In Cairo, a muezzin calls faithful Muslims to prayer.
It's the same call that sounds five times a day, every day,
in cities across the world.
Nearly a quarter of the people on earth respond to it,
'God is most great' the muezzin calls.
'I testify there is no other god but God.'
'I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God.
'Come and pray. Come and flourish.
'God is most great.
'There is no god but God.'
In the unfolding of history,
Islamic civilisation has been one of humatiy's grandest achievements.
A worldwide power founded simply on faith.
A spiritual revolution that would shape the nations of three continets
and launch an empire.
For the West, much of the history of Islam has been obscured
behind a veil of fear and misunderstanding.
Yet Islam's hidden history is deeply, and surprisingly,
interwoven with Western civilisation.
It was Muslim scholars who reclaimed the ancient wisdom of Greeks.
While Europe languished in the Dark Ages.
It was they who sowed the seeds of the Renaissance,
600 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci.
From the way we heal the sick...
to the numerals we use for counting...
cultures across the globe have been shaped by Islamic civilisation.
But all this, began with the life of a single, ordinary man,
and the profound message he proclaimed would change the world forever.
His name was Muhammad.
To Muslims, the life of Muhammad is a story revered.
In its mysteries as much as its certainties,
there are beliefs held sacred.
Whatever we can tell about the Prophet, of course,
is screened through the filter of what has been preserved over the centuries
and what people have wanted to preserve.
It's very difficult to pull out,
from all these different sources that are very adoring,
the ordinary human being...
We do know that Muhammad was born in or around 570 AD
in the sun-blasted Arabian peninsula.
A land of savage scarcity
whose Bedouin tribes were locked in a constant state of tribal war.
While still an infant,
Muhammad's parents gave him his first taste of life in the desert.
Muhammad was from a town, Mecca,
but he was sent off to live with the Bedouin
because the people even the town of Mecca
felt that the Bedouin were the holders of the deeper cultural Arab values.
And the Bedouin view the towns people
as having lost their really authentic roots in Arab culture
and the poetry and animal husbandry
and all the things that they do so well.
By the time Muhammad was six, both of his parents had died
and he was taken under the protection of his uncle, chief of his clan.
Being an outsider gave him a singular perspective.
He'd been orphaned early
and developed very early on a passionate sense of concern
for those who are left out of society.
To be orphaned in a tribal society
where clan and family relationships are your keys to everything...
success, status, honour, dignity...
is to face what it really feels like to be marginalised.
That obviously had a very deep impression on him as a young man.
In some ways, it was detrimental, of course, to grow up without parents.
But in other ways he was so adaptable.
He had many parents. He had many fathers.
He had many mothers. So it made him a child of everybody.
Muhammad's clan, like Arabs all across the Arabian peninsula,
would share the stories that had been told and retold for generations.
Pre Islamic Arabian civilisation was largely an oral culture
and there was tremendous respect and admiration
for people who could express themselves orally,
especially those who could recite poetry almost at the drop of a hat.
Some of the most important people in a tribe were the poets.
They sang of the glory of the tribe. They told the story of the tribe.
To the Bedouin, the word had a mystical importance.
Poets linked the tribe to its ancestors and celebrated values older than memory.
Poetry was the sinew that bound the Bedouin together,
celebrating their victories, lamenting their defeats.
The poems themselves, like the poems of Homer,
both celebrate this great heroic ethos
and yet intimate, in the deepest way,
the tragedy that, um...
this war... this ethos of constant tribal warfare brings to people.
Warfare and conflict were the grim realities of a dangerous time.
Muhammad's uncle taught him the skills he'd need to survive
in a world where even a prophet would wield a bow and arrow.
In a wilderness punished by the elements and bereft of water,
rivalry over a single well could provoke a blood feud for generations.
A real rivalry. Real battles, and sometimes quite bloody.
So the allegiance of individuals was the family, immidiately,
and, a larger extent, to the tribe.
Without the tribe's protection, no one could endure.
Scattered across the peninsula were countless factions,
all embroiled in bitter struggles,
each defending its precious grazing lands, trade routes
and most importantly, its wells.
You have to understand that most of the lands are dry.
So, water is something that everyone always considers precious.
For those of us in climates that are more heavily watered
it's difficult to understand the depth and the centrality of the symbol of water
in societies that are desert
and in which it only rains once or twice a year
and in which a little water makes the difference between life and death.
Each clan had its own separate gods and totems.
To water and wind, fire and night.
They were kept in the caravan town of Mecca,
in a shrine of wood, stone and cloth.
It was called the Kaaba, the Arabic word for 'cube'.
Pre Islamic Arabs worshipped a number of spirits.
They were generally nature-oriented spirits sometimes associated with natural features.
Like trees or rocks or springs.
