the two poems by jahan malik selected by
our stellar teachers and that we learned
about yesterday
uh really hit the spot to show us that
some of the things that make us human
really have not changed across centuries
and geographic distances i think our
world views can be much richer when we
have opportunities like this to learn
more about other parts of the world
and we really appreciate all the
teachers for actively seeking this out
for your students and for looking for
ways to incorporate this in the k-12
curriculum
the remarkable work of our next speaker
professor michael cooperson reminds us
of this as well
professor cooperson teaches arabic in
the department of near eastern languages
and cultures at ucla
his publications include translations
such as the life of ibn hanbal
by ibn al-jawzi the author and his
devils by
abdel fattah khilito and most recently
in postures by al-hariri 50 rogues tales
translated 50 ways
out just a few weeks ago professor
cupperson
specializes in the cultural history of
the early
abbasid period his research also
explores maltese language and culture
translation and time travel as a
literary device
and for these important ways of teaching
as professor cooperson i want to thank
you for your work
and for being here today well thank you
all for inviting me and
um it's great to see so many people here
um i i'm gonna share my screen now and
uh
and at some point no doubt my children
will come bursting into the room and if
you just think of them as the
mongols destroying baghdad in 1258
you can just fit them right into the
program
so you now should see a map of the
central middle east
so i set out some slides ahead of time
and this was the first one which means i
basically dropped you into the middle of
the story of baghdad so
i just want to back up a little bit and
give some framing and this
is um going to be something that please
feel free to ask questions about later
um but i just wanted to give you a bit
of background i'm not sure
how much of this would eventually fit
into your own presentations of this
material
um but these are questions that do come
up a lot
when dealing with early islamic history
so
um those of you who i mean that's all of
you at this point um
are familiar with some of the questions
of early islamic history know that
it can very easily collapse
into a list of names and dates and
genealogies
that can be hard for people to follow so
i've broken it down
into what i think are um
what i think are the um the major
thematic questions that we have to deal
with with
early islamic history and um
and i think of them as the two big
challenges for the early
muslim community and the first one uh
is was islam going to be an ethnic
religion or universal one
that's the first question and the second
question is would political authority
belong to members of the prophet's
family or to some other group
uh so early muslims had both models
in the region uh there was judaism and
there was zoroastrianism
both of those are religious communities
that were associated with people of a
particular ethnicity
now of course we know in reality it
wasn't that simple and that these
borders were very fuzzy
but in theory anyway both of these
communities were restricted to people
perceived to be or who presented
themselves as belonging to a certain
ethnicity
that was one model the other model was a
universal religion like christianity
which said that its message was for
everyone
so the answer is simply put at first
islam was an ethnic group of faith in
other words it was associated with being
arab
however it soon became a universal faith
and one of the key texts here
is this verse from the quran
which says that uh we have created you
from male and female and here the
translation mankind is a bit misleading
it's really people
all people we've created you male and
female and made you into peoples and
tribes
that you might come to know each other
so that god has a purpose
in creating different kinds of people
however
the noblest of you in god's sight is the
one who fears god most
so what that means or what this was
understood to mean is
that being an arab does not make you a
better person
than if you're persian or coptic or any
other
ethnic group within the community of
islam the most pious
the most observant the most
devout believer is
the better person regardless of
ethnicity so the quran makes it pretty
clear
that we're all equal at least once
you're
a member of the muslim community and so
with that you have
a conversion that is people embracing
islam and i should
point out that muslims often don't call
it conversion they call it reversion
because they think that everyone is
basically born muslim
which is just a way of saying that
people naturally tend to believe that
there is a moral order in the universe
and so islam doesn't necessarily mean
strictly belonging to a particular group
it can often mean simply like
having a particular moral orientation so
muslims believe that everyone is
essentially born that way
and often well in many cases then
might be might have their minds changed
by their environment so they often call
it
reverse in any case uh the point is that
um
the point is that uh people who were not
arabs
by ethnicity could become muslim and
there was a term for this
maula which
