian Christian refugees, probably some Jews too. Iran is after all the oldest diaspora in the world. So the widespread use of Arabic as the language of learning, culture and no doubt other aspects of life should be no surprise. In Spain, Maimonides and Ibn Gabirol wrote in Arabic, though not exclusively.

They also wrote in Hebrew, Latin and probably Spanish. And there are many examples of Central Asian thinkers also writing in their own or other languages. So the bottom line is we should not confuse the use of a lingua franca or in modern times a nationality with a person’s ethnicity. By that token, Maimonides was an Arab, Josephus was a Greek, Ishiguro an Englishman, and Isabel Allende an American. So to the polymaths, though few would argue against the preeminence of Ferdowsi’s great epic of the Persian people, the “Shahnameh” or “Book of Kings,” a collection of tales from the mythological to the historic. Written in the 10th century, it is particularly poignant in recounting the fears of the Iranians for their country and their religion Zoroastrianism following the Arab conquest.

It remains one of the principle sources for pre-Islamic Iran, and indeed for the central Asian part of Iran where much of the action is located. It also has a great deal to say about the relationship of fathers and sons, almost a millennia before Turgenev and Sigmund Freud. Next, we turn to another poet who has been a leading figure in Iran since his appearance in the 11th century and became better known and more appreciated in the West in the 19th century when his sublime poem, “The Rubaiyat” was translated from the original Iranian into English by Edward Fitzgerald. We speak of course Omar Khayyam. Could we have slide four, please? And there is the gentleman. I’m also going to show you on my screen if you can see this, that’s a book of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” also illustrated with an illustration called “The Lovers.”

We’ll see why shortly. Now his was no airy fairy poetry as favoured by the English romantics and others. This was earthy, penetrating. At times it was mystic in the Sufi tradition. And interestingly, it reveals Khayyam as an advocate of the more sensuous pleasures of life, hence “The Lovers,” showing the religious Islamic disdain for them that not fully penetrated, sorry for the pun, Central Asia. Rather than offer my poor interpretation, let me quote from the words of the master. “Drink wine. This is life eternal. This, all that youth will give you. This is the season for wine, roses and friends drinking together. Be happy for this moment. This is all life is. Be happy for this moment indeed. And again, my rule of life is to drink and be merry.

To be free from belief and unbelief is my religion. I asked the bride of destiny her bride price. "Your joyous hearts,” she said.“ Now amid the reference to the drink, and this could be Baruch Spinoza speaking. Perhaps Khayyam’s best known lines as quoted by Humphrey Bogart in "The Barefoot Contessa,” directed by Joseph Mankiewicz are, “The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it. What is done is done beyond all religion and philosophy. Once more, be happy for this moment.” And I can’t resist quoting a line from the Viennese Jewish author Stefan Zweig echoing the same sentiments. He wrote, “In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment, and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”

Khayyam cast a long shadow. Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur in 1048 CE. Nishapur was the capital of the province of Khurasan in northeast Iran which extended as far as the Oxus River. Can we just go back to slide three for a moment? You might be able to see almost at the centre there in big letters Khurasan. And just above it in tiny letters, which you may not be able to see, but it’s where the red line kinks a bit. That’s Nishapur. Okay, let’s go back to where we were, slide four. Thank you, Hannah. So shortly before Khayyam’s birth, the region had been occupied by the Seljuk Turks whose domains eventually spread into the Levant and Egypt and whose then leader, Salah ad-Din, led the Islamic armies during the third crusade, which we heard much more about them from Trudy earlier on today.

But, so far as Khayyam was concerned, that was in the future, and he wouldn’t live to see it. What mattered is that during his early years times were turbulent, and it was often necessary to be on the move, both to progress in his studies and in his life and sometimes to find a place of greater safety. His travels took him to Balkh in present day Afghanistan, to Merv, which we’ve already mentioned and to Samarkand, the city visited by Alexander the Great and later the capital of the Turkic leader Timur the Lame, known in the west as Tamerlane. Eventually Khayyam returned to Nishapur where he spent the rest of his long life. And again, can we just go back to the map at slide three? Thank you.

