This is the myth of the Dark Ages, the idea that history and progress pretty much stopped for a millennium after the fall of Rome. The trouble is that the myth is just that, a myth. But it has been a myth so potent that it has thoroughly distorted our understanding of how civilisations emerge and how science and learning progress. Advances in our understanding of the natural world happen when scientists absorb the latest knowledge in fields such as physics or biology, and then modify or improve it. They work rather like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of learning from one scientist to the next. Modern science, regarded as a hallmark of modern Western civilisation, achieved its place through the passing of many successive batons, which were handed to the scientists of Europe from those of the world’s non-Western cultures. These included those who lived in the cultures of Islam over a period of some 800 years from the 8th to the 16th centuries.

The fact that we know little of this is what Michael Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace speaks of as ‘lost history’. The historian Jack Goody goes further and calls it ‘the theft of history’. It is as if the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from human consciousness. Not simply in the West but in the Islamic world too, the achievements of Islamic scientists were, until recently, largely forgotten or at least neglected, except by a few diligent specialists such as Harvard University’s Abelhamid Sabra, David King, Jamil Ragep and George Saliba.

In mainstream science education in Britain – until very recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’ only really ends, and the progress of science only really begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic progress of modern science.

The Cairo-based physician ibn al-Nafis, for example, discovered pulmonary circulation, the circulation of blood through the lungs, in the 13th century. Andalusian engineer Abbas ibn-Firnas worked out theories of flight, and is believed to have carried out a successful practical experiment six centuries before Leonardo drew his famous ornithopters. And in Kufa in Iraq, Jabir ibn-Hayyan (translated by Latin scholars as Geber) was among those laying the foundations of chemistry around 900 years before Boyle.

Moreover, some researchers are now showing that some of the great pioneers of modern science were building directly on the work of scientists from Islamic times. George Saliba of Columbia University, for instance, demonstrates in his book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance how the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drew on the work of Islamic astronomers for the groundwork to his breakthrough claim in 1514 that the earth moved round the sun.

Historians of mathematics have also shown how algebra, a branch of maths that allows scientists to work out unknown quantities, was developed in 9th-century Baghdad by Musa al-Khwarizmi, building on work that he had discovered from mathematicians in India. Historians think that al-Khwarizmi would have had access to manuscripts through Islam’s first encounter with India, which happened a century earlier. Modern science depends, too, on the solutions to complex quadratic equations devised by the poet and scientist Omar Khayyam. And much of our understanding of optics and light is built on the pioneering work of Hassan ibn al-Haitham (translated in Latin as Alhazen) in 11th-century Cairo.

If all these examples were fleeting moments of brilliance, they would be fascinating enough. But as many more teachers and historians are realising, they are much more than that. Names such as al-Khwarizmi and ibn al-Haitham are as integral to the history of science and technology as are Newton and Archimedes, James Watt and Henry Ford, but the Arabic-sounding names somehow became lost in the myth of the Dark Ages. The reasons for this are the subject of an intense debate, which is as much about the relationship between the West and Islam as it is about the history of science and technology.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this negative picture of the Dark Ages finally began to crumble along with the colonial empires. Many Western historians are now generally embarrassed by the distortion of history implied by the idea, and if they talk about dark ages, it tends only to be in a less pejorative sense, about periods that remain little known because of the dearth of written evidence. It is hard for them to see how an age that produced the Book of Kells, the scholarship of Alcuin and Bede, and countless great churches and monasteries could ever be thought of as an age of brute ignorance. More significantly, though, a tide of recent archaeological and textual research is now painting a much richer, fuller picture of life in Western Europe in the centuries after the fall of Rome, and even the idea that this is an unknowable period for the West is evaporating.

But of course the most distorting effect of the Dark Ages myth was the way it seemed to sideline, in the popular imagination at least, the history of the world beyond Western Europe – and virtually ignore the fact that learning had simply shifted eastwards, not completely flickered out. First of all, the Dark Ages myth seemed to turn a blind eye to the fact that the Roman empire did not actually end with the fall of Rome, but moved its centre to Byzantium. As the work of the historian Judith Herrin of King’s College London shows so well, we are just beginning to wake up to the fact that cultural life – a rich cultural life – existed in Byzantium for the entire duration of the Dark Ages. And if Christian Byzantium was left in the shadows, equally telling has been the neglect of the achievements of early Islam.

The Dark Ages myth proved so powerful that even in some academic circles the best that could be said of Islamic scholarship was that it saved the great classical texts so that Europe could rediscover them in the Renaissance – as if retrieving them from a hole where they had been squirrelled away while the thousand-year storm blew past. With the old treasures retrieved, it was surmised, Islam was no longer needed and it was up to Europe alone to take knowledge forward.