is sometimes translated as client but
basically it means someone who
is not ethnically arab who then becomes
muslim
and one of the the and just what i'm
anticipating here is that
one of the reasons that baghdad is
really going to flourish is that it
brought together people of many
different
backgrounds the common language was
arabic
mostly persian was very important also
syriac was very important
the common language was arabic it does
not mean that the people that we're
talking about are arabs
in modern ethnic terms
so that's the first question the second
question was
uh about political authority who was it
going to belong to
and as you know this can get very
tangled i'm going to give a very short
presentation
and this is something that again we can
come back to and talk about
if you feel that it needs to be
clarified
if you think that the people who should
be in charge of the community are
members of the family of the prophet
muhammad then your ishiyat
but it's not that simple because it was
a big family
if the members of the family who should
be in charge
in your view are the descendants of ali
that is the prophet's cousin and
son-in-law
then you are called in english an allied
so just to give you a sense of how this
plays out genealogically the prophet
muhammad is
in the center and then you see um
his daughter fatima marries ali and then
their children al-hassan
there are eight more figures down to the
12th we don't need to go into the
details the point is simply that
um if you are a shiite of the ali
variety
then you believe that these people this
family
should be generating leaders for the
community
and in fact other leaders are
illegitimate
now there's a kind of a gray area if you
say that well
you're holding power until the correct
member of the family is found then
that's okay
so it's not an absolute requirement but
ideally you would have one of these
people
in charge of the community so that's
that's one shiite position
but there's another shiite position
because there's a big family here
um the prophet had an uncle called
al-abbas
and if you believe that his descendants
should be
the leaders then you're called an
abbasid so that's what the term abbasid
actually means
and let me show you the genealogy on
that
uh so muhammad's father abdullah had a
brother
so his children are then the abbasid
now here by the way you're seeing on the
on the uh
on the genealogy two terms caliphs and
iman so under the abbasis we have
caliphs
and under the uh on the eyelid side we
have the imams
and these terms have been
used for different things in islamic
history but the basic
meaning in each case is that the caliph
is the head of state he's the political
authority
the imam is also an authority
but uh it's a term that shiites used to
name the people who
they felt should be in charge but often
in fact
weren't so it's a way of saying that
someone has moral authority and
spiritual authority
even if they don't happen to be ruling
and we'll see how this plays into
the early abbesses date in just a moment
so um the last alternative then
generated by our question is well what
if you don't believe that it should be a
member of the family
uh well then you're a sunni so the sunni
sunni is a blanket term for people who
don't think it should run in the family
now when i present this material to
students you know there are different
ways you can do it
and you know one of the things that
people find hard to understand sometimes
is this notion of it being in the family
but
if you look at some of our recent
political dynasties in the united states
we have the bushes we have the clintons
we even have people that want to draft
michelle obama as
a presidential candidate so the idea
that somehow you should go to the people
you know
uh isn't such a strange one not as
strange as it may seem right away
now the sunnis are also a very
interesting group but we actually don't
need to talk about them very much
now because at the time that baghdad was
founded
the sunnis hadn't yet really figured out
what they thought the alternative should
be
and it took them a while to uh to come
up with
their alternative to the to the family
system because the family system was old
a lot of societies used it
it kind of made sense to people so the
other system that wasn't about a family
took a little longer to work out so the
sunnis
um aren't going to play as big a role
today as as they would if we were
talking about a later time
so that brings us now back finally to
baghdad so when i
say that it was founded by the abbasid
dynasty in 762
um what i meant by the abbasid dynasty
is then what you just
heard so the abbasid family then
are uh are a family that claim
legitimacy based on their descent from
they overthrew the umayyad dynasty in
750
i won't go into exactly who the umayyads
were
um but let's say the main thing to know
about them in this context is that they
weren't actually members of the
prophet's family so they were trying to
do their best
to govern based on a non-family model
and it didn't quite work
uh so they were overthrown by the
abbasids needed a new capital
the first capital of the muslim
community was medina
which was way too far off the beaten
track to serve as
the major city for an empire that at
this point had now reached
the borders of india on one side and the