I don’t know if you can see in large figures near the top of the map the word Transoxiana, which is the name given to the region the other side of the Oxus River. Thank you, Hannah. That’s just where you should put your cursor. A little bit up. Yes, stop there. If you look just below Hannah’s cursor you’ll see Bukhara, and just to its right to the west, you’ll see Samarkand. Yes, there they are. And I wanted to draw attention, because they’ve already been mentioned and they’ll be mentioned again. They’re really the heart of this region together with Nishapur. So we can go back now to Khayyam’s picture on the next slide. Thank you. But Khayyam was so much more than a great poet. His work in mathematics is legendary in Iran and elsewhere. At the age of just 22, he wrote his “Treatise on Demonstration of the Problems of Algebra,” in which he put forward a complete classification of cubic equations with geometric solutions. Sorry, don’t ask me what those are.

This flew beyond anything previous Greek or Arab or central Asian mathematic theory. And it was over 700 years before his work in this field was surpassed. And it didn’t end there. He also did important work in astronomy and is credited with the revision of the Iranian solar based calendar, which remained the official calendar of Iran until 1925. Yes, 1925. On a more philosophical note, he dismissed the disputes raging in his time about whether the world was created in time by God or whether it was eternal, because it was part of God. In other words, creationism and pantheism to use later descriptions. Khayyam dismissed it on the grounds that in the end we are all dead and it will all be the same created or uncreated. Incredibly, we still debate these things in our own time, though sadly without the wisdom of a philosopher like Khayyam.

We now turn to another polymath, well known in the West as well as his Asian homeland, Abu ʿAli al-Ḥusayn bin Sina. If the name is not instantly recognisable, it may be become so if we use the name by which he was known in Europe, Avicenna. Born around 970 CE and raised in Bukhara, Ibu Sina was the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world. I now quote, “In his work, he combined the disparate strands of philosophical and scientific thinking in Greek, late antiquity and early Islam into a rationally rigorous and self-consistent scientific system that encompassed and explained all reality, including the tenets of revealed religion and its theological and mystical elaborations.” High praise, indeed. The field in which he truly excelled with much original work is medicine. His book “Canon of Medicine” in English was the standard work not only in the Islamic world, but beyond.

This has been hugely influential in India and through a Latin translation became the principle source for medical instruction in European universities until the 17th century. It must also be noted that there were Hebrew translations of Ibn Sina’s work circulating in Europe. Perhaps we might detect the hand of Maimonides in this. A physician himself, he had a professional interest and would’ve had access to the Arabic translation of the book. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility he may have had a hand in both the Hebrew and the Latin translations, though I hasten to add, I’ve seen no direct evidence of that. Ibn Sina became more involved than Khayyam with the disputed issue of creation. He entered into a detailed and at times aggressive correspondence on the subject with another giant polymath, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni born around the same time near the Aral Sea in the northern part of the region.

Biruni also distinguished himself in the fields of geography, mathematics, religion, and psychology. And you can see on your screen a representation. I don’t think there are actual photographs or portrait painting, but a representation of what each of those great men may have looked like with Biruni on the right, Ibn Sina on the left. Now, what is interesting about this debate is not the outcome. As Khayyam observed, in the end we are all dead, but rather that this was one of the first, if not the first example of a scientific or philosophical debate justified or not by the evidence, not by authority. Perhaps for the first time since classical Greece, Aristotle’s views needed to be proven rather than just accepted because the first teacher said so. This profound development anticipated similar understandings in Europe by over half a millennium. But, authority was not quite dead.

In the debate with Biruni on whether heavenly bodies were restricted to circular or linear motion as Aristotle taught or whether they could move in an ellipse, a notion which I hope will be the subject of another talk Ibn Sina was reluctant to move away from authority. And it was Biruni who was the radical innovator. Ibn Sina found himself on a firmer footing when the discussion turned to optics, while it would, he was doctor. Rejecting Plato, and who wouldn’t, he asserted that the eyes controlled sight not by sending out rays as Plato had taught, but by receiving them. Whether he took the next step of understanding that it was the brain, not the eyes which processed the rays is unclear. Nevertheless, he was once again centuries in advance of European thought on this whilst Biruni dragged his feet. Now, having mentioned the movements of the planets, let’s now look at one of the most influential astronomers of all time.

