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.
In Europe anti-Muslim sentiment simmered.
By 1095 it reached the boiling point.
Pope Urban II spent most of that year travelling through France,
imploring his feudal lords to unite in a campaign of bloodshed.
'Hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of your eastern brethren'
the Pope demanded.
'Jerusalem is the navel of the world.
'She cries out to be liberated.
'Christ himself commands it.'
So we've got a merging or a coming together
of military service and religion,
which served the purposes, if you like,
of a pope who in 1095 made his famous call to crusade
to rescue the endangered holy places in the East
and in particular Jerussalem.
In 1097, Muslim shepherds in Syria caught their first glimpse
of a sight that would soon strike terror throughout the Holy Land.
When the Crusaders struck, by sheer chance,
the Arab empire was at its most vulnerable,
broken into feuding kingdoms and petty dynasties.
They couldn't have chosen a better moment
because the Muslim world was in a very fragmented state.
The great rulers of the time had died
and into that power vacuum
there came this most unexpected enemy, the Crusaders from Western Europe.
Who would have thought that a new enemy
would come to the Islamic world from that unexpected quarter?
It was completely unprecedented. It was a real surprise.
The Muslims didn't really know who they were.
They thought they were just another lot of Byzantines
who were coming, as usual to be a nuisance
and fight on the borders.
They had no idea that there was this extraordinary surge
of religious fervour and fanaticism coming from Western Europe
and that the aim of this group was Jerusalem.
History is haunted by days of incomprehensible horror.
Few are darker than July 15th, 1099
when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem.
The massacre must have been terrible.
The fear...
the fleeing of the population...
It must have been horrendous.
From a letter to the Pope from the Crusaders...
"If you want to know what was done to the enemies we found in the city; know this,
"Our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses."
They saw the Holy city and they were in a state of exultation.
And perhaps that's why,
when they flooded through the gates of the city,
that they were fired up with fanaticism and zeal.
And that's why there was this terrible massacre
in the name of Christendom.
It was a blot on the name of Christendom in the Muslim view
and justifiably so.
Even Christians weren't spared.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
dozens of worshippers from Eastern sects were massacred.
To the Crusaders, they were nothing more than foreigners.
The Christian chronicles record the carnage.
'The Saracens who were still alive dragged the dead ones out
'and made huge piles of them.
Such a slaughter of pagans no one has ever seen or heard of.
The pyres they made were like pyramids.
They shocked the Muslim world when they came.
There are a number of extremely moving lamentations in poetry
which date from that period.
And the Arab poets of the time
talk about the feelings of anguish and terror
which the Crusaders, or the Franks, as they're called in the Arab sources,
caused the local people... the old women, the young girls...
Those who are cloistered away in their houses are trembling with fear.
The whole imagery is that of...
the rape of their land
and the... terrible impurities
caused by these barbarian infidels coming into their sacred space.
'We have mingled blood with flowing tears
'and there is no room left in us for pity.
'To shed tears is man's worst weapon
'when the swords stir up the embers of war,
"when blood has been split,
"when sweet girls must hide their lovely faces in their hands for shame."
The First Crusade was over.
Of the 100,000 men who began the campaign
most would eventually return to Europe, having had only a glimpse of Muslim life.
The job of occupying Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside
fell to the 20,000 who remained... indefinitely.
To secure their occupation
the intruders did here what they had done in Europe
They built castles.
The Crusaders built the finest castles that the Near East has ever seen.
And the proof of that is that they're still there.
When everything else may have faded away,
the Crusaders castles remain a living testimony to their presence
and Crac des Chevaliers in Syria
is THE Crusader castle of them all.
It's very, very big. It's strong. It's impenetrable.
It's a living example of the way
that a number of the Crusader castles couldn't be taken by siege.
You can see for miles and miles from it
and see the other castles that would have been in visual distance
for communication by fire and smoke signals.
It's got all the accoutrements of a good medieval castle
with battlements and turrets
and places for pouring boiling oil and other liquids down onto the enemy.
But inside that castle, what was life really like?
It wasn't merriment and festivity.
It was constant fear.
You had to be on the lookout in case someone was trying to mine the castle
or to climb over the walls with scaling ladders.
The people outside, the population, the local peasantry...
they were not friendly.
So you had to watch their movements all the time.
It was a terrifying place.
The Crusaders made treaties... and broke them.
They harassed the traders who passed by their castles.
As they raided caravans,
the Crusaders learned of a luxurious lifestyle unheard of in Europe.
Materially, the Crusaders were just blown away
by what they found in the Middle East.
And they took a lot back with them.
Inlaid metalwork, textiles, silks...
things just never seen in such quantities before... the good life.
These things they brought back to Europe, some as souvenirs.
In fact, a whole industry developed in the Middle East.