borders of
france on the other so we're talking
about a really big big big
empire damascus didn't work either it
was centrally located
but it was the capital of the umayyads
who had just been overthrown
they chose baghdad which was not an
empty site there was a town there
but it was really beautifully located on
the tigris
and in very fertile land and on a number
of
land and sea trade routes so it had
access to trade
it had access to agricultural production
and it was an absolute
fresh start as far as the ambassadors
now the name of the city in arabic
because there was already a town on the
on the on the location on the spot what
the abbasids did as we'll see was to
build
a new city to serve as the capital but
this was not
um a residential part of the city this
was basically the administrative center
meanwhile everything that was outside
remained there and just got bigger
so the name the official name of
the new city that was built as the
administrative center was
in arabic medina which people often
translate as the city of peace
now i don't want to say that that's
wrong but the term salaam also means
salvation
and why that matters here it goes back
to
what we said about the caliph and the
imam so the head of state of
the abbasid dynasty is the caliph
which literally means successor he's
the successor in the sense that he's a
and he's also the imam meaning that he
is in the shiite sense
understood as your guide to salvation
and so shiites believe that if you
identify with the legitimate with the
moral
with the just political community then
you will be saved and if you do not
acknowledge
the imam as your guide from the right
family then you are not
saved so my interpretation of this
phrase the city of salvation is that
it's saying
we've built a new city with a new guide
from the wright family
and if you follow him then you will
enter heaven
peace doesn't really make a lot of sense
in this context not that people didn't
think it was a good thing
but foundational names
would be expected to have some kind of a
religious significance and i think in
this case
the significance is that we've got the
right family we've got the right imam
um he's the head of state he's our
spiritual guide follow him and you'll be
saved
so the building of baghdad was a really
big deal in that sense that basically
uh the ambassadors felt that they were
kind of giving the whole community a
sort of moral reboot
starting from scratch and this is
symbolized by having a new city as their
capital
uh you can think of that as real history
and then there's
sort of the reputation of the city over
the years
just one image uh this is from aladdin
and um it's uh
it shows if you look at the name of the
city in in
in aladdin it's agrabah which is
basically the letters of baghdad
minus the h minus one i think is
switched around
so it i think they originally meant to
call it baghdad but the film also came
out right around the time of the first
gulf war
and so it may be that i'm not sure what
point in the production process that
name was chosen but
but in any case they took away the
direct identification with baghdad which
is how it is in the original story
in any case it was imagined like this
now this image what you're seeing here
is based on a lot of things but not
baghdad
um i think part of it is people's idea
of places like this
or some of the mosques in istanbul which
come from a much much later period
and are built of stone very different
and even things like this that have
nothing to do whatsoever with islamic
history
but look kind of fun and exotic so you
know i think
none of them related to the actual city
of baghdad at all
so the problem is that people faced in
iraq was that there's no stone or timber
there so what they did was they built
with mud brick
and mud brick is cheap and quick to make
you have a frame
and you line it with something that will
prevent the mud from sticking
so it's usually like a wooden box you
pour the mud in and you leave it out in
the sun and it dries and then you have a
brick
and you can build with this very cheaply
and very quickly
and there are still a few places in the
world built this way this is a town in
tunisia
so not even iraq at all but same
conditions and this is what a
and here's a close-up and you can see
these are the mud brakes
uh and they're held
together with this um kind of mortar
um based in plaster
and so this is what baghdad would have
looked like close up
nothing like the taj mahal or anything
else
and it was located not only on the
tigris which is the river that you see
here on the right side
but also in an area that was full of
irrigation
canals so all the blue lines that you
see
were used for agricultural purposes
before the city was built so these are
canals um
and so the round city what you see in
the center was the new capital that the
abbasids built
and everything around it at least some
of it was there already
and then expanded as people came to
so um they didn't have
um they didn't have technology for um
for uh evening out uh roads or
paving them um or materials for paving
them as the romans did for example
so roads were dusty and inconvenient so
people found it much easier to travel by
canal
um and so in most stories that you read
about people moving from one place to
another in the city they often do it by
