"In Cairo, a muezzin calls faithful Muslims to prayer." "It's the same call that sounds five times a day, every day, in cities across the world." "Nearly a quarter of the people on earth respond to it," "'God is most great' the muezzin calls." "'I testify there is no other god but God.'" "'I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God." "'Come and pray." "Come and flourish." "'God is most great." "'There is no god but God.'" "In the unfolding of history," "Islamic civilisation has been one of humatiy's grandest achievements." "A worldwide power founded simply on faith." "A spiritual revolution that would shape the nations of three continets and launch an empire." "For the West, much of the history of Islam has been obscured behind a veil of fear and misunderstanding." "Yet Islam's hidden history is deeply, and surprisingly, interwoven with Western civilisation." "It was Muslim scholars who reclaimed the ancient wisdom of Greeks." "While Europe languished in the Dark Ages." "It was they who sowed the seeds of the Renaissance, 600 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci." "From the way we heal the sick... to the numerals we use for counting... cultures across the globe have been shaped by Islamic civilisation." "But all this, began with the life of a single, ordinary man, and the profound message he proclaimed would change the world forever." "His name was Muhammad." "To Muslims, the life of Muhammad is a story revered." "In its mysteries as much as its certainties, there are beliefs held sacred." "Whatever we can tell about the Prophet, of course, is screened through the filter of what has been preserved over the centuries and what people have wanted to preserve." "It's very difficult to pull out, from all these different sources that are very adoring, the ordinary human being..." "We do know that Muhammad was born in or around 570 AD in the sun-blasted Arabian peninsula." "A land of savage scarcity whose Bedouin tribes were locked in a constant state of tribal war." "While still an infant," "Muhammad's parents gave him his first taste of life in the desert." "Muhammad was from a town, Mecca, but he was sent off to live with the Bedouin because the people even the town of Mecca felt that the Bedouin were the holders of the deeper cultural Arab values." "And the Bedouin view the towns people as having lost their really authentic roots in Arab culture and the poetry and animal husbandry and all the things that they do so well." "By the time Muhammad was six, both of his parents had died and he was taken under the protection of his uncle, chief of his clan." "Being an outsider gave him a singular perspective." "He'd been orphaned early and developed very early on a passionate sense of concern for those who are left out of society." "To be orphaned in a tribal society where clan and family relationships are your keys to everything... success, status, honour, dignity... is to face what it really feels like to be marginalised." "That obviously had a very deep impression on him as a young man." "In some ways, it was detrimental, of course, to grow up without parents." "But in other ways he was so adaptable." "He had many parents." "He had many fathers." "He had many mothers." "So it made him a child of everybody." "Muhammad's clan, like Arabs all across the Arabian peninsula, would share the stories that had been told and retold for generations." "Pre Islamic Arabian civilisation was largely an oral culture and there was tremendous respect and admiration for people who could express themselves orally, especially those who could recite poetry almost at the drop of a hat." "Some of the most important people in a tribe were the poets." "They sang of the glory of the tribe." "They told the story of the tribe." "To the Bedouin, the word had a mystical importance." "Poets linked the tribe to its ancestors and celebrated values older than memory." "Poetry was the sinew that bound the Bedouin together, celebrating their victories, lamenting their defeats." "The poems themselves, like the poems of Homer, both celebrate this great heroic ethos and yet intimate, in the deepest way, the tragedy that, um... this war... this ethos of constant tribal warfare brings to people." "Warfare and conflict were the grim realities of a dangerous time." "Muhammad's uncle taught him the skills he'd need to survive in a world where even a prophet would wield a bow and arrow." "In a wilderness punished by the elements and bereft of water, rivalry over a single well could provoke a blood feud for generations." "A real rivalry." "Real battles, and sometimes quite bloody." "So the allegiance of individuals was the family, immidiately, and, a larger extent, to the tribe." "Without the tribe's protection, no one could endure." "Scattered across the peninsula were countless factions, all embroiled in bitter struggles, each defending