And the Kaaba in Mecca was one of a number of these sanctuaries
centred around a particular cluster of deities.
It was said the Hebrew patriarch Abraham himself
built the Kaaba centuries before
and that a sacred black stone it held within had fallen from the sky.
In these turbulent times, the Kaaba provided a rare place of peace.
Only here would the Bedouin submit to a temporary truce
before returning to their conflicts of the open sands.
There was this one place in the middle, around the Kaaba,
which was, from even pre Islamic times, a place of... a sacred enclosure
where all people had to put down their arms.
This, of course, facilitated trading
because it meant that you couldn't carry on your feuds, when you were doing your buying and selling
The spiritual and economic importance of the Kaaba and Mecca
are pretty hard to seperate as far as the pre-Islamic Arabs are concerned.
The Kaaba made Mecca a vibrant centre for trade.
Here were found Arabian incense, exotic perfumes and Indian spices,
Chinese silks and Egyptian linens.
But perhaps the greatest treasure to be found at Mecca
was the rich mixture of cultures.
They were people who came through town
who had all kinds of interesting experiences to relate of faraway places.
The local religion was mixed. There were Christians, there were Jews.
There were also the Arabs of the desert who followed an animist type of religion.
Muhammad's world was a centre of trade,
connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean,
linking the ageing empires of Byztantium and Persia
to the great bazaars of India and China.
Muhammad became a merchant.
In fact, he had a great flair for trade.
At the age of 25, while leading a caravan northward to Syria,
his talents caught the eye of the shipment's owner,
a wealth widow named Khadijah.
She was so taken with Muhammad, she proposed marriage.
Ah, Khadijah. Well, I think she was a mentor as well as a wife.
A very strong lady who had her own business
and Muhammad was helping her out.
So, it was a wonderful partnership and I'm sure he learned a lot from her.
He had a tremendous amount of contact
with merchants coming from different parts of the world,
passing through the Arabian peninsula.
I think he was a very intelligent man, very open minded,
and he was able to communicate with a great variety of people.
He must have had great charisma as well.
Muhammad had a way with people, and with resolving their disputes.
Once, when the Kaaba fell into disrepair,
the clan chieftains quarrelled over who would have the honour
of putting the sacred black stone back where it belonged.
Before violence could erupt, Muhammad proposed an equitable solution.
United in the effort, the four leaders shared the weight...
and the honour.
In gratitude, they invited Muhammad himself to replace the secret stone.
He became known as Al Amin, 'The Trusted One'.
There are all kinds of indications
that he was tremendously interested in religious questions.
This is obviously not something
that an ordinary person probably was interested in in those days.
He talked to... sages, Arab sages.
He talked to Jewish and Christian sages who lived in the area.
He used to go up into the rock hills around Mecca
and meditate, think about things.
And at some point he had this extraordinary vision
which is spoken about very evocatively and allusively.
In a cave above Mecca,
Muhammad had an experience that would be the defining moment of his life.
An angel was said to appear before him in the form of a man,
instructing him to recite in the name of God, the Almighty.
For Muhammad, it was an encounter as profound as it was deeply disturbing.
You get a sense of what it would be like
to be a normal person in society...
perhaps unusual in the sense of your intensity for things
like social justice and finding out what the meaning of life is,
but not being endowed with anything that would seem miraculous by your friends.
And all of a sudden having this voice come to you
and then come OUT of you as you speak it and recite it to other people.
And that is the beginning of the prophetic career of Muhammad.
The months to come would bring more revelations...
powerful words of a lyrical quality,
more beautiful than the most exquisite Arabic poetry.
Above all, Muhammad was to bear one message to his people,
a simple yet radical proclamation.
That there is only one God.
The central tenet of Islam is the oneness, the indivisible unity of God.
Not something that is simply... that one pays lip service to
but something that is absolutely the most important concept.
Divine unity is more than saying there's only one God
and there are no other deities.
It's only thinking about one thing.
So, to be thinking about possessions, to be thinking about status,
to be thinking about power,
are all intellectual idols.
The implications were staggering.
One God meant one people.
No more tribal divisions.
To the poor and unprotected, the prospect was revolutionary.
Seems to me that one of the most important things
in his early teaching that isn't often talked about
is the strong social justice message that he delivered.
In Mecca at the time
there was an increasing separation between the haves and the have nots.
He insisted that this was not to be and that we should share the wealth.
It was this social justice message that, i think,
really got him a hearing among many of the folks.
So coming with Islam it was a new order, a new way of life,
and it was a beautiful way of life
because everybody was equal... black, white, men, women, children.
So it had that type of universal appeal
which I think was the reason why Islam spread so rapidly.
Many were moved by Muhammad's message
as he began to speak out in the community.
