The Abbasid caliphs -- When Baghdad ruled the Muslim world [45min]

The Abbasid caliphs were the dynastic rulers of the Islamic world between the middle of the 8th and the 10th centuries. They headed a Muslim empire that extended from Tunisia through Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Persia to Uzbekistan and the frontiers of India. But unlike previous conquerors, the Abbasid caliphs presided over a multicultural empire where conversion was a relatively peaceful business. As Vikings raided the shores of Britain, the Abbasids were developing sophisticated systems of government, administration and court etiquette. Their era saw the flowering of Arabic philosophy, mathematics and Persian literature. The Abbasids were responsible for patronising the translation of Classical Greek texts and transmitting them back to a Europe emerging from the Dark Ages. So who were the Abbasid caliphs and how did they come to power? What was their cultural significance? What factors can account for their decline and fall? And why do they represent a Golden Age of Islamic civilisation? Presenter Melvyn Bragg investigates the history of ideas and debates their application in modern life with his guests Hugh Kennedy, Professor of History at the University of St Andrews; Robert Irwin, Senior Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge. Baron Bragg -- historian, journalist and novelist -- is Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television.

From Melvyn Bragg's Email Newsletter:

I don't know about you, but this morning for me was a real revelation. I had"known" about the work done by Arabic scholars in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. That is to say, even though I read history set in that period at Oxford University, I had never heard it mentioned; even though we've done an enormous number of programmes on the Greeks and the Medievalists and I knew that there was an Arabic link between the two, I had not really explored it; even though I have been to Seville and intend to go to Cordoba to look closely at that golden amalgam of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, nothing much but a vague notion that Something Significant Happened really stuck. This morning, therefore, was the first essay into a period to which I think we should return a number of times over the next few years.

You'll have to believe this, but I did walk away from Broadcasting House through Soho being sprinkled with snowflakes, past the cutting rooms of Wardour Street down to the House of Lords, where the first question of the day was concerned with whether strychnine should be used to coat worms to kill moles, and then back to the studios here to work on a film of the manga picture books which so dominate Japan and are moving over here, with a feeling that a large piece in the jigsaw had been filled.

I love the idea that ancient Baghdad was calling in paper from China, calling in texts from Greece, sending out commentaries which reached Toledo and Cordoba and then moved back east and north into Medieval and then Renaissance Europe; that from Persia it was bringing in love poetry and stories which became the prototype of the novels first of Spain and then later of Europe and the world; that there was this tongue which was wholly part of Western civilisation. Arabic. Afterwards in the Green Room we were told that in Spain of the 10th and 11th centuries, young men would decide which religion was the most fashionable for them to follow (it seemed that dandyism was rife) and they would choose Judaism, Christianity or Islam depending on the mood and intensity of the moment. Arabic was preferred by many of them to Latin.

I don't know why the idea of culture swirling in such a way, like clouds around the planet, is so exciting. I suppose it appeals to some rather sentimental idea of the Wholeness of things. It also points to a kind of rough sharing, if not an equal weight of input, then a parity of essential input. Without the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad, would we have had Aquinas, the Renaissance scholars and everything that happened since then? But what happened to the great flowering of that Arab golden age? Why did it not succeed to its own Renaissance and beyond? That is, I hope, another programme and more programmes from that fantastic period.