He was Nasir al-Din al-Tusi from the city of Tus very near to Nishapur and who flourished in the 13th century. You can see him now on your screen with in the middle of the screen, you’ll see what I’m going to come on to talk about in just half a moment. He was another Iranian polymath who was influential in many fields of learning, including chemistry, logic, mathematics, and biology. He was regarded in his time as the greatest exponent of Ibn Sina’s philosophy and Biruni’s natural science. However, he is best known for his work as an astronomer working in a purpose-built observatory as Maragheh near the Mongol capital at Tabriz. It was funded by Hulegu the new Mongol Khan, who by then ruled Iran. You can see the picture now in the middle of the screen called “The Astronomical Observatory of Nasir al Din Tusi.”

There would be nothing comparable in Europe for another three centuries. Of course, Hulegu was not really interested in astronomy. He was far more concerned with astrological predictions to further his political and military ambitions. But, so long as the money kept flowing, al Tusi probably didn’t complain. Like Khayyam before him, who didn’t set great store by astrology, al-Tusi thought predictions of going on a journey or whatever were a poor imitation of the journey of the celestial bodies. Al Tusi was concerned to iron out faults in the Ptolemaic geocentric system of the centre of the universe rather than to overthrow it. But, his credited with the view that celestial spheres which rotate on their axis are more compatible with Ptolemy’s own observations than Ptolemy’s view that the earth is stationary.

What troubled al-Tusi was that he knew no experiments which could establish conclusively either that the earth was stationary or that it was rotating. Early shades of relativity theory and absolute motion. Al-Tusi made very accurate tables of planetary movements as depicted in his book “Zij-i Ilkhani,” in English, “The Ilkhanic Tables.” These tables were used for calculating the positions of the planets and the stars. His model for the planetary system is believed to be the most advanced of his time and was used extensively until the development of the heliocentric model in the time of Copernicus. It is widely accepted that Copernicus made use of the two C couple, a theory which generates to linear motion from the sum of two circular motions. Now, so far as we know, Copernicus couldn’t read Arabic, but he could have found someone who did. Perhaps the Jewish scholar from al-Andalus, Abner of Burgos is a possible candidate.

Alternatively, the knowledge could have come through the Byzantine Greek scholar, Gregory Chioniades. Still others claim Copernicus could have arrived at these conclusions independently, perhaps influenced by Euclid’s work and his own known dissatisfaction with Ptolemaic theory. We may never know. Now in part for personal reasons, I must mention Ali Ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari. Slide seven, please. Here he is. We’re not sure of his dates, because they’re given in various sources as 838 to 870, 810 to 855. Again, 808 to 864, and also 783 to 858. We do know he was an Iranian Muslim scholar, physician, and psychologist who produced one of the first Islamic encyclopaedias of medicine titled “Firdous al-Hikmah,” “Paradise of Wisdom.”

He was one of the first to discover, sorry, he was the first to discover that pulmonary tuberculosis is contagious. Al-Tabari also emphasised the close connection between physical and mental health, as did Maimonides after him. These thoughts didn’t originate with Sigmund Freud. Probably because he’s said to be a Muslim convert from an Nestorian Christian family, Ali Ibn Sahl spoke Syriac and Greek, the two sources of the medical tradition of antiquity, which had been lost by mediaeval Europe and which he transcribed in meticulous calligraphy. He lived for over 70 years, we’re told, which indicates his dates are most likely to be 783 to 858. And he interacted with important figures of the time, such as Muslim Caliphs, governors and eminent scholars. Because of his family’s religious history, al-Tabari was one of the most controversial scholars.

Interestingly, another source says that he was originally from a Jewish family, that the confusion may be because there were other al-Tabaris such as the renowned Abu Ja far Muhammad ibn Yazid al-Tabari, another polymath, best known as a historian. In those days, the last part of a name was used to designate the person’s place of birth or residence rather than any family affiliation. In this case, the place was on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake in the area now called Mazandaran, that then known as Tabaristan. There are many more great thinkers and polymaths we could mention including al-Jahiz, al-Razi, al-Khwarizmi and al-Farabi known as the second teacher with Aristotle being the first. The time is against us, and I hope I have at least given the flavour of what was happening in this time and place and why it was regarded as a Golden Age.

