Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World

Long before the European Renaissance, the Arab world was ablaze with the knowledge, invention and creativity of its Golden Age. This is the story of how Islamic science preserved and enhanced the knowledge acquired from Greece, Mesopotamia, India and China. Through the greatest minds of the Muslim world, this knowledge was carried from Samarkand and Baghdad to Cordoba and beyond, influencing Western thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Copernicus and helping to inspire the cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance. Freely tells this spellbinding story of the melting pot of cultures involved and concludes with the decline of Islam’s Golden Age, when the West forgot the debt it owed to the Muslim world and the influence of medieval Islamic civilization on modern science.