its precious grazing lands, trade routes and most importantly, its wells." "You have to understand that most of the lands are dry." "So, water is something that everyone always considers precious." "For those of us in climates that are more heavily watered it's difficult to understand the depth and the centrality of the symbol of water in societies that are desert and in which it only rains once or twice a year" "and in which a little water makes the difference between life and death." "Each clan had its own separate gods and totems." "To water and wind, fire and night." "They were kept in the caravan town of Mecca, in a shrine of wood, stone and cloth." "It was called the Kaaba, the Arabic word for 'cube'." "Pre Islamic Arabs worshipped a number of spirits." "They were generally nature-oriented spirits sometimes associated with natural features." "Like trees or rocks or springs." "And the Kaaba in Mecca was one of a number of these sanctuaries centred around a particular cluster of deities." "It was said the Hebrew patriarch Abraham himself built the Kaaba centuries before and that a sacred black stone it held within had fallen from the sky." "In these turbulent times, the Kaaba provided a rare place of peace." "Only here would the Bedouin submit to a temporary truce before returning to their conflicts of the open sands." "There was this one place in the middle, around the Kaaba, which was, from even pre Islamic times, a place of... a sacred enclosure where all people had to put down their arms." "This, of course, facilitated trading because it meant that you couldn't carry on your feuds, when you were doing your buying and selling" "The spiritual and economic importance of the Kaaba and Mecca are pretty hard to seperate as far as the pre-Islamic Arabs are concerned." "The Kaaba made Mecca a vibrant centre for trade." "Here were found Arabian incense, exotic perfumes and Indian spices," "Chinese silks and Egyptian linens." "But perhaps the greatest treasure to be found at Mecca was the rich mixture of cultures." "They were people who came through town who had all kinds of interesting experiences to relate of faraway places." "The local religion was mixed." "There were Christians, there were Jews." "There were also the Arabs of the desert who followed an animist type of religion." "Muhammad's world was a centre of trade, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean, linking the ageing empires of Byztantium and Persia to the great bazaars of India and China." "Muhammad became a merchant." "In fact, he had a great flair for trade." "At the age of 25, while leading a caravan northward to Syria, his talents caught the eye of the shipment's owner, a wealth widow named Khadijah." "She was so taken with Muhammad, she proposed marriage." "Ah, Khadijah." "Well, I think she was a mentor as well as a wife." "A very strong lady who had her own business and Muhammad was helping her out." "So, it was a wonderful partnership and I'm sure he learned a lot from her." "He had a tremendous amount of contact with merchants coming from different parts of the world, passing through the Arabian peninsula." "I think he was a very intelligent man, very open minded, and he was able to communicate with a great variety of people." "He must have had great charisma as well." "Muhammad had a way with people, and with resolving their disputes." "Once, when the Kaaba fell into disrepair, the clan chieftains quarrelled over who would have the honour of putting the sacred black stone back where it belonged." "Before violence could erupt, Muhammad proposed an equitable solution." "United in the effort, the four leaders shared the weight... and the honour." "In gratitude, they invited Muhammad himself to replace the secret stone." "He became known as Al Amin, 'The Trusted One'." "There are all kinds of indications that he was tremendously interested in religious questions." "This is obviously not something that an ordinary person probably was interested in in those days." "He talked to..." "sages, Arab sages." "He talked to Jewish and Christian sages who lived in the area." "He used to go up into the rock hills around Mecca and meditate, think about things." "And at some point he had this extraordinary vision which is spoken about very evocatively and allusively." "In a cave above Mecca," "Muhammad had an experience that would be the defining moment of his life." "An angel was said to appear before him in the form of a man, instructing him to recite in the name of God, the Almighty." "For Muhammad, it was an encounter as profound as it was deeply disturbing." "You get a sense of what it would be like to be a normal person in society... perhaps unusual in the sense of your intensity for things like social justice and finding out what the meaning of life is," "but not being endowed with anything that would seem miraculous by your