boat
and so far from looking like
any of those other buildings that we saw
before it probably felt a lot like
venice in italy so this again is not as
a town in iraq but it gives you a sense
of what it might have felt like to be
in baghdad when it was first built where
you're moving around
and the previous slide this is a
close-up actually of that administrative
center
this by the way this doesn't exist
anymore the great problem with mud brick
as we'll see in a moment is that it's
not very durable
so the city the medieval city of baghdad
that i've been describing actually
um doesn't exist anymore so these are
all reconstructions based
on descriptions so what happened was
when the caliph
had this city design he set aside these
spaces between the walls of the city
for different families and it helped the
abbasids come to power and so they
eventually became places where there
were shops and eventually also
residences
but the space in the center was used for
administrative purposes so there was a
palace there was a mosque there were
different government offices
this is a picture of cairo and it
these are very old buildings some of
them some of the buildings on this
street in cairo
um go back to the 10th century
but the reason that they're all still
there is that egyptians have granite
uh they have stone to work with and so
whatever they build
stays right it's why we have pyramids
it's why we have
all these fantastic archaeological uh
all these fantastic archaeological sites
in egypt but that's not true in iraq
because
if you reign on a mudbrick city it melts
this is an example also from egypt of a
melted mud brick city
so you can see that in fact it just
literally melts
so these are some melted houses here and
then in the background you can see the
modern city which is built with
cinder blocks and materials that don't
melt
so this is why it's one of the reasons
that baghdad isn't around anymore
um sometimes iraqis will tell you that
it's because the mongols came and
destroyed it all well they didn't
physically destroy it all the real
problem was the materials that they were
building with
just simply don't survive weather
conditions
so one of the results of this actually
is that we don't really have
ambassador cities anymore that you can
go and look at
the closest we have to that is in samara
in iraq
which was a town built as an alternative
capital in the 9th century and then
abandoned
so the abandoned part means that
essentially it stopped having any kind
of wear and tear it was just left there
on the right side you see that the
modern city is
kind of beginning to encroach on the
archaeological site but
the reason that this is an aerial
photograph is that if you're actually
down on the ground it just looks like a
plane of dirt
you really can't see anything um with
one exception
but what you're seeing here is the lines
of the original city
as they were laid out um in the ninth
century
um and you can see the scale of it it's
quite large
um so baghdad would have had a a plan
something like this um
but uh but in baghdad it happens that
it's completely covered with modern
construction so we can't even see that
but here in samara we can actually see
from above
what it looks like when you build the
city of mudbrick how it was laid out
the one exception is that in modern
times
one of the buildings one of the great
mosques was reconstructed
and you can see here so you've got this
big rectilineal sort of
courtyard where people that's where you
gather for prayer and then the minaret
where the cult prayer comes is that
spiral on the left side and
what this tells you is that with mud
brick you can't build those big domes
that we saw um in the earlier slide so
the
the the the city from aladdin was not
physically possible they couldn't build
you can't build mud brick uh you can't
build you know domes and spheres on that
scale out of
a material like mud brick but what you
can do is you can build these kind of
spirals
um where everything is is the the the
way the weight is distributed is such
that you can actually
you can actually build it even so this
did
come apart and it was essentially
so this is not again not baghdad this is
samara
which is a city that was built at the
same time a bit later but
according to the same principles and it
gives us some idea of what
baghdad might have looked like if any of
very clearly that
um so that's i guess a physical
orientation to
to baghdad and a kind of
a political background the period that
i'll be focusing on
as we move forward is going to be the
9th century
so let me
and the major figure here uh who has
become symbolic
of what many people think of as the
islamic golden age
which is a term i really don't like
because it implies that nothing
interesting happened at any other time
which is obviously not true and it also
implies that everything was great all
the time
uh in the 9th century which is also not
true um
but for better or worse this period has
become
famous as the symbolic golden age of
arab and islamic culture and so there
have been a lot of tv shows and so on
about it this is the caliph al-matmun
who reigned from 813 to 833
and was very famous as someone who did a
lot to
promote scientific and literary activity
so here he is
being played by a jordanian actor in a
2006.