It had the suppleness and symbolic depth of the great pre-Islamic poems
that had been created by this people
and that had given these people in Arabia
such an Extraordinary ear for verbal expression,
where verbal expression was the commanding cultural force.
Some people called him a poet.
There's a Qur'anic sura basically saying...
Muhammad is not a poet.
Poets speak through desire.
This is not the voice of desire, this is the voice of God.
Muhammad's following began to grow.
They called themselves 'Muslims', for those who surrender to God.
They set out to preserve the message Muhammad had brought.
This was the beginning of the Qur'an.
The Qur'an was revealed orally
but very soon people realised it had to be written down
in order to make sure it wasn't corrupted
and the original message was maintained.
From a very early date, and it's very unclear when that date was
because no early manuscripts of the Qur'an survive,
people began copying it down.
The Qur'an is a revelation of spiritual teaching,
of both ethical and social guidance.
It was revealed, and remains, in Arabic.
What's so extraordinary about the Qur'an is its naturalness,
so that it can say the most powerful cosmic things
with a sense of intimacy,
so that power and tenderness come together constanly in the Qur'anic language.
With words alone, the Qur'an delivers its vision to the faithful.
Its imagery conjures a picture of the afterlife
that resonates with all the power of traditional Bedouin poetry.
Imagine yourself in the desert...
surrounded by dust, by the glare of the sun.
You wear cloaks to cover your body
because the wind will just sear your skin right off your face.
And you walk into an oasis.
The temperature drops dramatically.
There's a quiet there. The wind is no longer howling.
Everywhere you look you see green and colour.
The world of water and paradise are symbolically tied to one another.
And the Qur'an can conjure that up with just a few briefly chosen words.
Yet for all the imagery of paradise in the Qur'an,
there was no easy description of God.
The mystery would remain.
It's very difficult to talk about God without reifying God,
reifying to make God into a thing,
or anthropomorphising God,
to make God into a projection of our own human self.
That's why Muslims don't like sculpture, for example, traditionally,
because they believe there's that danger.
The Qur'an avoids that by constantly shifting the pronouns
so we can't really reify God and get an image, a physical image of God.
Rather than a physical image of God, or of Muhammad,
it is the beauty of the Qur'an itself that is celebrated in Islam.
Islam developed in this context where pictures were not favoured.
The Qur'an as it was revealed was God's representation on earth.
And Muslims felt from a very early time
that the only just representation of God's word was the Qur'an itself,
not any picture of... God, certainly not, because you couldn't represent God,
and certainly not a picture of Muhammad, because he wasn't divine.
At certain times and places people did make images of the Prophet Muhammad.
But these are not religious images,
these are not images meant to be worshipped,
they are not images of a saint or of God.
They're images of Muhammad as a historical figure.
He's sort of given honour by having a very bright blue background
or a white cloud near him
but he's not otherwise distinguished from the other characters in the story.
At other times people did represent the Prophet
but always with a white cloth over his face, to hide his face.
So there were different approaches to doing this.
But in all of these, these are not devotional images.
You're not supposed to look at them and pray towards them.
You're to learn more about the history of your religion,
with the emphasis on history, from them.
As Muhammad's community grew,
so did the opposition.
People, of course, were sceptical
and said "Look, if you're a prophet, where's your miracle?"
"And the prophets in the Qur'an...
"Moses had miracles, Jesus had miracles.
"Where's your miracle?"
And the Qur'anic answer to that challenge is...
"This is the miracle... this Qur'an.'
But that wasn't miracle enough
for the people who defined themselves by the gods of their ancestors
and the totems of their tribe.
Their doubts increased.
The idea of life after death appalled them.
So, the Qur'an presents people as really being sceptical.
"You mean to tell me that after I die
"and my body has gone back to the elements and I've been putrefied
"that I'm going to be put back together again
"and brought back to life?"
That, of any of the messages in the Qur'an,
that struck the people of Arabia as being the most hard to believe.
Muhammad also spoke of eternal damnation for the unjust.
He used the language of apocalyptic imagery,
talking about the signs of the end of time...
when the mountains crumble, when the skies are rolled up like scrolls,
then you will know what responsibility you bear for your actions.
There are references to those who are unjust going to the fire.
To the non believers,
the divine reckoning Muhammad invoked was an outrage...
His dismantling of their heritage and customs, deeply unsettling.
It was a threat, in several ways...
to their social order, to their age old traditions
and an economic threat because of the importance
of the pilgrimage shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca.
As Muhammad's following increased,
the social fabric of the caravan city began to unravel.
Business suffered as pilgrims and traders, worried for their safety, left town.
The tribal leaders decided
Muhammad and his message must be removed, permanently.
They didn't want him taking over and horning in on their control of the city.
They made things very difficult for him, perhaps even plotted his assassination.
