Informative and entertaining history.

I really enjoyed this history audiobook. I leave learnt a great deal about the contribution of scholar's from the Islamic Golden Age contributing to advancements that we take for granted in current age.

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4 people found this helpful

This book will change your perspective

Professor Gearon speaks with passion and authority on a subject that will give you a new perspective on the Islamic* world's contribution to human progress. The course is well structured in that you can follow the place and context of most inventions and scholars without feeling lost. The subject matter really comes alive with Mr Gearon's style which includes fun facts, personal anecdotes, the odd dry-English humour joke and involves a real passion for these topics that can't make you help but feel that you should be passionate also. By the end of this course you will feel like you've had an excellent overview of the subject with sufficient depth to give you some understand of contributions to Astronomy, Medicine, Engineering, Inventions, Mathematics, Poetry etc. and to confidently go off to find out more if you wanted to on most topics.

*used in same sense as defined by Professor Gearon.

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2 people found this helpful

Excellent course

This is one of the best books I have ever listened to. The author has clearly and explicitly explained to the world an unknown era in the history of the humanity. I thank him for this effort and for being impartial and very scientific in his analysis of the events. Strongly recommended. Thank you

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Engaging and thought provoking

Professor Gearon is very engaging and clearly enthusiastic about the Islamic golden age. The subject itself is interesting and I learned a great deal. It is a pity that the facts of this topic are not more well known. Amy history of the west seems to jump from Roman history to the Renaissance ignoring the important contributions of Islamic art, science and culture - which this course goes some way to rectifying. I highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in history.

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9 people found this helpful

Loved it

Brilliant, excellent and thought provoking description of the achievements from that era. Couldn't stop until I finished it.

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3 people found this helpful

Enchanting, narration.

A most enjoyable and riveting journey through the history of the middle east. Thank you.

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3 people found this helpful

Well-presented propaganda

In recent years, suspicion of and hostility to Islam has grown continuously in the western world, as Muslim immigration has increased, and jihad attacks have become almost routine. Western elites have made an extraordinary efforts to convince their sceptical publics that Islam is not just the fount of horror many of them believe it to be. Part of this propaganda initiative has involved talking up the glories of the supposed Islamic golden age. Professor Gearon's work falls squarely within that tradition.

Although Gearon acknowledges that many of the greatest achievers were not Muslims, he insists on using the term "Islamic Golden Age" anyway. His excuse: because it's already in widespread use. He constantly asserts, but fails to convincingly demonstrate, that the European Renaissance somehow derived from or depended on the prior "Islamic Golden Age".

There are many flaws in this strain of Islamophile propaganda. Notably, it implies that "Greek wisdom" would have been lost to Europe if it had not been preserved through intermediate translation into Arabic. There are a few texts of which this is true but its extent has been massively exaggerated. The propagandists tend to ignore the fact that "Greek wisdom" was preserved in the place where it originated, Greece, under the auspices of the Byzantine empire. By rhetorical sleight of hand, they disconnect the Byzantine empire from Europe and argue that Europe should somehow be pathetically grateful to Muslims for having given us back our own knowledge. An absurdity. They also ignore the fact that there was almost zero transmission of "knowledge" from Islamic civilisation to European civilisation until the Muslim polities in Spain were defeated in the Reconquista. In other words, it wasn't convivencia that brought "enrichment" but warfare.

Professor Gearon makes the Muslim propagandist's case as well as it can be made, but, for me at least, it remains deficient and unconvincing. It's worth listening to, certainly, but in a spirit of scepticism.

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9 people found this helpful

Excellent Overview

It's a subject I studied many years ago and wanted a good refresher. This delivered precisely what I was looking for. Nicely delivered with some good humour to boot.

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3 people found this helpful

Interesting

The Narrator was good but pronunciation let him down.

This was a good Introduction . I knew a lot of it from before.

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Thought provoking and enlightening

This course was easy to listen to and underlined both the achievements of the Abbasid Caliphate as well as its continuing impact on the modern world. As with many empires there is, in reality, no clear start and often an even less clear ending but both these aspects as well as the political and religious challenges of the era are fully covered

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