School of Illumination [45min]

Writer and singer Shusha Guppy tells the fascinating story of how Islamic philosophers brought the treasures of classical Greek thought to the West. By the 9th Century, the works of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had largely been lost in the Latin West. In the Islamic East it was a very different story. For centuries they had been translating these and other Greek philosophical school works, harvesting the knowledge they contained and in turn, writing their own commentaries. As the Islamic empire spread to Europe, that knowledge travelled with it.