Of providing souvenirs for the Crusaders to take back.
It is perhaps a Western bias
to imagine the Crusaders were a decisive force in world events,
devastating to the Islamic culture and trade.
The truth is,
while the Knights of the Crusades were bunkeringndown in their castles,
Islam was spreading its influence and flourishing.
Muhammad's message rang out as clear and strong as it ever had.
Allahu akbar!
Mosques were now on every horizon.
They welcomed traders.
They housed schools and hospitals.
Through Islamic architecture, literature and music
a vibrant culture was emerging in celebration of a singular faith.
Faith had launched an empire.
Culture was now enlightening it.
But ultimately what united it was trade.
For the Muslims, trade, like science, brought innovation.
Business was expedited by a revolutionary concept called the sakk,
a cheque that could be written in Spain
and cashed in India.
Writing a cheque assumes that someone will cash it at the other end.
And that if you have money in one place
someone will say "I have access to that somewhere else."
So this imply that you have some kind of central bank
or central loan organisation who's going to be good for the money.
So it frees up your ability to travel.
It frees up commerce because the money doesn't have to be moved
from Samarkand back to Cordoba, and back the other way the next year.
So you can base it all on trust and faith.
And Muslims became some of the greatest merchants of the Middle Ages.
And the greatest craftsmen as well.
From the Persians, Muslim blacksmiths learned how to fold steel
to give it strength and flexibility.
The swords made in Toledo and Damascus had no equal in the world.
But the economic backbone of Islam's expanding wealth was textiles.
The demand for the products of Muslim looms was enormous...
for cashmere, cotton and silk.
Textiles were simply the gas and steel industry of medieval times.
Because you have to think of textiles not only as growing the plants
but making all the dyes.
The dyes were particularly expensive and imported the farthest.
Then you need all the fixtures and mordants and equipment for looms,
then you need to transport these textiles.
So, collectively, the industry of making and transporting textiles
was the mainstay of the economy.
While Europeans settled for coarse woollen and linen garments,
Muslims wore brocaded fabrics of organdie, damask and taffeta,
words that came into the English language from Arabic and Persian.
The fabrics produced in the Islamic world were among the finest ever produced.
And they were made of not only plain linen or cotton
but also very, very fancy silks,
cloth of gold, where silk thread is wrapped with gold,
and with very, very complicated patterns.
These complex patterns were coveted by wealthy Europeans
and the Church as well.
When the Christians needed a cloth
worthy of wrapping the bones of their saints,
the choice was obvious.
They looked to a Muslim loom.
But sometimes the fabrics were trimmed
with decorative Arabic text from the Holy Qur'an.
And so the words of the Prophet sometimes appeared
in shocking proximity to Christendom's holiest icons.
It is not unusual to find in Italian Renaissance paintings, for example,
to find paintings of the Virgin
wearing a robe of very fancy patterned cloth
and precious silks embroidered with gold
or woven with gold designs.
Sometimes they would say things with an Arabic inscription on it
which says " There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet", in Arabic.
After almost 100 years of broken treaties and sporadic fighting,
The Muslims reached a tuning point in their struggles against the Crusaders.
It came in the person of one of Islam's most celebrated figures.
His name was Salah ad-Din.
But the West would remember him, and come to revere him, as Saladin.
There is certainly one thing we must recognise about Saladin
and that is that he was successful
where many others of his faith and his part of the world had not been.
He possessed one unusual feature.
In addition to his intelligence and his robust physical strength,
he certainly seems to have been a great inspirer of his military followers.
In 1187, Saladin amassed an army of 12,000 mounted warriors
and lured the Crusaders out of Jerusalem
onto a plain between two hills called the Horns of Hattin.
On the evening of July 3rd, after a long march,
the Crusaders camped on a barren hillside.
There was nothing but a waterless terrain.
And we're talking about July.
We're talking about the Middle East, about incredible heat and no water.
As dawn approached, Saladin's men set fire to the tall grass
and a strong wind carried the flames into the Christian encampment.
And very soon they found themselves surrounded, as in the Muslim tactic,
by their enemy,
and panic set in.
"The flames bore down on them and the heat became intense"
Saladin's secretary wrote.
"The people of the Trinity were consumed by the fire of flames,
"the fire of thirst and the fire of arrows."
The army of the Crusaders was totally decimated.
And the victory at Hattin
was a real turning point for Saladin.
It meant that he could then proceed
to take Jerusalem later on that year.
Three months later, Saladin entered Jerusalem.
For the first time in almost a century,
the call to prayer floated over the Holy City once again.
And yet, remarkably,
Saladin levelled no retaliation against Christians or their holy places.
In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre., mass was celebrated as usual.
Saladin also decreed that Christians who wished to
could leaye the city with their property.
