Texts in Context:
Islamic Civilization in
the Early Middle Ages

By Gabriel Blanchard

Again we turn our eyes to the south. We may be taken at unawares by what we find there ...

The Muslim World

In the ninth and tenth centuries, Charlemagne’s heirs were squabbling over a fractured realm; the East Roman Empire clung to Anatolia and Greece by the skin of its teeth; Northern Europe from Götland to Galway was a patchwork quilt, whose patches ceaselessly changed in size, shape, and position. Whatever became of the Umayyads Charles Martel sent back to Hispania, their tails between their legs? Well, to be truthful, they were having a bit of a … golden age.

Dar al-Islam (the approximate equivalent in Islam of the concept of Christendom in Christianity) had its challenges, but from the late eighth century to the mid-thirteenth,1 it prospered. While saints like King Olaf II, Adalbert of Prague, and Boniface2 were baptizing Norwegians, Poles, and Saxons, at the same time, from Song China to the Swahili Coast, Muslim missionaries and merchants could be seen turning toward the Kaaba. A thriving trade network criss-crossed the Indian Ocean; besides the frankincense of Yemen and the grain of Egypt, the Abbasid Caliphate received spices, cotton, and indigo dye from Indomalaya, coffee from Ethiopia, and gold and slaves from East Africa—and all this is only a selection of the wares that might reach an Arabian bazaar. Any African goods that the Abbasids and their vassals did not consume themselves could be sold or bartered for those from Asia, and vice versa.

The gentle reader may be wondering where Europe fit into this equation. The answer is not quite “it didn’t”; however, even wealthy European societies had less to offer the Caliphate than one might think, with one important exception. The East Romans made silk, but so did the Chinese. The Norse sold walrus ivory; Mapungubwe and Zanj sold elephant ivory. The Burgundians, Franks, Greeks, and Italians made wine, which Muslims didn’t drink. The peoples around the Baltic Sea had amber, which—actually, amber was not found in many other places. Probably the Abbasids had no grave shortage of Burmese rubies, Chinese jade, emeralds from Egypt, Indian topazes, pearls, and amethysts, or lapis lazuli from Khorasan; but amber is nice too.

That aforementioned exception, however, is worthy of attention. Wealth is not the only thing that earned this period the moniker “the Islamic Golden Age.”

The بَيْت الْحِكْمَة [Bayt al-Ḥikmah]

Recall that the Caliphate had conquered such cities as Alexandria, Byblos, and Edessa; these had been major centers respectively of Egyptian, Levantine, and Assyrian culture for hundreds of years, and did not suffer in that respect by being removed from Byzantine control.3 What the Mediterranean (European as well as Afro-Levantine) had to offer, at least until Arabic-speaking calligraphers began creating beautiful codices of their own, was books. And the Arabs proved to have a voracious intellectual appetite.

From my early youth ... until the present time when I am over fifty, ... I have ever bravely embarked on this open sea, throwing aside all craven caution; I have poked into every dark recess, I have made an assault on every problem, I have plunged into every abyss, I have scrutinized the creed of every sect ... All this have I done that I might distinguish between true and false.

During much of the Early and most of the High Middle Ages, Muslim philosophy, astronomy, music, architecture, law, medicine, engineering, visual art, poetry, cartography, and mathematics were second to none. In 762, the Abbasid dynasty built a new capital, giving it a name that seems to be derived from Middle Persian: Bagh-dād, “the God-given.” There, Caliph Harun al-Rachid, who succeeded to the throne in 786, constructed the Bayt al-Ḥikmah or “House of Wisdom”4: a public academy and library, housing hundreds of thousands of books at its zenith. Caliph al-Ma’mun, al-Rachid’s son and second successor, was so devoted to knowledge that he demanded a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest (then the seminal text on astronomy) as part of the settlement of a war. And this intellectual vitality wasn’t a peculiarity of the Abbasids. In 859, in the Idrisid sultanate of Morocco, a wealthy merchant’s daughter named Fatima al-Fihriya founded a mosque called al-Qarawiyyin: we know it as the University of Fez, the single oldest university in continuous operation in the world.

Mathematics was an area in which the Islamic world particularly shone. Our modern numeral system is traceable (along with the idea of place value, a priceless mathematical advance) ultimately to India; from there, it was stylistically modified by Muslim scholars and passed on to Europe, which is why we call them “Arabic numerals.” Caliph al-Ma’mun promoted the work of one mathematician in particular, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi; the last element of his name means that he was from the region of Khwarazm, from which the great doctor and logician Avicenna also hailed in the tenth century. We now call it “Kazakhstan,” but we did borrow al-Khwarizmi’s name into English as a word, though we respelled it algorithm. We also accepted the new kind of mathematics he discovered, but in that case we kept the name he gave it: In translation, he described it as the art of “resetting broken parts,” or al-jabr—algebra.