But we should say a word also about the sceptics, the radical thinkers in large part from Khurasan who provided a counterpoint to mainstream intellectual developments, Not so much because they dominated the narrative, they didn’t, but more because they provided a focus for what came next. Many were Muslims, but others had different antecedents. Here, we have al-Balkhi from Balkh, probably of Jewish birth attacked Judaism pointing out what in his view were inconsistencies or absurdities in the first five books of the Jewish scriptures, to Jews, the Torah, and to others, the Old Testament. He probably suffered like many after him from a too literal reading without enough attention to the underlying metaphorical meaning. His views were as much an anathema to Muslims who believed the Jewish scriptures to be divinely inspired as they were to Jews. Another such writer was Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn al-Rawandi from lesser Merv in present day Afghanistan.

He was born Jewish, then converted to Islam before finally declaring himself an atheist. His rejection of all revealed religions in favour of reason and observation presaged the European enlightenment by 800 years. Some, though not all of his views could have been spoken by Spinoza. The key point is that right or wrong, these opinions and others like them were seen as attacking religious authority, and that was the problem, which we will pick up again shortly. Now, it’s noticeable that the polymaths we’ve looked at were all men. Women in those days and in that place had no part in intellectual endeavour, at least not publicly.

But, that was not so in the political and social fields where women exercised a degree of power and authority, which surpassed that of their contemporaries in Europe and the Levants, particularly so under Mongol and Turkic rulers. There is a story of widowed queen who governed a city under siege by one of the most formidable rulers of his day, Mahmud of Ghazni. She was known simply as The Lady, like Aung San Suu Kyi. Rather than surrender her city, she challenged Mahmud by telling him that, “If she won, she would’ve defeated the greatest commander of the age. That if he won, he would only have defeated a woman.” As he slunk off to fight another day, he might have reflected that wars are not always won by feats of arms.

So after that brief glimpse into the Islamic golden age in Central Asia, we are left with two burning questions. Firstly, in what way did the Arabs contribute to it? And secondly, why is it called the lost enlightenment? On the first question, we’ve already seen how Arabic became the lingua franca of learned Central Asia and beyond, perhaps just an unintended byproduct of the conquest, but possibly not. Remember that one aim, though surely not the only one had been to convert the indigenous population to Islam, and Arabic was the language in which the Holy Books of Islam were written and the language in which Muslims prayed.

The fact Islam spread over such a wide area in which, for the most part, Muslims could travel freely facilitated the dissemination of written works and more importantly the ideas they encompassed. So whether or not intended, that was a major contribution. We may also legitimately ask whether the translation of classical works from ancient Greece and the more recent Hellenic world into Arabic was another achievements of the Arabs. Well, that case is harder to support, although there was a burst of such work under the caliph Harun al-Rashid at the start of the eighth century. Sorry, it’s the start of the ninth century. The work itself was largely done by a Buddhist family called the Barmaks.

They came from, well you’ve guessed it, Central Asia. Their expertise extended to translations from Sanskrit as well as from Greek and Syriac. And they were not just translators. They acted as viziers to Harun. And some say they virtually ran the Abbasid Caliphate in all but name, much like the mayors of the palace in Merovingian France. Central Asians were effectively the leaders, not subservient to the Arab conquerors in all things. And Iranians have long said that “Their country is unconquerable, because all who try end up being absorbed into Iranian culture.” History shows us there is much truth in that. So what about Arabic numerals, you might ask?

Introduced to the west by the Arabs and used worldwide today, the short answer is they’re not Arabic. They were brought to the Islamic world from India, together with the mathematical concepts of zero and the decimal points. Moving to the technological sphere. Can we see slide eight, please? The astrolabe was an instrument known in ancient Greece. It was used to fix and predict the location of planets and stars and to measure time as specific latitudes. It could even be used to calculate the height of mountains. It was assumed for over 1,000 years that this instruments had been perfected by Arab scientists.

However, it was not that simple. The scientist who constructed the first, so-called Arabic astrolabe was called Fazari. And he came from Fars in the southwest of Iran, not Central Asian this time, but clearly Iranian. An Arab from Baghdad, Battani, known in the West as Albategnius first worked out the mathematics of the astrolabe, but it was Saghani from Merv, again Central Asia, who discovered how to use it to project a sphere onto a plane perpendicular to its axis, thereby opening up new uses and possibilities for the instruments. So, in summary, the Arabs did make important contributions, but few of these were in the realm of the intellectual developments or original contributions to the expansion of knowledge.

