My first blog

Well, my very first blog! (And an exclamation mark after the fifth word.) Not that I haven’t had anything to say, you understand – I’m just a little behind the times. Although I must admit that I cannot understand why so many people feel the need to constantly tell the world about the minutiae of their lives via Facebook’s ‘Status Updates’.

Oh, I am so going to enjoy ranting.

Since I do not think you will have stumbled across this page without having gone through my website first, I assume you have some idea of my background. Anyway, I am not going to waste time going through formal introductions; life’s too short.

So for now, I think I’ll say a few words about my current BBC4 series, Science and Islam, which is a look at the achievements in science (maths, medicine, astronomy, chemistry etc) during the Golden Age of Islam that began around the mid 8th century CE and continued for several hundred years before fading away in the 13th and 14th centuries. I must say that although I had been bracing myself for emails, I have been quite stunned by the response so far, and that’s just episode 1!

You see, I am theoretical nuclear physicist, which is not a subject medieval scholars knew that much about to be honest, so the historical subject matter of this project has been new to me. I have spent the past two years on a frighteningly steep learning curve and think I am pretty much ready to argue my case against anyone. And it’s a crackingly good story too.

On the whole the response so far to the series has been overwhelmingly positive. Many have written saying they found it most welcoming that finally they get to learn about some of these remarkable achievements. There have also been the inevitable complaints from the islamophobes who have argued that the Islamic Empire did nothing beyond translate Greek knowledge into Arabic before handing it back again during the European Renaissance; there have been Iranians complaining about the use of the term Arabic science; there have been devout Muslims complaining that I am a patronising Western infidel; there have been those who complain that I don’t acknowledge Indian science and Chinese science; and there have been those who frankly just like to moan.

But it’s the science that interests me. Here are a few factoids for you:

• Muslim scholars were the first EgyptologistsAn Egyptologist, Dr Okasha al-Daly, has uncovered details about how hieroglyphs were actually decoded by a ninth century Iraqi scholar called Ibn Wahshiyah, eight centuries earlier than Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone.
• First Clinical TrialsClinical trials are the way medicine is studied today but common wisdom is that it began in the mid-18th century in Europe. In fact, they were around as long ago as the 9th century in Baghdad, where the world’s greatest medieval scholar al-Razi (Razes) carried out a trial to see the effects of blood-letting as a cure for meningitis.
• The greatest ever book on medicineThe most famous Muslim scholar of all time was Avicenna, a Persian of the 11th century. He wrote the Canon of Medicine, a multivolume book that was the standard medical text all over the world for over 600 years!
• CopernicusThis Polish astronomer of the 16th century is regarded as the greatest since the Greek Ptolemy and the man who discover that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the Universe but actually went around the Sun. There is now compelling evidence that he used, even copied work of earlier astronomers. In fact I found a geometric diagram plotting the Moon’s orbit in his great Revolutionibus that is identical to one belonging the 13th century Persian al-Tusi, even down to the letters used to mark the point on the circles. How much did he know of this body of Arabic astronomy?
• The mountain fort of the AssassinsThe name ‘Assassins’ comes from the Arabic Hashashin who were an outlaw group from a Muslim sect who hid in the mountains of northern Iran. I visited their only fort not conquered by the invading Mongols of the 13th century. It has only been excavated in the past two years and is hugely impressive. In it lived the Persian astronomer al-Tusi who convinced the Mongols to build him the world’s greatest observatory. It was there that astronomers paved the way for the revolution that was to come much later in Europe by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.