They tried to keep him from the Kaaba, doing all they could to run him out of town.
They demanded Muhammad's uncle remove his clan's protection from the Prophet...
which would clear the way for his murder without the threat of retribution.
But his uncle refused.
The battle lines were drawn.
Nothing short of tribal war would settle the conflict now.
Muhammad is clearly asked to do extraordinary things...
to tell the Bedouin to give up many of their notions of multiple gods,
to give up their attachment to their ancestors
and their tribal warfare in the way they had.
Things that... could and did make him the object of scorn, persecution
and, um... attack.
Muhammad's followers were forced from the marketplace and starved.
Those without clan protection were tortured and killed.
In 619 AD, Muhammad's wife Khadijah died...
and his uncle as well.
Gone were his first great love and his only protector.
Here at last was the opportunity his enemies had been waiting for.
But in the lush oasis town of Yathrib, north of Mecca,
a refuge opened to Muhammad and his people.
Clan rivalries had become deadly in the town
and they desperately needed a peacemaker.
They had heard that Muhammad was a very trustworthy man.
They'd heard he had great arbitration skills, and they thought...
"Let's get him here to help out." So they invited him.
Muhammad agreed to travel to Yathrib and settle their disputes
in exchange for a safe refuge for his people.
For Muhammad's followers,
leaving the place of their ancestors, their families and tribes
was the ultimate test of devotion.
In doing so, they began a new community, a new tribe.
For the first time, they were bound together not by blood,
but by faith.
In the course of a single caravan journey,
Islam marks its true beginnings.
Their journey is known as the Hijrah.
622 in the Christian calendar marks the Muslim Year 1.
Muhammad's goal among the people of Yathrib
was the same as his larger mission...
to bring unity and peace with his message...
He was asked to be a Solomonic figure,
to mediate tensions between tribes that seemed intractable.
As his work succeeded,
the town would become known as the City of the Prophet...
Medina.
Muhammad's great task in Medina
was to try and bring together these various groups,
to try and forge a community of believers
in a way that would bring people together in a sort of harmony.
To the divided clans of Medina, Muhammad offered a vision of solidarity.
But even as he spread the word of Islam,
he didn't challenge the beliefs of other faiths.
Islam sees itself in relatlonship,
to the earlier revealed religions of Judaism and Christianity
and treats them as people of the Book.
It believes that God had revealed himself, his word, to mankind many times...
to Moses, to Jesus, for example, and...
but each time people went astray.
Throughout the Qur'an we have a sense of the humanity of Muhammad,
his humbleness as a person
and the extraordinary challenge
of the mission he was given by this divine revelation.
As the Muslim community grew in Medina,
a life of simple devotion and ritual developed.
A freed Abyssinian slave, named Bilal,
was the first to call believers to prayer at Muhammad's house.
Allahu akbar.
It was the first mosque.
The call to prayer has within it the first Islamic Pillar
which is the affirmation of God's unity...
"La ilaha illa Allah"...
that beautiful phrase which many Muslims chant
over and over in their mind, or vocally,
to constantly remind themselves of the unity of the God.
And the unity of what we should focus on in our life.
Allahu akbar. La ilah illa Allah...
Praying together is a good thing.
It cements the idea of belonging to a movement, to a religion,
to an organisation, to a community.
The result is something very, very powerful even to watch,
even for a non believer or someone from another religion.
We carry out physical gestures of prayer, in worship,
that unify our body and our mind and our soul,
all at the same moment of bowing and touching our head to the ground
toward that exact centre.
What could be a more powerful symbol of unity?
It's said that, while he was in Medina, Muhammad received a revelation,
instructing those in prayer to face in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca.
Though filled with pagan idols, it was still the shrine of Abraham,
the first believer in the one true God.
But even as the Muslims were praying toward Mecca,
their enemies there were rallying in force.
Their goal... to wipe out the Muslims.
Muhammad 's people began to gather arms.
Though the Muslims prepared as best they could,
they were outnumbered and outmatched.
They mustered a force of only 313,
mostly old men and boys, with few weapons...
while the approaching Meccans were heavily armed and a thousand strong.
For years, Muhammad had tried to bring Islam to the people of Mecca peacefully.
Now it was time to fight.
Muslims faced their own tribes,
brother fighting brother, son against father.
Yet they came armed with a powerful weapon...
a passionate belief in their faith...
Muhammad's troops fought with every confidence
that God's will was guiding them.
They fought three very, very bloody battles.
At one point, the entire young Muslim community was on the edge of annihilation.
For three years, the Muslim army held out against staggering odds.
As word of the fighting spread,
other Bedouin tribes saw God's hand in Muhammad's victories.
One by one, the peoples of the desert began to join in his struggle.
The Muslim army grew and tide began to turn.
