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The Golden Age of Islam

Islamic Golden AgeThe islamic Golden Age may be a period of time lasting from c. 750 metallic element to c. 1257 CE, throughout that philosophers, scientists and engineers of the islamic world square measure attributable with a period of contribution to knowledge base, cultural arts, civilization and design, both by developing earlier traditions and by a period of comparatively fast and marked innovation. a substantial degree of historic islamic intellectual innovation occurred in the Golden age.


Foundations


Bernard Lewis wrote that Islamic governments inherited:

the information and skills of the traditional Middle East, of Balkan nation and of Persia. They intercalary new and vital innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and decimal point list from Bharat.

Much of this learning and development can be joined to geographics. Even prior to Islam's presence, town of Mecca served as a middle of interchange peninsula and Muhammad was a merchant. The tradition of the journeying to Mecca became a middle for exchanging ideas and product. The influence held by Muslim merchants over African-Arabian and Arabian-Asian trade routes was tremendous. As a result, Islamic civilization grew and swollen on the idea of its merchant economy, in distinction to their Christian, Indian Associate in Nursingd Chinese peers UN agency engineered societies from an agricultural landholding nobility. Merchants brought product Associate in Nursingd their faith to China (resulting in an exceedingly vital population of Chinese Muslims with an estimated thirty seven million followers, mainly ethnic Turkic Uyghur whose territory was annexed to China), India, geographic region, and the kingdoms of western africa and came with new inventions.

Islamic art

Marquetry and tile-top table
Marquetry and tile-top table from the year 1560.

 

Philosophy


In Al-Andalus, Ibn Rushd founder of the Averroism school of philosophy, was influential in the rise of secular thought in Western Europe.

Sciences


A manuscript written during the Abbasid Era.

Girih tiles arranged in Quasicrystal order is an example of the advancements that had taken place in the Islamic Golden Age.
Many notable islamic scientists lived and practiced during the islamic Golden Age. Among the achievements of Muslim students during this period were the development of trig into its fashionable kind (simplifying its practical application to calculate the phases of the moon), advances in optics, and advances in natural philosophy.

Medicine


The eye according to Hunain ibn Ishaq. From a manuscript dated circa 1200.

Medicine was a central part of medieval Muslim culture. Responding to circumstances of time and place, Muslim physicians and students developed an outsized and complicated medical literature exploring and synthesizing the speculation and apply of drugs. (from the National Library of drugs digital archives)
Islamic medicine was designed on tradition, mainly the theoretical and sensible information developed in Ellas, Rome, and Persia. For Muslim scholars, Galen and medical man were pre-eminent authorities, followed by Hellenic scholars in Alexandria. Muslim scholars translated their voluminous writings from Greek into Arabic and then produced new medical information based on those texts. in order to make the Greek tradition more accessible, comprehensible , and tractable , Muslim scholars ordered and created more systematic the vast and generally inconsistent Greco-Roman medical information by writing encyclopaedias and summaries. (from the National Library of drugs digital archives)
Pagan Latin and Greek learning was viewed suspiciously in Christian early medieval Europe, and it had been through 12th century Arabic translations that medieval Europe rediscovered Hellenic medicine, together with the works of Galen and medical man. Of equal if not of bigger influence in Western Europe were systematic and comprehensive works like Avicenna's The Canon of drugs, that were translated into Latin and then disseminated in manuscript and written kind throughout Europe. throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alone, The Canon of drugs was revealed more than xxxv times. (from the National Library of drugs digital archives)
In the medieval Muslim world, hospitals were built in all major cities; in Cairo for instance, the Qalawun hospital had a employees that enclosed physicians, pharmacists, and nurses.

Commerce and travel

summary overview map from al-Idrisi's
Introductory summary overview map from al-Idrisi's 1154 world atlas (note that South is at the top of the map).

Apart from the river, Tigris River and Euphrates River, passable rivers were uncommon, therefore transport by sea was very important. direction sciences were extremely developed, creating use of a rudimentary sextant (known as a kamal). when combined with careful maps of the amount, sailors were ready to sail across oceans rather than skirt on the coast. Muslim sailors were also chargeable for reintroducing giant 3 masted shipping to the Mediterranean. The name caravel might derive from an earlier Arab boat referred to as the qārib.
During the Muslim Golden Age, travel to distant lands occurred. the use of paper spread from China into the Muslim world within the eighth century cerium, inbound in European country (and then the rest of Europe) within the 10th century cerium. it absolutely was easier to manufacture than parchment, less seemingly to crack than papyrus, and could absorb ink, creating it ideal {for creating|for creating} records and making copies of the koran. "Islamic paper makers devised assembly-line ways of hand-copying manuscripts to show out editions so much larger than any obtainable in Europe for centuries." it absolutely was from Islam that the rest of the world learned to make paper from linen. (from the digital archives of The National Library of Medicine)

Architecture and engineering

The Great Mosque of Kairouan
The Great Mosque of Kairouan (also known as the Mosque of Uqba), founded in 670, dates in its present state from the 9th century; it is one of the masterpieces of Islamic architecture. The Great Mosque of Kairouan is located in the city of Kairouan, in Tunisia.


The Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul

Isometric laser scan data image of the Bab al-Barqiyya Gate in the 12th century Ayyubid Wall. This fortified gate was constructed with interlocking volumes that surrounded the entrant in such a way as to provide greater security and control than typical city wall gates.

The Great mosque of Kairouan (in Tunisia), the relation of all the mosques within the western islamic world, is one of the most effective preserved and most significant samples of early nice mosques. supported in 670, it dates in its gift form largely from the 9th century. the good mosque of Kairouan is official of a three-tiered sq. tower, an outsized court surrounded by columned porticos and a large hypostyle prayer hall covered on its axis by two cupolas.
The Great mosque of Samarra in iraq was completed in . It combined the hypostyle design of rows of columns supporting a flat base higher than which a large spiralling tower was created.
The Moors began construction of the good mosque at Cordoba in 785 marking the beginning of islamic design in European nation and Northern Africa (see Moors). The mosque is noted for its hanging interior arches. Moorish reached its peak with the construction of the fortress, the impressive palace/fortress of Granada, with its open and breezy interior spaces adorned in red, blue, and gold. The walls square measure adorned with unreal foliage motifs, Arabic inscriptions, and arabesque design work, with walls covered in glazed tiles.
Another distinctive sub-style is the design of the Mughal Empire in Asian nation within the 16th century. mixing islamic and Hindu components, the emperor Akbar created the royal city of Fatehpur Sikri, situated twenty six miles west of city, within the late 1500s.

Mongolian invasion and gradual decline


A Seljuq, Shatranj (Chess) set, glazed fritware, 12th century.

The Crusades place the islamic world under pressure by invasion in the eleventh and 12th centuries, however a new and far larger threat came from the East throughout the thirteenth century: in 1206, Genghis Khan established a powerful phratry among the Mongols of central Asia. throughout the thirteenth century, this Mongol Empire conquered most of the Eurasian land mass, including each China in the east and much of the old islamic caliphate (as well as Kievan Rus) in the west. Hulagu Khan's destruction of Bagdad in 1258 is historically seen as the approximate finish of the Golden Age. Later Mongol leaders, like Timur Lenk, destroyed several cities, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, and did irrevocable harm to the traditional irrigation systems of geographic region. Muslims in lands subject to the Mongols currently long-faced northeast, toward the land routes to China, instead of toward Mecca.
Eventually, most of the Mongol peoples that settled in western Asia reborn to Islam and in several instances became assimilated into varied Muslim Turkic peoples. The empire rose from the ashes, however (according to the standard view) the Golden Age was over.

Reasons for decline


Trade Routes transmitted by Muslim civilization were ruined by offensive Crusaders, Mongols and also the Portuguese. per Ibn Khaldun such invasions ruined economies and caused a rise in plundering and piracy.
There is very little agreement on the precise causes of the decline, however in addition to invasion by the Mongols and crusaders and also the destruction of libraries and madrasahs, it has additionally been instructed that political management and also the stifling of interpretation (independent reasoning) within the twelfth century in favor of institutionalised taqleed (imitation) thinking played a district. Ahmad Y Hassan has rejected the thesis that lack of ability was a cause, disceptation that science was forever unbroken break free spiritual argument; he instead analyses the decline in terms of economic and political factors, drawing on the work of the fourteenth Century writer Ibn Khaldun.

Opposing view

The issue of Moslem Civilization being a misnomer has been raised by variety of recent students, including the lay Iranian historiographer, Dr. Shoja-e-din Shafa in his recent arguable books titled Rebirth (Persian: تولدى ديگر) and once 1400 Years (Persian: پس از 1400 سال), during which he queries whether or not it is smart to speak of a category such as “Islamic science”. Shafa states that while faith has been a cardinal foundation for nearly all empires of antiquity to derive their authority from, it doesn't possess adequate process factors to justify attribution within the development of science, technology, and arts to the existence and observe of a certain faith at intervals a selected realm. while varied empires within the course of mankind's history had a political candidate faith, we have a tendency to do not ordinarily judge their achievements to the religion they practiced. for instance, the achievements of the Christian Roman Empire, geographic region and all consequent European empires that advocated Christianity aren't ordinarily considered one civilization.