It has remained something more like common knowledge that the Muslim world took over the ancient practice of, and gave us the modern word for, alchemy. From their careful experiments in trying to make gold, discover a universal solvent, and so forth, the beginnings of modern chemistry would rise in a few hundred years. They were no slouches in medical matters, either—the Canon of Medicine, by the above-mentioned Avicenna, was completed in the early eleventh century, and (while imperfect) remained the best textbook on the subject until the eighteenth. The works of the late tenth and early eleventh century scientist Alhazen, who wrote on optics among other subjects, paved the way for Sir Isaac Newton; further along, in the twelfth, inventor and engineering scholar Ismail al-Jazari described an assortment of real and imagined devices, including the automated elephant clock of his own devising (whose automation is more impressive when one learns that the clock kept track of “temporal hours,” i.e. the hours that result if one divides the time of actual daylight into twelfths, rather than observing an hour with a constant length). And speaking of engineering, it was through Muslim Spain that Europe obtained its single most quintessentially Medieval feature: castles.

Tales From the East

Thus far, we have mainly addressed mathematics and the sciences (and only barely scratched the surface about them!). We will have occasion later to revisit the ways Islamic philosophy, jurisprudence, and even theology affected Western culture—though perhaps, in light of what the Muslim tradition shares with ours, it would be more accurate to say “the rest of Western culture.”5

What we must not pass in silence here are the artistic traditions of Dar al-Islam. Muslims today are widely reputed to be implacably opposed to any depiction of human and animal forms, but, across different places and eras, this is not the absolute orthodoxy some people make it out to be. Persian Muslim art in particular includes many beautiful, often fantasticated depictions of animals, djinni, and human beings. At the same time, there is a very ancient tradition of aniconic (non-representational) Islamic art. Arabic calligraphy is not infrequently so labyrinthine that, to the unfamiliar, it can be hard to recognize as writing! The lavish use of gold and of tiles colored with intense ultramarine blue in the decoration of the al-Aqsa Mosque are a captivating example of Muslim visual art.

Above all, we cannot forget Islamic literature. Only a taste of it is present on our Author Bank—that collection of folk stories, woven together in an interlace more complex than that of The Canterbury Tales, titled أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ [Alf Laylah wa-Laylah] or “A Thousand Nights and a Night.” Its exact date is not known, and doubtless many of its constituent tales were composed at different times. Yet, in its famous heroine, the Islamic Golden Age seems personified, and the present author can hardly imagine a better invitation to the Author Bank than she. The book opens (as is right and proper) in A Faraway Land, whose shah has been driven mad by jealousy. Every night he weds a virgin bride, and in the morning executes her, lest he ever suffer an unfaithful wife; but his vizier’s brilliant and fearless daughter, Scheherazade, has a plan:

The Chief Vizier had two daughters, Scheherazade and Dunyazad. Scheherazade the elder had perused the books, annals, and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples, and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred. … And Scheherazade said to her younger sister, “Note well what directions I entrust to thee, which shall be our deliverance, if so Allah please, and which shall turn the King from his blood thirsty custom.” … When it was midnight, Scheherazade awoke and signaled to her sister, who sat up and said, “Allah upon thee, O my sister, recite to us some new story, wherewith to while away the waking hours of our latter night.” “With joy and good pleasure,” answered Scheherazade, “if this pious and auspicious King permit me.” “Tell on,” quoth the King, who chanced to be sleepless. So Scheherazade rejoiced; and thus, on the first night of the Thousand Nights and a Night, she began …7


1It is convenient to peg the beginning of the Islamic Golden Age to the accession of Caliph Harun al-Rachid in 786, and its end to the destruction of the House of Wisdom by the Mongols in 1258. However, it can be dated earlier (e.g. from Baghdad’s founding), later (e.g. till 1406 with the death of the statesman and philosopher Abd’ ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun), or both.
2An Anglo-Saxon by birth, Boniface (Bonifātius in Latin: “well-omened, fortunate”) was the name he took “in religion” as a Benedictine monk. His original name was Wynfreth (modern “Winfred” or “Winifred”); it meant “joy-peace” or “joy-refuge,” from the Anglo-Saxon wynn and friþ.
3Byblos (modern Jubayl) is likely where the Phoenician abjad was created; it gave us term “Bible” via the Greek βιβλία [biblia], “books,” as the city was famous for making them. Edessa (modern Urfa) was a leading center of the Church of the East: This church is closely linked with the Assyrian people, who survive to the present as one of the traditionally Christian ethnicities of the Near East.
4Technically this is disputed. It may have begun under Abd’ Allah al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph (Harun al-Rachid was the fifth).
5There is only one serious reason not to—and it is a fairly cogent reason, because language is a tool for communicating, so clarity matters even more to it than logic does.6 That reason is, though probably more accurate, including Islamic civilization under the “Western civ.” umbrella would be less clear: For all the mutual influences between the Islamic world and what we habitually call Western culture, the two tend to “do their own thing” at least as much. However, we can say both Western and Islamic culture find their roots in Mediterranean Antiquity; it is not difficult to believe such a rich civilization as that bore multiple children.
6For a test case, look no further than the word “comfortable.” Logically, this word ought to mean “susceptible to receiving comfort”; which is not at all what it does mean.
7This version of the text is based on Francis Burton’s 1885 translation. It has been lightly edited for flow, and replaces Burton’s Shahrazad with the more familiar, or less unfamiliar, Scheherazade.

Jibrā’īl ibn Nabīl al-Muntiri (Gabriel Blanchard) is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

Thank you for reading the Journal and supporting the Classic Learning Test.

Published on 3rd February, 2025. Page image of the al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem.

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