um one of the things that
matt moon did was to uh support
scholars of different kinds and one of
the most famous is a man called el kindi
who uh wrote
we should never hesitate to applaud
truth and adopt it as our own
no matter where it comes from or what
distant people or far away nation
happens to bring it he's responding here
to people who felt that
the revelation of the quran and the
example of the prophet should be enough
to organize society in a just a moral
way
i don't think the kindy would have
disagreed with the fact that the quran
and the example of the prophet uh can
help us construct a society that is just
and moral
but he also argued that wisdom can come
from other places too
and the particular people he's thinking
of in this case
uh are the ancient greeks uh
and so it was understood that the
ancient greeks most people understood
that they didn't believe in a single god
which made a lot of what they had to say
suspicious uh
but as we'll see a lot of what they
actually wrote
was being translated into arabic and
people were able to see that there was a
great deal
of useful information so here he's
arguing
uh that um that in fact people should
take this
seriously and it's remarkable and this
is one of the reasons where in fact it's
true that matt moon really did
make a difference in that he essentially
sponsored this kind of
intellectual exploration but the site of
encounter question basically is this
um the region where baghdad was built
was already
very diverse before that before baghdad
was built so you have
um on that site it was originally part
of the persian empire
um the persian the sasanian empire had
already begun
translating texts from sanskrit so that
people in the susanni empire were
already interested in other cultures
and many stories uh and works on things
like mathematics got translated from
sanskrit to persian and from persian
into arabic so there was already
diverse intellectual activity happening
already
the same with um uh uh
christians in the region who
um had learned greek because of its
importance for christian theology
so that there were people who knew greek
and the syrian the christians in the
region had taken that
those greek materials and put them into
their own language which is syriac
and many of them were translated later
from syriac into arabic so that was
happening and then you've got
a large jewish population probably a
third of the population of baghdad
in pre-modern times were jewish and
there were different
currents of judaism both the karaites
and the rabbinites if that distinction
is familiar to anyone
and so there was already a a chorus of
different voices in that region before
the arabs came and so then the arabs
come the arab muslims at a point when
it's still an ethnic religion
essentially
they show up they conquer this region
and then everyone starts
mixing and because you can convert to
islam and essentially be
on the equality everyone
um have people whose background
may be uh jewish or christian or
zoroastrian who may know persian who may
know sanskrit who may know
any number of different languages all
meeting on this planet as and
even meeting not
one of the things that matt moon did as
the ambassador
was to sponsor translation work and
scientific activity by people who
weren't even muslim
uh so that's one of the
and then once uh baghdad becomes the
capital is very
start flocking to it from all over the
world
so um you know we have evidence that in
in the 10th century in baghdad
the head of the jewish community was
answering questions sent by jews
questions about jewish law
sent from as far away as france so in
other words you're in france you have
about the law
you write to the head of the jewish
community in baghdad because he's the
guy who knows everything
and your message goes all the way to
baghdad and comes all the way back to
france
okay so you have people interested in
what people in baghdad are saying even
if they live
in places that are very very very far
away um
so that's one of the ways that it was a
site of encounter and we're going to
look at a few of those examples in a
moment
um and i just want to ask i mean a
number of people mentioned
um a number of people asked about the
the building and the mud bricks and so
on um
this is another way in which baghdad is
building on previous cultural traditions
what they saw around them
were the cities of the ancient near east
i mean the assyrians the babylonians
and those cities um were also
constructed this way
and so um it just was it just seemed
like an environmentally appropriate way
to build in that
setting um and they took it over from
people like the assyrians and the
babylonians who have been building that
way for centuries already
and as far as it being round there's a
huge debate about this a lot of people
have talked about this
and it's not really explained anywhere
except in one place where one source
says
that the caliph didn't want some of his
subjects to be closer to him than others
so that if you build a round city um
it's not
it felt as if somehow it was it was it
could be the center
and the caliph could be in the center of
it and then everyone would have equal
access to him
whereas if it was built on any other
kind of plan then
it was possible it would be linear and
so that um some people could be closer
to him than other i mean
obviously in a circle some people are
closer to the center than others
but somehow symbolically it felt that
the circle was
um granted equal access from every side
i think that was the idea
but there have also been mystical
interpretations and spiritual
interpretations and all
kinds of and all kinds of other ones so
it's a really good question i can't say
i know the answer to it
um so um
and and actually i have to mention
daniel had a really good suggestion when
i talked to him earlier about actually
making mud bricks
um as a class activity i have never
tried it
i have a friend who was a refugee from
iraq
who ended up in saudi arabia at some