The first is the idea that the scholars of Islam acted as little more than custodians to the great classical works of scholarship, and added little of substance to the progress of human knowledge. Just how wrong that view could be will become clear later on. But it has led to much of the attention around the scholarship of the Islamic middle ages being focused on the ‘Translation Project’, the extraordinary movement to translate many of the great works of ancient Greece into Arabic, during Islam’s so-called Golden Age under the Abbasid caliphs in the 9th century. This was indeed a phenomenal achievement, and it did ensure that the best of classical learning was not lost. But it seems likely that it is just one part of the sustained Arabic scholarship that began before the Golden Age of the Abbasids and endured for many centuries after, spreading well beyond Abbasid Baghdad, into Cairo and Cordoba, Persia and Uzbekistan.

There is what some scholars call a ‘classical narrative’ about Islamic science that has been put forward by orientalists in the past. This tells us that Muslim intellectual life shone for a few centuries under the Abbasids and their immediate successors. The Abbasids, led by the Caliph al-Mamun, were on the side of a progressive, rationalist approach to Islam, which enabled Muslims to take on board Greek learning in translation. But the growing influence of a conservative tendency which gave more weight to literalism in revelation and less to human logic gradually stifled scholarship. The turning point was a famous polemic against intellectuals in the 12th century by the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. When Baghdad and many other Islamic cities were destroyed by the horrific Mongol raids in the following century, Islam turned inwards and intellectual life declined – at just the time when the Europeans were able to go forward with the essentially Greek body of knowledge passed on by the Arabic scholars of the Golden Age.

The problems with this classical narrative are gradually being exposed, however. The philosophical standoff between the so-called rationalists and literalists was far more nuanced than it suggests, and the idea that Islamic science came to an end after al-Ghazali, or even the Mongol raids, is now known to be wrong. Some of the greatest minds of the Islamic era, such as al-Jazari, ibn al-Nafis and the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, carried on the tradition well beyond the first stirrings of the European Renaissance.

There is no doubt that the history of the Crusades and the barriers of misunderstanding between the West and Islamic countries today help to reinforce the impression that beneficial contact between Islam and the West was minimal. It is highly likely, too, that many scholars in the Renaissance later played down or even disguised their connection to the Middle East for both political and religious reasons. The notion of the Dark Ages has reinforced the impression of separation. How could there be any contact between Islamic civilisations and a Europe lost in barbarian darkness?

Much new scholarship and archaeological research, however, is challenging this assumption. It now seems likely that there was considerable contact between Islam and the West even as early as the 7th century. In some ways, it is a mistake to talk about the Islamic ‘world’ and the Western ‘world’, as people often do; what is more accurate is to say that they are simply different parts of the same world.

Across the English Channel at around the same time, the Frankish king Charlemagne was minting silver ‘denarius’ coins, also clearly modelled on Arabic dinars. He too was very much in the market for oriental luxuries. Indeed, Charlemagne was at this time exchanging gifts and letters with Baghdad’s Harun al-Rashid, the caliph made famous in The Thousand and One Arabian Nights tales. In 801 CE, he sent Charlemagne an elephant called Abul Abbas, which is believed to have caused a sensation in the streets of Aix-la-Chapelle. The caliph also sent the king a carved ivory horn, a tray, a gold pitcher, a chess set, a tent, brass candlesticks and a water clock that astonished everyone who saw it and heard it striking the hour!

In addition, research from scholars such as Nabil Matar of the University of London shows that there was extensive and continuous contact between Islam and Christian Europe throughout the early and late middle ages in a host of different ways. Besides the merchants and entertainers who plied their trade across Europe, there was exchange of ideas and goods at every level in the places where the worlds of Islam and Europe became one – in Spain, in Sicily and in southern France – not to mention via Byzantium.

Some of the ways in which Islamic science and technology fed into Europe will be explored later in this book. At the same time, there are strong parallels between many things Islamic and those long regarded as part of the Western way of life. How they came to be will also be explored in these pages.

Take gardens as a place of relaxation rather than just a place for growing vegetables or herbs, for instance. They came to us from Persia. ‘Early Muslims everywhere made earthly gardens that gave glimpses of the heavenly garden to come’, says the historian A.M. Watson in his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. ‘Long indeed would be the list of early Islamic cities that could boast huge expanses of gardens.’ Islamic-era Toledo boasted Europe’s first large botanical garden...