Those who chose to stay would be allowed to worship freely.
When his reputation reached Western Europe
of the way he had behaved in Jerusalem over the conquest,
he gradually became the most famous Muslim of all time.
Saladin's victory did not put an end to Western aspirations in the Near East.
Other crusades would follow, though, as with the first,
they would hardly have an impact on the larger Islamic culture.
The Crusaders would eventually be driven from their citadels along the coast
and return to Europe,
their only lasting legacy a few abandoned castles.
But the returning Crusaders found themselves changed
by their contact with Islamic culture.
The long term impact on European life would be profound.
They were just amazed by the material culture they found there.
The quality of the merchandise
was far better than anything at home and they brought it home with them.
They came back, for example, with a taste for highly spiced food.
They imported pepper and cinnamon and other oriental spices
because their tastebuds had been whetted by a different cuisine.
We know that they found out the delights of using soap
when they were in the Middle East
and it would appear that that caught on back in Europe.
After the Crusades,
many Europeans were far more open
to the ideas of what was going on to the East
and in other parts of the world.
They simply couldn't be as insular as before.
Lots of people were open to "What's out there? Let's explore this."
New intellectual thoughts... "Let's see what these people are writing."
This is when people start to learn Arabic, slowly, in the West.
As the barrier of the language dissolved,
ideas born in the great Muslim cities began to filter into Europe.,
ideas that would forever change Western thought.
The great Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas
used the writings of the Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rüsd)
To justify the clear separation of faith and reason,
a Muslim ideal that formed the basis of all scientific inquiry
and led to the European Renaissance.
Averroes (Ibn Rüsd) himself appears in Raphael's classic Renaissance painting
of great Western thinkers.
Here, alongside Plato and Aristotle,
stands a vivid reminder of the debt the world owes Islam.
The scope of Islamic civilisation
has now reached levels
which certainly were not accomplished
by any other known civilisation of the world.
It actually unified parts of our globe
in ways that had not been witnessed before.
But this golden age of Islam was not to last.
After shrugging off the Crusades
and bringing the precious gift of knowledge to Europe,
the great cities of the Islamic empire would be brought to ruin
by a force more terrible than anything the Europeans could muster.
Their libraries destroyed the wealth plundered,
the empty cities stood mute in the aftermath of a devastation
that desended upon them not from the West, but from the East...
It's known as the Mongol Catastrophe.
The Mongols were Turko-Mongolian nomads from the steppes of Central Asia.
In the 13th century, they rampaged across much of Eurasia
between the Ukraine and China.
It wasn't long before they entered Islamic Persia.
To the cultured, urban Muslims, these guys were a bunch of savages.
When you entered the Mongol army, you came with three horses
and you lived off the horses.
First you drank their blood, then when you'd moved far enough away
you killed them, you slaughtered them and ate their meat.
And that's why they could go so far and survive so long.
Terror was the Mongols' principal tactic.
One of the local Iranian leaders foolishly decides
to kill off the emissary that the Mongols have sent.
In doing that, he evokes the anger of the Mongols,
who want to use him as an example.
They use this retaliatory technique often, of killing off entire towns,
wiping them out as examples.
So they build these fantastic towers of skulls,
piling up all the dead bodies as an example.
And then all the other towns around immediately give way.
City after city fell before them.
It was only a matter of time before they reached the centre of Islamic power.
On February the 10th, 1258
the Mongols took Baghdad.
According to the Arab chroniclers,
the Mongols put Baghdad to the torch and killed 10,000 inhabitants.
Mosques and libraries, the collected knowledge of centuries,
were all set ablaze.
Within less than 50 years,
the Mongols seized the heart of the Islamic empire from the Arabs.
Islamic civilisation seemed poised for destruction...
Iost to posterity.
But then something remarkable happened
While the consensus of opinion
is that Mongols were a devastating force,
I personally feel that they also had a very positive effect
on Western Asia and the world of Islam.
They opened the world tremendously.
Historically, the most significant thing about the Mongols for us
would be that they became Muslims.
Most in the end... converted to Islam
and then became, after being these tremendously destructive forces
some of the greatest patrons of the arts and letters in all of Islamic history.
The conversion, and its lasting effect, was extraordinary.
Within a decade, the Mongols had gone from building towers of human heads
to building mosques glorifying God.
It is not surprising to me that the land conquered the conquerors.
The Mongols themselves became Muslims, or Islamic leaders, par excellence.
The Mongols transformed Islam.
Now, Islamic power could be held by anyone,
not just the Arabs who had created it.
The Mongols threw open the door for the great gunpowder empire to follow...
The empire of the OTTOMAN TURKS.
Islam was now set on a new course of expansion
to both the east and the west...
marching to, the beat of Turkish drums.