The Muslim forces advanced to the outskirts of Mecca.
It was a furious siege that lasted for nearly a month.
Until, finally, the city fell to Muhammad.
In 630 AD, the terrified people of Mecca braced for the onslaught.
Muhammad's army was returning home,
now 10,000 strong...
The vanquished knew the terrible fate that awaited them.
According to the modes of tribal warfare,
the Meccans could expect a big revenge.
The men are usually killed.
Women and children are sold into slavery.
There's little pity for the loser in a tribal war.
Of course, that's standard around the world.
But Muhammad had a surprise in store for the fallen city.
When Muhammad came into Mecca
and not only did not carry out a bloody revenge
but actually embraced the very Meccans who had fought him for three years
and attempted to annihilate him,
it was very shocking
to the people in his milieu.
So, within the very founding of the religion
one finds episodes of great generosity...
often extraordinary acts of kindness and mercy.
But not all of Mecca escaped Muhammad's wrath.
Flush with victory, his troops marched straight to the Kaaba.
Seven times they circled the shrine,
as those who had come to seek its protection appealed to their idols.
But it was not the pagan people Muhammad come to destroy.
It was their gods.
He raised his staff
and the tribal gods of his ancestors smashed into dust.
When Muhammad entered Mecca and entered the shrine,
and destroyed the idols in the shrine,
this is of great cultural and symbolic importance in Islam.
By breaking the idols,
he was breaking apart the tribal system
in which each tribe really had its own independent deity.
This was schocking to the Bedouin.
This was saying, the gods of our fathers are being destroyed.
In some sense, you are saying that our fathers themselves were deluded.
How can you say this in a tradition
in which relationships to one's father and tribe were primary?
So, this act of iconoclasm, then,
is seen as an act of prophetic violence
that has just as much importance in Islamic tradition
as Moses's breaking of the tablets when he saw the idolatry at Mt Sinai
or Jesus's casting of the money sellers out of the Temple.
The Muslims turned to the north,
They continued west, into Egypt, and quickly across North Africa,
fortifying the coastline of the Mediterranean.
Only the seas stopped them.
Its growth was so explosive
from 622, Year 1 of the Islamic calendar.
Within 50 years,
people whose fathers had been camel herders
were now governing one of the major empires in world history.
Within 200 years it extended from Spain to China.
The Muslims absorbed the Sasanian Empire of Iran
and two thirds of the Christian Byzantine Empire.
By now the empire was larger than Rome.
It stretched from Morocco in the west
to the Indus River in the east, where the border of India is today.
How had it happened,
that so small an army could conquer an area so large, so fast, so easily?
Islam's success in expanding into the central Middle East
then across North Africa
was due in large part
because people were fed up with previous regimes.
So the idea that Muslims were going across the world saying that "Convert or Die"
is really not accurate, not at all.
They didn't have a heavy hand, they didn't rule with a heavy hand.
They allowed the conquered people to maintain their administrative structures.
They allowed the Christians and the Jews to maintain their religious law
and to be governed by them.
And so, in many cases, conquered peoples did not feel
the presence of the new regime very heavily.
Certainly for individuals who felt themselves exploited or downtrodden
by an oppressive and even sometimes parasitic priesthood,
the idea of Islam being a religion essentially free from clergy
must have seemed very attractive.
It's the times that create the movement and sometimes the men.
The Roman Empire had collapsed.
The Byzantine Empire wasn't strong enough.
There was a need for a new vision, a new way of looking to life
and i think what happened at that time,
Muhammad's mission filled the void that the societies wanted.
They really wanted some sort of solidarity in their lives.
The lessons of the Qur'an,
so successful for the Muslims in Medina and Mecca,
were playing out on a global scale.
As the conquest swept through Syria,
the Muslims held their friday prayers
in the church of St John the Baptist in Damascus...
allowing its Christian congregation to continue their services on Sunday.
Side by side, the two faiths shared the same building, in peace.
As the Muslim community grew,
they bought the old church from the Christian congregation
and built a huge mosque on the site.
With Byzantine artisans, they decorated it with golden mosaics of an Islamic paradise.
The Great Mosque of Damascus would become a model for new mosques to come,
all across the empire.
The Arabs transformed their conquered lands,
maintaining, improving or expanding the infrastructure.
In Tunisia, building on Roman ruins,
they devised an ingenious system of water purification,
using gravity to separate fresh water from sediments.
Part of this system were these two enormous basins
that they built outside the city walls.
The clean fresh water would flow over into the larger basin
where it would then be distributed by pipes to the city.
This is, you know, hundreds of years before
anyone in Europe ever thought of having running water.
All over you find schemes for bringing water from the mountains,
where there was more water,
to the plains, where there might be less water.