They were more the messengers and facilitators of its dissemination to a wider audience certainly for which we should be grateful, though it does seem to fall a little short of an Arab civilization. The European enlightenment is arguably a continuing process to the present day. It has had its opponents who Isaiah Berlin calls “betrayers of freedom” and Francis Fukuyama describes as “discontents.” But, most of us like to think that the inquiring mind and openness to new ideas is still flourishing, at least on Lockdown. By contrast, the Islamic enlightenment in Central Asia did not continue. In that sense, it is a lost enlightenment, and we will conclude by briefly examining why and how that happened. It does much to explain how the Middle East has ended up in the sad state it is in today.

The seeds were sown relatively early in the time of Khayyam in the 11th century. There arose in Tus a man, a philosopher, and in time a theologian who started a process which eventually led to the Islamic Enlightenment being superseded by worldview based on religion rather than philosophy and science, the rational arts, as one might say. This man was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, and we can see him on slide nine, please. Initially, he was a supporter and even a friend of Khayyam that later grew disillusioned with rationalism and became increasingly combative in his opposition to thinkers like Khayyam, Ibn Sina, and Biruni. Ghazali did not entirely reject rationalism, but he considered it should be confined to practical and technological matters and did not serve to explain or illuminate the greater truths of the world.

He believed that only religion could do that. By granting supremacy to religion, he effectively marginalised rational thoughts and all the Islamic philosophers, mathematicians, cosmographers, physicians and others who based their work on reason and logic were undermined by him. He wrote what has been described as a brilliant and devastating attack on the rationalists called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” which would have a negative effect on rational thought in the region for centuries. Opposition to Ghazali was muted in Central Asia. Perhaps surprisingly, the rebuttal came from distant Europe, Muslim, Spain. It came from another giant polymath in Islamic thoughts, the philosopher and judge and many other things too numerous to mention known in Europe as Averroes, But we will call him by his real name.

Abu l-Walid Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rusd or simply Ibn Rushd. Next slide, please. There’s his statue outside the walls of his city of Cordoba where he was born in 1126 shortly after Ghazali’S death and a few years before Maimonides’ birth. His rebuttal came in a book cheekily entitled “The Incoherence of the Incoherence.” It is said that he left Ghazali’s assault in tatters, but it was too late. His work was largely ignored by Muslims, both in Spain and in Central Asia. It had more influence amongst Jewish thinkers in Spain such as Maimonides, Moses Narboni, and Abraham ibn Ezra. And his writings were translated into Hebrew and from there they were translated into Latin and reached a wider Christian readership.

Ibn Rushd’s life and thought are outside the scope of this talk, but we really cannot leave him without mentioning one of his sayings. “Ignorance leads to fear. Fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence.” Timeless truth. How different the relationship between Jew and Arab might have been, if those on both sides that he did his wise words. Over the centuries following Ghazali, the religious thinking continued to gain ground over the rationalists. The Mongol conquests probably didn’t help, though there were some bright spots such as al-Tusi’s Observatory being funded by Hulegu.

There was also a late flowering in the time of Tamerlane centred on his capital in Samarkand. And one of his grandsons, Ulugh Beg is famous for his astronomical observations and patronage, but the preeminence had been lost. The successor states to the Timurid Empire, the moguls in India, the Safavids in Iran, the Ottomans in Turkey did not inherit the intellectual achievements of the Golden Age in Central Asia. Instead, they became bastions of different versions of Islamic orthodoxy. By contrast, Europe was just emerging from its own Dark Ages. In passing, we should observe that those dark ages were caused only partly by barbarian invasions. The other course is the reactions to the uncertainty of both the political and individual levels.

The response of both in the years around 400 CE was in a retreat from rational, open-minded classical thinking to a more mystical train of thought, eventually, but quite quickly transformed into religious orthodoxy. Dogma rather than mysticism. This suited the Roman empire, emperor and the patriarchs of the church. In other words, Europe had already lost its classical enlightenment of antiquity even before the developments we’ve been describing in Central Asia, and from much the same causes as Central Asia’s decline a millennium later. One eminent historian has written on this period of European history under the title, “The Closing of the Western Mind.” It’s interesting and ironic that the developments in Central Asia we’ve been reviewing have been described elsewhere as the closing of the Muslim mind.