friends." "And all of a sudden having this voice come to you and then come OUT of you as you speak it and recite it to other people." "And that is the beginning of the prophetic career of Muhammad." "The months to come would bring more revelations... powerful words of a lyrical quality, more beautiful than the most exquisite Arabic poetry." "Above all, Muhammad was to bear one message to his people, a simple yet radical proclamation." "That there is only one God." "The central tenet of Islam is the oneness, the indivisible unity of God." "Not something that is simply..." "that one pays lip service to but something that is absolutely the most important concept." "Divine unity is more than saying there's only one God and there are no other deities." "It's only thinking about one thing." "So, to be thinking about possessions, to be thinking about status, to be thinking about power, are all intellectual idols." "The implications were staggering." "One God meant one people." "No more tribal divisions." "To the poor and unprotected, the prospect was revolutionary." "Seems to me that one of the most important things in his early teaching that isn't often talked about is the strong social justice message that he delivered." "In Mecca at the time there was an increasing separation between the haves and the have nots." "He insisted that this was not to be and that we should share the wealth." "It was this social justice message that, i think, really got him a hearing among many of the folks." "So coming with Islam it was a new order, a new way of life, and it was a beautiful way of life because everybody was equal..." "black, white, men, women, children." "So it had that type of universal appeal which I think was the reason why Islam spread so rapidly." "Many were moved by Muhammad's message as he began to speak out in the community." "It had the suppleness and symbolic depth of the great pre-Islamic poems that had been created by this people and that had given these people in Arabia such an Extraordinary ear for verbal expression, where verbal expression was the commanding cultural force." "Some people called him a poet." "There's a Qur'anic sura basically saying..." "Muhammad is not a poet." "Poets speak through desire." "This is not the voice of desire, this is the voice of God." "Muhammad's following began to grow." "They called themselves 'Muslims', for those who surrender to God." "They set out to preserve the message Muhammad had brought." "This was the beginning of the Qur'an." "The Qur'an was revealed orally but very soon people realised it had to be written down in order to make sure it wasn't corrupted and the original message was maintained." "From a very early date, and it's very unclear when that date was because no early manuscripts of the Qur'an survive, people began copying it down." "The Qur'an is a revelation of spiritual teaching, of both ethical and social guidance." "It was revealed, and remains, in Arabic." "What's so extraordinary about the Qur'an is its naturalness, so that it can say the most powerful cosmic things with a sense of intimacy, so that power and tenderness come together constanly in the Qur'anic language." "With words alone, the Qur'an delivers its vision to the faithful." "Its imagery conjures a picture of the afterlife that resonates with all the power of traditional Bedouin poetry." "Imagine yourself in the desert... surrounded by dust, by the glare of the sun." "You wear cloaks to cover your body because the wind will just sear your skin right off your face." "And you walk into an oasis." "The temperature drops dramatically." "There's a quiet there." "The wind is no longer howling." "Everywhere you look you see green and colour." "The world of water and paradise are symbolically tied to one another." "And the Qur'an can conjure that up with just a few briefly chosen words." "Yet for all the imagery of paradise in the Qur'an, there was no easy description of God." "The mystery would remain." "It's very difficult to talk about God without reifying God, reifying to make God into a thing, or anthropomorphising God, to make God into a projection of our own human self." "That's why Muslims don't like sculpture, for example, traditionally, because they believe there's that danger." "The Qur'an avoids that by constantly shifting the pronouns so we can't really reify God and get an image, a physical image of God." "Rather than a physical image of God, or of Muhammad, it is the beauty of the Qur'an itself that is celebrated in Islam." "Islam developed in this context where pictures were not favoured." "The Qur'an as it was revealed was God's representation on earth." "And Muslims felt from a very early time that the only just representation of God's word was the Qur'an itself, not any picture of..." "God, certainly not, because you couldn't represent God, and certainly not a picture of Muhammad, because