Science in the East: 750–1453 CE

“The moving finger writes and having writ moves on,” said Omar Khayyám in his epic poem, The Rubaiyat. This could stand as an epitaph for the Golden Age of Islam in the 8th to 13th centuries. Science and other cultural activities went through a glorious period, but it was a dead-end for the culture. It’s a conundrum how Arabia could have become the world’s leading center for intellectual activity across sciences from astronomy to biology and medicine and then collapsed. The flame of knowledge had passed from the Greeks to the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) as the result of Arab conquests across Alexander the Great’s empire. It incorporated knowledge from all across Asia. Although it was later extinguished in the Arab world, it passed into Western Europe, partly through the Moors during their occupation of Spain (from 711 to 1492). The renaissance of science in the late medieval period in Europe was fueled by Greek texts that had been conserved by translation into Arabic, and were then translated back into Latin. It was another century before science took off as an independent intellectual activity in Europe.