Islamic Golden Age

From the eighth century, Baghdad under the Abbasids became the intellectual centre of the world. Greek, Persian, Indian and Syriac works were systematically translated into Arabic, studied, corrected and extended — a project that ran for generations and is usually associated with the Bayt al-Hikma.

The results reshaped several fields permanently. Al-Khwarizmi's work gave algebra both its method and its name, and his name in turn gave us the word algorithm. Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics established experiment as the test of a hypothesis, three centuries before that idea reached Europe. Al-Razi and Ibn Sina wrote medical encyclopaedias that remained standard texts in European universities into the seventeenth century.

Astronomers built observatories at Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Maragha, corrected Ptolemy's tables, and produced the star names — Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse, Vega — that astronomers still use.

The same period produced the philosophy of al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, the historical method of Ibn Khaldun, the geography of al-Idrisi, and the paper mills that made all of it reproducible. Its transmission into Latin through Toledo and Sicily is one of the foundations of the European Renaissance.