point after one of the
wars in iraq and actually he
and his fellow refugees ended up
building a mosque out of mud bricks just
with a gas can they would put the mud
into the gas can
um and they would cut the top off and
they would sort of make the bricks and
he said it worked so
and there are recipes online i've
checked i mean there are plenty of
people online who will actually show you
how to do it
in their videos so i think it could be
done it might take some experimenting
first
to do it yourself and
um and there's a mention in the chat
about the mongols the mongols actually
um aren't going to come in for a while
they actually show up in the 13th
century so at this point
um we're not actually talking yet about
mongols
but they will arrive all right
okay let me um then wrap up with just a
few glances at some of the things that
were happening in baghdad in the ninth
century under the caliph
okay so again here is the caliph
just picking him as kind of a symbol of
this period um
and this is how he's actually seen in
so here's the philosopher of kindy again
talking about
accepting truth no matter where it comes
from
and here's a place to comment actually
that one of the ways that western
civilization is often taught is that you
know it begins with the ancient greeks
uh and it sort of moves to europe and
then it moves you know the romans and
then to western civilization and so on
and so forth
but from the medieval islamic point of
view that didn't make any sense at all
they thought that the greeks were kind
of part of the same mediterranean world
that they were part of
um so they didn't in any way think of
the greeks as europeans and that didn't
make any sense to them at all they
basically thought of them as some really
smart people
who lived in their region a long time
ago so europe wasn't
this man el juarez me is really
important here he is on a stamp
from i can't remember i think is it
turkmenistan or
kazakhstan a number of modern nations
like to claim him
uh because he he wasn't an arab
ethnically but as you can see on the
left side he wrote in arabic and
what this is is the first book on
algebra
so he invented it essentially um and
he's got what you see there is actually
a diagram where they solve
he solves algebraic equations using a
kind of diagram so it's a geometric
solution
one of the reasons that this took off by
the way i'm not going to go into the
details here but
the rules for inheritance according to
the quran are extremely complicated you
have to divide
up an inheritance among different
relatives and different proportions and
the only
way to do it right is to actually know
so that's one of the reasons that the
ancient
ancient knowledge of things like math
and geography and
geometry that they learned about from
the greeks ended up being
really important for the muslim
community and then ended up getting
developed in ways that hadn't been done
before
so this gives you a sense of the
complexity of the
inheritance rules and why you actually
so this is a just more another shot of
of the geometric solution and this has
actually been translated into english
and i've actually had students
either in arabic or in english actually
work through some of the equations and
it's not that hard
if i can understand it then it's got to
be simple so it's um
if you look at the earliest books on
algebra they're actually pretty easy and
i've actually had students work through
some of these problems
numerals this is another example of
encounter so the earliest
digits you know the indicating uh
amounts graphically goes it goes back to
india and that's what you see in the
first line
um and then it sort of moves across
from india to iran and then
there's an intermediate stage which is
what you see at b and then c
is what the numbers used in the
arab world except for north africa by
the time they move over to north africa
it's actually line d which is the
numbers that we use that we call
arabic numerals and you might wonder how
you get from c
to d but if you look at for example two
if you turn the two a bit to the left
in line c the second digit you see that
it actually turns into a two
and if you do the same with the three
you turn it to the left you see it
actually becomes a three
and most of them actually work that way
if you flip them around a bit you see
that they actually become you see that
they actually become
uh translation so this is um from
aristotle's rhetoric
and as i mentioned the christians of
iraq actually knew
uh greek and
through syriac or directly from the
greek they were able to produce arabic
translations
of they weren't interested in literature
not the iliad not the odyssey not the
plays they didn't the christians didn't
know about those they didn't care
so what actually ended up being
translated into arabic
were philosophy science medicine works
like
um including for example works on
mechanics so this is an example
of something built in baghdad um
by engineers who got the idea from
translations of
hero of alexander so this what this does
is it's a kind of magic trick that
is supposed to keep the lamp lit
uh without you having to keep pulling on
the wick so basically as the
oil level of oil drops the the
plum the floater uh drops it pulls on
plumb line on the plum on that chain
that's holding the thing called the plum
which then turns that wheel and then
that plate on the bottom
slides up and pushes out more of the
wick so the idea was that your lamp
would keep burning without you having to
get up and
keep pulling on the wick and adding more
oil and all that sort of thing so
this was not an industrial application
it was just something that they thought
um here is someone actually commenting
on the translation the translation
movement
so this is an authority we'll see who he
is in a minute commenting that
books have been translated from india
from greece
from persia so they were very much aware
of this and he even comments
that the arabic is better than the
original which