That Europe was moving on with the pre Renaissance of the 12th century, the Renaissance proper a little later and its own enlightenment from the early 1600s. By then Europe had asserted its ascendancy over the Islamic world causing great resentments amongst many Muslims, which we see writ large to this day. This is one cause among others of the present relationship between Jews and Arabs. So a final question, how should the West react to this? With a warm glow of superiority, a shrug of the shoulders, a finger wagging, you’ve only got yourselves to blame? Whilst arguments for any or all of the above can be advanced, in my opinion, none of them will bring us to a point of reconciliation and living for a common purpose. The path to peace will be stony with many pitfalls, and there is no silver bullets. Only by better understanding one another is there a chance that mutual respect might grow and with it a lasting peace.

Whilst I wouldn’t put money on it happening in my lifetime, we need to start somewhere, and perhaps one thing to do on our side is to acknowledge the Islamic achievements of the past. There is much to do on the other side as well. It would be entirely understandable if some do not wish for reconciliation and could perceive no possible common purpose between Jews and Arabs. To that I would say two things. Firstly, what is the alternative? A life in bunkers and safe rooms and a perpetual state of conflict? And secondly, remember that we are all children of Noah and the rainbow bears witness to the covenants with all mankind. Now see slide 11. and thank you all so much for listening. I’ve slightly went over time, and my apologies for that.

• Not bad, Raymond. The timing, I mean the lecture was absolutely superb. I was riveted. I’ve forgotten just how good you were. As I said, for those who came on late, I’ve known Raymond since I was 18. Anyway, are you going to take any questions? Well, I’m just-

• I believe, Hannah, am I correct, we can have 10 minutes?

• [Hannah] Yes, absolutely.

• [Trudy] Okay,

Q&A and Comments

• Well, as I probably won’t be able to answer quite a lot of them, I should think 10 minutes will be adequate. So much of Asia Central. The first question is rather wide. The spread of Islam into Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia as Tamala mentioned, that would’ve been a process of conversion, I suspect later than the period I’ve been talking about. May have started in Mughal India, because don’t forget that India has today more Muslims there than any Islamic country in the world, round about 250 million people in India, which is I believe about twice the population of Indonesia. As to why the Philippines are Catholic, they were conquered by the Spanish.

When Magellan sailed the world, the first to circumnavigate this as far as we know, his first landfall in Asia was the Philippines, which he colonised for Spain, rather ignoring the Treaty of Tordesillas, which split the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese. I hope that very brief explanation helps. And then, I’m asked to repeat the name of the book by Frederick Starr, which I’m very happy to do, because it has the same main title as this lecture, “Lost Enlightenment.” It has a different subtitle, which is “Central Asia’s Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane.”

And it’s published by Princeton University Press. I’m sure you can find it on Amazon if you’re happy to pay the full price, but it is well worth a read. So, I’m asked about ethnic groups or tribes in Central Asia at the time. I can’t fully answer that. The settled groups were largely Iranian. The nomadic groups were a tribe called the Karakitai who were mainly in the north and lived in also in areas of Kazakhstan. Over the period, we saw an influx of Turkic tribes who were initially at least nomadic, I think a little less so later on. And if we can get slide number three back up on the screen, it may name a few other tribes who I’ve forgotten. I don’t know if that’s now possible, or whether Hannah’s still with us or-

• [Hannah] I’ll be right there.

• If we see it, I’ll come back to that question. Claudia asks a very interesting question, why did Toynbee marginalise the Jews calling them a fossil civilization? I wasn’t aware that he did.

• Mm-hmm .

• Because when I first read “The Study of History,” which was probably 40 odd years ago, he singled out the Jews and Chinese as the only two civilizations in the world with a continuous history. So, why he would refer to us as fossil, I really am not sure. I can’t answer that. I do see we’ve got a slide back on the screen, but if we can go to the one before it with the map. Now, that’s excellent. And I think we can see some, not very many. Yes, towards the top of the map, there’s one that’s called Oghuz, that’s the name of a tribe. And so is the one just below it and slightly to the right, the Qarakhanids that I referred to.