They resurrected elaborate irrigation systems,
filling the old stone aqueducts with precious water.
Agriculture flourished
as life-giving staples like wheat were introduced to the Mediterranean region.
In just 100 years,
Muhammad's vision had transformed the spiritual and political map of the world
and his followers had established an empire larger than Rome.
But Muhammad never lived to see it.
In the 11th year of the Islamic calendar,
632 AD, only two years after the taking of Mecca,
Muhammad died.
Medina fell into despair.
For days, the city was consumed with sorrow and ceremony.
He's known to have said that he wanted to be buried very simply
with no marker over his grave.
He didn't want people to worship his grave.
That would interfere with their worship of God.
God had spoken to them only through Muhammad.
Now that the Prophet had left them, perhaps God would as well.
Muhammad's death set up a crisis in the young Islamic community.
The question of succession was the first thing that really occupied people's concerns.
At this point there was a divergence of opinion as to how
the community should go about choosing a new leader.
According to the Shi'ites, a faction, the Shi'a of Ali,
Muhammad had indeed designated Ali his son-in-law and cousin, as his successor.
The opinion that came to be the majority, or Sunni opinion
held that Muhammad had not appointed a successor during his life
but had said "After I am gone, choose one from among your peers,
from among the elders."
And from the house there came out a man who would be his successor, Abu Bakr.
And he addressed the people and said...
"If you worship Muhammad, know that he is dead"
"If you worship God, know that he lives forever. "
Here was the secret to Islam's strength and profound influence...
the unifying power of one God, merciful and compassionate,
the power of one people, bound by a common faith.
Muhammad did not lead the conquest of create the empire to come
The transforming power of his message did.
Out of that message would spring a font of knowledge
that would transform humanity,
as Islam continued to spread its reach far and wide.
Awaiting the Muslims would be a new age.
They would be destined for enlightenment, for new horizons,
and a clash of great powers
the like of which the world have never seen...
During the 7th and 8th centuries AD,
a powerful new faith was about to change the world...
the faith of Islam.
Its followers launched a conquest not only by the sword
but with the power of ideas.
Two hundred years after the death of Muhammad
his message, and the new Arab empire, were transforming three continents.
Now comes a new empire, a political new configuration,
driven by a religious, newly defined civilisation.
This new civilisation,
expanding beyond its own dreams within a period of very short time.
Literally, the largest empire civilisation had ever known.
The Arabic word for conquest, futuh,
literally means 'openings'.
Islam sowed the seeds of its faith to the four winds
and a world of opportunities opened before it.
But the vast empire's spiritual core remained at its birthplace...
the holy city of Mecca.
From every corner of the Muslim world
the faithful embarked on the traditional journey to Mecca,
a sacred pilgrimage known as the Hajj.
The pilgrimage became a central devotional and ritual feature in Islamic life.
In fact, since the life of Muhammad himself,
the pilgrimage has symbolised,
probably more than any other Islamic ritual activity,
unity among all people and equality.
The Hajj set humanity in motion.
For the first time since the reign of Alexander the Great,
cultures and caravans now flowed freely.
Borders closed for a thousand years opened...
Both ideas and goods went back and forth over incredible distances.
Since every Muslim is enjoined once in his life to visit Mecca.
It means that there were caravans carrying goods and pilgrims
and ideas and people.
And they all met together in Mecca once a year,
then things would radiate back home.
So if an invention was discovered in Samarkand
it could be, within the year, known in Cordoba.
Where pilgrims trod, traders soon followed.
Muhammad himself had been a man of commerce
and now the spread of his message
brought with it the spread of trade and the Islamic way of life.
Trade was incredibly important in the Islamic world
simply because of its geographical position.
It was, and still is, between what we call the West,
and what people always called the East.
So it was a natural land bridge connecting China to Europe.
In only two centuries, Islam had extended its reach
from Spain all the way to the edge of India.
It took nearly a year
to travel from one end of the Arab empire to the other.
At its heart was a fabled city of wealth.
It was called Baghdad.
The palaces of ancient Baghdad have been lost over the centuries
but in its glory it rivalled ancient Athens or Rome.
It was a magnificent architectural achievement,
the pride of Islam in a new age.
One visitor left this account.
"All the exquisite neighbourhoods covered with parks,
"gardens, villas and beautiful promenades
"are filled with bazaars and finely built mosques and baths.
"They stretch for miles on both sides of the glittering river."
But what made this the greatest city of its time
was more than just what met the eye.
It was the company it kept.
Scholars made Baghdad the jewel of the world.
Certainly from the 8th century on,
Baghdad was the centre of learning in the Islamic world
and all major innovations either came from Baghdad or quickly came to Baghdad
Because the best people came to Baghdad, the best thinkers, the best philosophers, the best artists.
