East to West

This is the untold story

of the making of the modern world.

A fresh perspective,

charting the spread of civilization across the globe.

From the dawn of mankind

and the first cities and empires

to the belief in One God.

We follow the flow of civilization

from the Middle East.

An extraordinary place that has been a vital link

between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia.

An economic, scientific and cultural center of the world.

This is an epic journey of discovery...

from the east to the west.

Damascus, Syria.

The faithful are called to prayer at the Great Umayyad Mosque.

Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!

Allah Akbar...

This is a tradition that has marked out the hours of the day

in an unbroken sequence for 1300 years.

...Muhammad rasool Allah.

It is an appeal heard across the globe

by believers in one of the world's great religions, Islam.

It is testament to the enduring power

of the spiritual message of the prophet Muhammad.

But it is also evidence of another tradition in Islam,

its spirit of discovery and rational investigation.

Its embrace of science.

This is the story of the forgotten contribution

of medieval Islam to the history of world civilization.

At the low point of European history,

Muslims brought together the knowledge of the world...

founded great institutions of learning...

and created the foundations of modern science.

The discovery of this knowledge kick-started Europe's emergence

from a Dark Age.

And it formed the basis of the revolution we call the Renaissance.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Built at the height of Europe's colonial dominance

in the 19th century.

Its Cast Gallery is filled with the ghosts of great European artworks

illustrating the West's own view

of its rise to global cultural supremacy.

These works mark stages in the progress

of what was called “Western Civilization",

portrayed as a humane and rational approach to art and life,

which first flourished under Greece and Home, then died out.

It was rediscovered, according to Western tradition,

by modern Europeans

in the time we call the “rebirth" or the Renaissance.

This story, cherished by the West,

is encapsulated in one of the most iconic images of Renaissance art.

This painting which was done by Raphael for the Vatican originally

encapsulates everything

that the Europeans thought about their Renaissance.

It's called “The School of Athens"

and these are the great philosophers debating the meaning of life.

In this painting, great figures of the Renaissance

masquerade as their ancient Greek forebears.

Raphael himself plays the painter Apelles.

Michelangelo appears as Heraclitus

and in the center, Plato bears the face of Leonardo DaVinci.

One of the stories that this painting tells

is that there was a direct handover of Greek culture

to the European Renaissance.

It is a homage to the intellectual creativity

that flourished for 1000 years under Greece and Home.

But a millennium before Raphael's day

this so-called Classical Age had come crashing to an end.

In the 5th century barbarians from the north

had put an end to the glory of Rome.

Classical civilization in the West

had been consumed by a tide of violence,

plunging Europe into a Dark Age.

The forum, the main square of ancient Rome,

where Cicero and Caesar had addressed the Roman populace,

reverted to agricultural land.

By Raphael's time it was known simply

as the Campo Vaccine, the cow pasture.

With the fall of Home,

Western Europe had lost an entire culture of urban life,

and with it contact with the philosophy of ancient Greece.

The painting illustrates the longing of Raphael's contemporaries

to regain what was lost in that moment.

There is no hint that anything lay between or beyond

these two worlds but ignorance.

But even here there's a clue to another story.

What's fascinating is a rather shadowy figure

almost in the corner leaning over the back of Pythagoras.

Now this man was called Averroes

and he was an Islamic scholar.

And he's one of the very few hints that we get

of how much the Renaissance actually owed

to the Islamic world.

This solitary figure stands for the crucial missing link

between the Classical and Renaissance worlds.

In the Middle East there was no Dark Age.

There the Romans were a blip in a much longer history of civilization.

The Eastern Roman Empire

fell to a dynamic new force that emerged from the Arabian desert.

The invaders brought with them a new religion, Islam.

Within a century the Caliphs in Damascus

had made themselves masters of an empire larger than Rome's.

The new Islamic world stretched from India to the west coast of Spain.

Unlike the tribes that invaded Rome,

these new rulers could not be called unsophisticated barbarians.

In their capital Damascus

the buildings themselves tell the story of an empire

that was more concerned to develop the culture they found

than to destroy it.

In 706 they began work on the first Great Mosque in Islamic history.

But they took as their starting point

a structure that is one of the world's oldest sacred sites.

3000 years ago this is where the mighty god Haddad

was feared and was offered blood sacrifices.

In the 1st century this was small part of the huge Temple of Jupiter

which remained the Temple of Jupiter until the 4th century

when this became the Cathedral of John the Baptist.

And it remained so until the 8th century

when this place became the greatest mosque of the new Islamic empire.

The Umayyad Mosque is testament to the place of Islam

within a much longer story of civilization.

The new mosaics and minarets were built by Christian craftsmen

into the fabric of the old cathedral and pagan temple.

Just as we can see around us in the architectural evidence

that this new empire didn't knock down what was there before it,

but it actually built on it to a new level of sophistication,

it did the same to achieve

its new level of intellectual sophistication that it required.

This new religion had its own reasons

for respecting and developing the knowledge of the past.

In Islam, believers are taught to pray at five specific times a day

and so from the faith's beginning

it was very important to accurately measure the passing of time.

At the top of the minaret of the great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus

we have a beautiful sundial made by lbn Al-Shatir in the 13th century.

Sundials used to adorn the courts and walls of the mosques

because the time of the five daily prayers in Islam

depended on the position of the sun in the sky.

To be able to predict this you need a sundial such as this one.

This sundial works on a system of hours

dividing the time from sunrise till sunset

and the 24 hour system we use today,

as well as indicating the times of the five calls to prayer.

As well as determining the precise time,

Muslims needed to know their exact position on earth.

Also you need to be able to determine the direction to Mecca

because Muslims usually will pray directing themselves towards Mecca

wherever they are on the earth.

So they need to do time-keeping, global positioning,

based on the movements of the sun, planets and moon.

The efforts of the people who positioned this sundial

to understand the universe in scientific terms

were motivated, not discouraged, by their faith in the word of God.

It's motivated not only by its rituals and timekeeping needs,

but also with its intellectual stimulation

because the Koran is full of verses

that actually ask you to look at the sky

and use your rationale to ponder the reason behind the creation,

the reason why there is precise movement

for the celestial bodies.

The reason why there are irregularities,

why there is symmetry, just to think about the reason behind everything

and find out yourself.

There are many passages in the Koran for example,

that tell you to look around at the world and marvel at it,

but also come to understand it better,

because the world is full of signs

that it has been made by a wise and just and merciful creator.

So Muslim scientists in this medieval period,

thought of science as a way of studying

the work of God in the world.

The arrival, two centuries after Rome's fall,

of a new champion of rational inquiry

would breathe new lite into the dormant tradition

of ancient philosophy.

The Arab rulers were very interested

in not only preserving the culture and the learning in particular,

and with a certain emphasis on scientific learning

of the areas that they'd taken over,

but they wanted to gather this information together

beginning with the Abbasids in Baghdad.

In 750 the Abbasid dynasty

founded a new city on the banks of the Tigris.

They called it Madinat as-Salam.

But it was instantly known by its local name, Baghdad.

It was built on a perfectly circular plan

centering on the glorious palace of the Caliph.

Around it grew the greatest city of the age.

If I had to live in the 8th century I'd want to live in Baghdad.

That was the most exciting place, it's where the action was.

It's the center

of the most powerful empire in the world at the time,

and there's a huge amount of money being poured into creating culture,

learning, building a new city.

It must have been fabulously exciting.

That city survives today

only in the buildings it inspired elsewhere,

like the lbn Tulun Mosque in Egypt.

It hints at the opulence of what was once a cosmopolitan metropolis