And towards the bottom of the map, the Ghaznavids, you’ll remember one of the characters I mentioned was Mahmud of Ghazni. Well, his people were the Ghaznavids in the South. So most of them, perhaps, are really not familiar names today, even to historians in some cases. But Starr’s book will make that a lot clearer if you have the patience. So enjoy the moment from Khayyam sounds like the conclusion of the writer of Ecclesiastes. Yes, well, there’s a lot of crossover between, you know, the later Jewish scriptures.

I’m surprised you haven’t quoted the Song of Solomon, because I’m sure that will have a lot of the same themes. But, it’s interesting. Khayyam might even have been familiar with the Jewish scriptures. They reached settled form long before he lived. And there would’ve been Jews living in Nishapur and in all the cities that I’ve mentioned. Benjamin of Tudela around the year 1200 gave a Jewish population for Samarkand at 70,000 people. Well, that was larger than most cities in Europe at the time. I think he may have exaggerated a bit, but you know, the point is still, there were a lot of Jews in Iran, and from long before the period of which I’m speaking.

Q: So William asks, “How were those thinkers supported?” A: That’s a very good question, which is the stock answer when you haven’t got clue. I think some of them who were thought to be useful were supported by political rulers. I mean certainly the caliphs in, sorry, the, yeah, the caliphs in Baghdad would’ve supported a number of scholars. And many Central Asian scholars actually physically moved to Baghdad. So they would’ve had some support. They would’ve also had support from local rulers. And we’ve seen in the talk how even the Mongols were prepared to give financial supports where they considered it in their interest to do so.

Q: Susan asks, “When should one refer to Iran and when Persia?” A: Now, what I would say to that is that in Europe we have traditionally called it Persia. But in Iran, Iran is the normal name. Persia is just a small part of Iran. It gives its name to the language. And if you look at the map, you can see right on the left hand side, the far west, you can see the letters A-R-S. That’s because the map was cut off on the copy I made. It actually reads F-A-R-S, and that’s Fars, which is the ancient name for Persia. Persia is derived from the Fars. And it gives its name to the language, which is called Farsi, today. If you meet a Persian or an Iranian and ask them what language they’re speaking, they’ll tell you they’re, “speaking in Farsi.” So I would say it would be more respectful to talk of Iran. Persia owes a little bit to Orientalism in the past.

Q: And then Margaret asked, “Do these polymaths also not translate Greek philosophers that were handed down to us thanks to them?” A: Absolutely, they did. Not necessarily the polymaths who worked in the same field, but there would’ve been translators. I mentioned the Barmaks. There were there of course many other translators, and they would’ve spoken Greek, because Greek was a language known in this region. Don’t forget that Alexander reached Samarkand, and his Seleucid successors established a state. They called it Bactra, and it was based in northern Afghanistan and the southern part of Transoxiana. So right in the centre of our region, Greek was widely known by, at least by the educated. I don’t think it was a spoken language, but the educated would’ve known Greek well.

Q: And then William asks, “What followed the Golden Age, religion? A: In terms of learning and an open mind. Yes. That is basically the answer. There were other things that followed it. I mean, in the world of art, the architecture and the Safavid miniature paintings are just superb. There was much culture going on in this region and after the golden age, it just wasn’t in the world of thought and philosophy and the scientific subjects.

So David comments, "The Golden Age seems to have been eclipsed by modern day geopolitics.” Yes. What else is new? Of notes, there have been no more than 15 Islamic Nobel Prize winners. I didn’t know that. And contrast that with the 214 Jews. Is there an explanation? I’m not going to say that Jews are cleverer. I think I’ve demonstrated that whatever the position today, that hasn’t always been true. I would say that we’ve been more numerous in the West, in Western Europe and in North America. And that the Nobel Prize Committee is based in Western Europe. Maybe there’s a touch of bias. I don’t know. Trudy’s best in place to answer that,

• Raymond. It’s quarter past eight. I think we’re going to have to stop here.

• Okay. Well-

• But it was absolutely fantastic. And when are you planning to come back?

• As soon as you’ll have me. I’ve already written the next talk.

• You’ve got you. Oh, that’s fine then I’ll speak to you. Anyway, thank you all for listening, and have a safe Pesach. God bless. Bye. And thanks, Raymond, lots of love.

• My pleasure. Goodbye.

• [Trudy] Thanks Hannah.