he wasn't divine." "At certain times and places people did make images of the Prophet Muhammad." "But these are not religious images, these are not images meant to be worshipped, they are not images of a saint or of God." "They're images of Muhammad as a historical figure." "He's sort of given honour by having a very bright blue background or a white cloud near him but he's not otherwise distinguished from the other characters in the story." "At other times people did represent the Prophet but always with a white cloth over his face, to hide his face." "So there were different approaches to doing this." "But in all of these, these are not devotional images." "You're not supposed to look at them and pray towards them." "You're to learn more about the history of your religion, with the emphasis on history, from them." "As Muhammad's community grew, so did the opposition." "People, of course, were sceptical and said "Look, if you're a prophet, where's your miracle?"" ""And the prophets in the Qur'an..." ""Moses had miracles, Jesus had miracles." ""Where's your miracle?"" "And the Qur'anic answer to that challenge is..." ""This is the miracle..." "this Qur'an.'" "But that wasn't miracle enough for the people who defined themselves by the gods of their ancestors and the totems of their tribe." "Their doubts increased." "The idea of life after death appalled them." "So, the Qur'an presents people as really being sceptical." ""You mean to tell me that after I die" ""and my body has gone back to the elements and I've been putrefied" ""that I'm going to be put back together again" ""and brought back to life?"" "That, of any of the messages in the Qur'an, that struck the people of Arabia as being the most hard to believe." "Muhammad also spoke of eternal damnation for the unjust." "He used the language of apocalyptic imagery, talking about the signs of the end of time... when the mountains crumble, when the skies are rolled up like scrolls, then you will know what responsibility you bear for your actions." "There are references to those who are unjust going to the fire." "To the non believers, the divine reckoning Muhammad invoked was an outrage..." "His dismantling of their heritage and customs, deeply unsettling." "It was a threat, in several ways... to their social order, to their age old traditions and an economic threat because of the importance of the pilgrimage shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca." "As Muhammad's following increased, the social fabric of the caravan city began to unravel." "Business suffered as pilgrims and traders, worried for their safety, left town." "The tribal leaders decided" "Muhammad and his message must be removed, permanently." "They didn't want him taking over and horning in on their control of the city." "They made things very difficult for him, perhaps even plotted his assassination." "They tried to keep him from the Kaaba, doing all they could to run him out of town." "They demanded Muhammad's uncle remove his clan's protection from the Prophet... which would clear the way for his murder without the threat of retribution." "But his uncle refused." "The battle lines were drawn." "Nothing short of tribal war would settle the conflict now." "Muhammad is clearly asked to do extraordinary things... to tell the Bedouin to give up many of their notions of multiple gods, to give up their attachment to their ancestors and their tribal warfare in the way they had." "Things that... could and did make him the object of scorn, persecution and, um... attack." "Muhammad's followers were forced from the marketplace and starved." "Those without clan protection were tortured and killed." "In 619 AD, Muhammad's wife Khadijah died... and his uncle as well." "Gone were his first great love and his only protector." "Here at last was the opportunity his enemies had been waiting for." "But in the lush oasis town of Yathrib, north of Mecca, a refuge opened to Muhammad and his people." "Clan rivalries had become deadly in the town and they desperately needed a peacemaker." "They had heard that Muhammad was a very trustworthy man." "They'd heard he had great arbitration skills, and they thought..." ""Let's get him here to help out." So they invited him." "Muhammad agreed to travel to Yathrib and settle their disputes in exchange for a safe refuge for his people." "For Muhammad's followers, leaving the place of their ancestors, their families and tribes was the ultimate test of devotion." "In doing so, they began a new community, a new tribe." "For the first time, they were bound together not by blood, but by faith." "In the course of a single caravan journey," "Islam marks its true beginnings." "Their journey is known as the Hijrah." "622 in the Christian calendar marks the Muslim Year 1." "Muhammad's goal among the people of Yathrib was the same as his larger mission... to bring unity