The empire's meteoric growth had left its new leaders overwhelmed.
They had staggering engineering and logistical problems to contend with.
Solving them would take the greatest minds of the day.
Under the new empire now, you're responsible for public hygiene,
you're responsible for the marketplace, for the goods being sold in the marketplace.
All of this require some basic elementary science.
This new civilization having a need for science,
really stems from the need to run that empire.
The best minds rose to the call.
The finest were welcomed at a centre of scholarship,
Baghdad's renowned House of Wisdom.
It was a magnet for scholars and intellectuals
who came and worked in the academies.
There were public libraries associated with the palace
and scholars came from all over the empire.
There were scholars from Iran, there were scholars from Byzantium.
Some were Christians, some were Muslims, some were Jews.
And all of these different... sort of threads of human knowledge
So, the net effect of this
is that you've got human individuals
from radically different cultural traditions being thrown into the same crucible.
The challenge that greeted these scholars was daunting.
The great works of the ancients,
had to be transformed into a wholly new body of knowledge.
Competition for jobs developed within a new intellectual elite.
And from there on, every single scientist is competing for that job.
They were competing among themselves almost just... in the same way
that modern bureaucrats and academicians will fight among themselves.
Scholars were dispatched across the empire
to locate as many ancient texts as possible...
the first international scientific venture in history.
Unlike their Christian counterparts,
Muslim thinkers saw no insurmountable contradiction
between their faith and the laws governing the natural world.
So they embraced Aristotle and Plato,
writers the Christian church considered blasphemous.
So this is the time when we begin to see
scientists, bureaucrats, what have you...
going and seeking from whatever civilisation
that had any sciences before,
be it the Greek, the Indian, the Persian, and so on.
From the Hindus came mathematical concepts that guide us today.
It was the scholars of the House of Wisdom
who developed the system of Arabic numerals, still in use.
It is they who translated and transformed the writings of the Greeks
and made a gift of them to the modern Western world.
The Renaissance had its beginnings in Baghdad.
They managed to assimilate
quite a lot of the rich legacy of the Hellenistic world,
translate it into Arabic, initially,
which was then made available to all other participants
in the new Islamic civilisation.
Arabic emerges as the language of learning throughout the region.
This is a very significant development in human intellectual history.
Having amassed the knowledge, the Muslims began to challenge it.
This was perhaps their most important contribution.
The scientific process was born.
They wanted to know why a very intelligent Greek scientist
whose texts they were just admiring and they were verifying it...
Why would he make a mistake in the first place?
So they began to dig. Was it because he didn't have the right instruments?
Or is it because he didn't have the right methodology
to use the instruments for the verifications of observation?
It is this spirit, you see, this spirit of questioning,
the spirit of saying that we have to build science constantly
on a systematic, consistent basis,
where we make a physical proposition of how the universe ought to be run,
and the mathematical representation of that physical universe ought to match.
Now you begin to have what i call the birth of the new Islamic science.
Algebra and trigonometry, engineering and astronomy...
Countless disciplines integral to our lives today
trace their roots to Islamic scientists.
More surprising, perhaps, were their innovations in medicine.
At a time when Europeans were praying to the bones of their saints
to cure their illnesses,
Muslim physicians developed an innovative theory...
that disease was transmitted through tiny airborne organisms,
the precursor to the study of germs.
They determined that sick patients should be quarantined and then treated.
This is the basis of the institution most fundamental to medicine today...
the hospital.
Funded mainly through religious endownments,
Muslim hospitals had separate wards
for patience suffering from different kinds of disease.
Even mental illness was treated.
Their studies of anatomy were so sophisticated
that they remained in use by Muslim and European physicians
for 600 years.
Muslim scientists were especially intrigued by light, lenses
and the physiology of the human eye.
The father of optics was a muslim named Ibn al-Haytham.
His work with lenses eventually led to the invention of the modern camera.
He produced the first treatise that ventured to explain
how the eye actually sees.
A thousand years before the West dared to take up the practice,
Muslim doctors were removing cataracts surgically,
clearing them from the eye with a hollow needle.
But for all this knowledge to transform and illuminate an empire,
it had to be copied and shared
across a hundred different cities in the Islamic world.
For this, there was a new invention,
one that is still fundamental to learning and knowledge today...
paper.
Around the year 700 to 750, when Muslim armies reached Central Asia,
they encountered paper for the first time.
And, very quickly, the Muslim bureaucracy
started using paper.
You find that within 50 years it's in Syria.
Then a few years later it's in Egypt.
Then it's in North Africa.
Then it's in Sicily, then it's in Spain.
And that's where Europe learned to make paper.
They learned to make it from the Arabs.
We begin to have people with family names like Papermaker.
So, in other words, it was not only that paper was available.
It must have become a very, very widespread industry.