well debatable but in any case um the
person saying this is a guy called the
jaffas
who says that he's very aware of what's
going on historically and he says these
books have been transmitted from one
nation to another from one generation to
the next
and from one language to another before
reaching us and then he uses this very
interesting word that can either mean
we're the latest
or the last to inherit them and examine
them
one of the moments that really reflects
the curiosity that people had in this
period is that our friend the caliph
moon at one point visits egypt and he
sees the great pyramid
of giza and he's curious to know what
it is and he concludes for various
reasons
that it's actually a library
and it's empty it's hollow inside and
it's full of books
so he tries to break into it and what
you see
at the in the middle of the photo is the
original entrance built by the ancient
egyptians
which they then concealed and then it
was unconcealed later by archaeologists
but that's not how matt moon got in um
he got in
through the tomb robbers entrance which
is that little tunnel at the bottom
uh which had been covered up and then he
actually had
people come and remove the blocks and he
sent someone into the pyramid to see
what was in it
uh of course he didn't find much uh but
this is an example of the kind of
curiosity that people had about the
world and about the different
uh cultures that come together because
of course you know they didn't know
about ancient egypt because they
couldn't read hieroglyphs so they saw
all these buildings and they wondered
what they were
so this is an example of how they tried
[Music]
and if you look at some of what was
written in this period by people
engaged in scientific activity you find
that many of what we
consider the conditions of doing science
were there
so for example here's someone commenting
yes there were people before us but were
able to build on their work
which is why ours is better so there's a
sense of cumulative effort
um so here is
the same source essentially saying that
you know why it is that it's still worth
doing science even though the people
before us were greater minds than we and
this is a common trope that you know
the dead were smarter than we are but
this is someone saying well no actually
you know we still have something to
contribute
um as one thinker after another
discovers what his predecessors did not
knowledge grows and expands in a process
that appears to be infinite and to have
no predetermined
end so this is very much
in the scientific spirit of it just can
keep going forever
right um but
this is not presented as some kind of
secular insight it's then reconciled
with
uh the revelation of islam by this quote
from the quran
above everyone who knows is another who
knows more and so here he's repurposing
that quote to
argue that yeah we've got to keep doing
more science
and the person speaking here is a guy
called the maseridi who was a geographer
and
story
now why wasn't it exactly modern science
they didn't have
controlled experiments so uh people
often talk about medieval science
ancient science yeah it was science
in that it was cumulative in the ways
that we've just seen but
it wasn't they didn't have experimental
and control groups
so i didn't so it wasn't uh it wasn't
precisely science in all the ways that
we understand it
um here's another example of
something that they took over from
ancient greece the ancient greeks had
measured the earth
by measuring the angle of the sun at two
different separate places
distantly separated places at the same
time of day
and then were able to come up and then
the caliph moon
replicated the experiment and came up
with a figure
of about 20 000 miles
which it turns out is quite a bit
smaller than today's result but still
pretty good if you consider how crude
their instruments were
uh which moon himself was aware of he
said yeah i can i know that it's
about the instruments um but that figure
the smaller figure the 20
000 ends up in this book
which is a medieval arabic math text
translated that was then translated into
latin
and it's from this text that christopher
columbus
it was on this basis among other things
that christopher columbus
decided that yeah he could actually
cross the atlantic
because he thought it was a lot closer
he thought that the earth was a lot
smaller than it really is
so yeah it made sense right if you take
out about five thousand four thousand
miles
it's a little easier to do it um
so he's like yeah it's not going to be
that hard well it turns out
you know it was but but it's quite
possible that
it's because of this lower figure that
matt moon came up with
uh that ends up being available to
columbus that he got the idea that it
would actually be feasible to cross the
atlantic
one of the people he took with him and
this is another example of even though
we're not talking about baghdad anymore
um how it reverberates through history
so as you know um at the time that
left spain uh the muslims and the
jews had been either expelled or forced
to convert
and one of the converted jews was a man
named luis de torres
whom we don't have a picture of him
unfortunately but he's described as
one of the first europeans to smoke
because when
columbus's expedition arrived in the new
world uh one of the things that they
discovered was tobacco
and apparently luisa torres was one of
the first to actually smoke it this is
not him but
that's an example of someone smoking um
the torres actually died in the new
world and there's a synagogue named
after him
in the bahamas and
finally the caliph moon who is uh
the person behind many of these uh the
sponsorship and patronage
um the credit he gets
in outer space is that yeah there's a
crater named after him on the moon
although they didn't get his name quite
right this is the medieval latin version
of his name
but this crater is actually named after
so i think that brings me to the exact
end
yeah okay everybody take care
thank you so much professor thank you