And hence the acquisition of books must have also become very easy.
With the wide use of books and paper,
hundreds of scribes, some of whom were women,
were kept busy transcribing the translations and new writings
of the Baghdad scholars.
All of this knowledge that's being acquired from the Greeks
and from the Indians and from Central Asians
is all beingswritten down in books on paper.
And these books are being copied and re-copied and sent around.
We know, for example, that there was a street of booksellers
with more than a hundred shops,
each one with paper and books for sale.
And this is a time when, you know, in Europe,
a monastery would be lucky if it had five or ten books.
While the monks of the West were hoarding their wisdom
on scraps of expensive parchment,
paper enabled Islamic civilisation to spread its newfound knowledge far and wide,
creatingu single community, linking three continents.
So, the chief distinction, therefore, of Islamic civilisation,
in addition to the fact that it made new leaps of originality,
New transformations in traditions of learning and everything else possible,
is the fact that it enabled human beings to consider the possibility
of thinking about the globe as a single unit... humanity.
In all the broad empire,
there was one place the Christian world could experience the lifestyle
Muslims now took for granted...
southern Spain.
Here, on the European continent itself,
Islamic culture would begin to have an effect
on the European civilisation around it.
A thousand years ago,
the Spanish city of Cordoba was a centre of learning and culture
that rivalled Baghdad.
Today, Cordoba's narrow lanes hearken to its medieval past.
During the Dark Ages,
this was the most prosperous and sophisticated metropolis on the continent.
It had streetlights and paved roads,
libraries, hospitals and palaces.
This was a city of light... a Muslim city.
We have descriptions of it by people coming and saying
"All these flowers everywhere, open streets,
"this wonderful light comingtown..."
Northern cities were dark.
Cordoba had running water. People lived in big houses.
In contrast, in Paris, people lived in shacks by the side of the river.
The glory of medieval Cordoba is here,
in what is now the great Roman Catholic cathedral in the middle of town.
But the Cordoba Cathedral of today began its life as a mosque...
one of the grandest of the Islamic empire.
The Great Mosque in Cordoba was simply the biggest mosque
in the biggest city in southern Europe.
When you climb the church tower which used to be a minaret,
you look out over this expanse of roof.
Complete with flying buttresses,
popping up out of the middle of this massive mosque.
Many, many people came to visit it,
to view the wonders of the mosque,
which had rib vaulting.
The kind of vaulting which is like this
and which, 100 years later,
but not at all a coincidence,
appears in the Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe,
in Lincoln Cathedral in Chartes Cathedral in France.
Where does that come from?
Obviously, influenced by the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the south of Spain.
For the occasional European Christian traveller,
Cordoba was the one opportunity the climpse the Islamic world
What they saw, was shocking...
Most of Europe at that time languished in poverty and squalor.
Cordoba was a pageant of prosperity and enlightment.
In the 10th century there was a Saxon nun
with the unpronounceable name of Hrotswitha
who called medieval Cordoba "the ornament of the world".
She was very, very taken with the place.
and she was a Christian nun.
As Europeans made their way from the cold stone of their northern castles...
into the glorious Muslim cities of Southern Spain,
they couldn't help of being impressed.
In the green hills above Granada, was a palace of startling elegance.
A shining example of the richness and sophistication Islam brought to medieval Europe.
It's called the Alhamra.
The Alhamra is, perhaps the most famous example...
...of the Islamic architecture to most Westerners.
It is the best remaining example of...
...what a medieval Muslim palace would've look like.
How far Muhammad's followers had come from the life of desert nomads.
How distant they felt from the rest of the European continent they now shared.
Christian Europe, due north, was struggling on through the Dark Ages.
a tragedy in Jerusalem would put Muslims and European Christians
on a collision course.
Jerusalem was ruled by an Egyptian caliph,
an infamous man named al-Hakim.
But at the dawn of 11th century,
Clinically speaking, I suppose, today we'd regard him as a madman,
as simply insane.
For 200 years, the Christian holy places in Jerusalem...
...had been respected and protected by Muslim rulers.
In 1009, the Egyptian ruler al-Hakim broke with that tradition.
He ordered the holiest church in Christendom destroyed.
And, horror of horrors,
he burnt down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Nobody knows quite why he did it,
and you can have your own theories about it,
but the fact of the matter was
that that sent shivers of terror and anxiety
through Christendom.
In a way, of course,
el-Hakim was the one exception and proved the rule for Christians
that Christians had been speaking of for centuries,
of Muslims as intolerant, mad, slavering heretics
who simply could not be...
...expected to abide by the rules of civilised human beings.
The fact that al-Hakim's succesor
rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre...
it was done by 1048 with Byzantine help...
didn't cut any ice.
There was this perception now
that things were not going well in the Holy Land.