and peace with his message..." "He was asked to be a Solomonic figure, to mediate tensions between tribes that seemed intractable." "As his work succeeded, the town would become known as the City of the Prophet..." "Medina." "Muhammad's great task in Medina was to try and bring together these various groups, to try and forge a community of believers in a way that would bring people together in a sort of harmony." "To the divided clans of Medina, Muhammad offered a vision of solidarity." "But even as he spread the word of Islam, he didn't challenge the beliefs of other faiths." "Islam sees itself in relationship, to the earlier revealed religions of Judaism and Christianity and treats them as people of the Book." "It believes that God had revealed himself, his word, to mankind many times... to Moses, to Jesus, for example, and... but each time people went astray." "Throughout the Qur'an we have a sense of the humanity of Muhammad, his humbleness as a person and the extraordinary challenge of the mission he was given by this divine revelation." "As the Muslim community grew in Medina, a life of simple devotion and ritual developed." "A freed Abyssinian slave, named Bilal, was the first to call believers to prayer at Muhammad's house." "Allahu akbar." "It was the first mosque." "The call to prayer has within it the first Islamic Pillar which is the affirmation of God's unity..." ""La ilaha illa Allah"... that beautiful phrase which many Muslims chant over and over in their mind, or vocally, to constantly remind themselves of the unity of the God." "And the unity of what we should focus on in our life." "Allahu akbar." "La ilah illa Allah..." "Praying together is a good thing." "It cements the idea of belonging to a movement, to a religion, to an organisation, to a community." "The result is something very, very powerful even to watch, even for a non believer or someone from another religion." "We carry out physical gestures of prayer, in worship, that unify our body and our mind and our soul, all at the same moment of bowing and touching our head to the ground toward that exact centre." "What could be a more powerful symbol of unity?" "It's said that, while he was in Medina, Muhammad received a revelation, instructing those in prayer to face in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca." "Though filled with pagan idols, it was still the shrine of Abraham, the first believer in the one true God." "But even as the Muslims were praying toward Mecca, their enemies there were rallying in force." "Their goal..." "to wipe out the Muslims." "Muhammad 's people began to gather arms." "Though the Muslims prepared as best they could, they were outnumbered and outmatched." "They mustered a force of only 313, mostly old men and boys, with few weapons... while the approaching Meccans were heavily armed and a thousand strong." "For years, Muhammad had tried to bring Islam to the people of Mecca peacefully." "Now it was time to fight." "Muslims faced their own tribes, brother fighting brother, son against father." "Yet they came armed with a powerful weapon... a passionate belief in their faith..." "Muhammad's troops fought with every confidence that God's will was guiding them." "They fought three very, very bloody battles." "At one point, the entire young Muslim community was on the edge of annihilation." "For three years, the Muslim army held out against staggering odds." "As word of the fighting spread, other Bedouin tribes saw God's hand in Muhammad's victories." "One by one, the peoples of the desert began to join in his struggle." "The Muslim army grew and tide began to turn." "The Muslim forces advanced to the outskirts of Mecca." "It was a furious siege that lasted for nearly a month." "Until, finally, the city fell to Muhammad." "In 630 AD, the terrified people of Mecca braced for the onslaught." "Muhammad's army was returning home, now 10,000 strong..." "The vanquished knew the terrible fate that awaited them." "According to the modes of tribal warfare, the Meccans could expect a big revenge." "The men are usually killed." "Women and children are sold into slavery." "There's little pity for the loser in a tribal war." "Of course, that's standard around the world." "But Muhammad had a surprise in store for the fallen city." "When Muhammad came into Mecca and not only did not carry out a bloody revenge but actually embraced the very Meccans who had fought him for three years and attempted to annihilate him, it was very shocking to the people in his milieu." "So, within the very founding of the religion one finds episodes of great generosity... often extraordinary acts of kindness and mercy." "But not all of Mecca escaped Muhammad's wrath." "Flush with victory, his troops marched straight to the Kaaba." "Seven times they circled the shrine, as those who had come to seek its protection appealed to their idols." "But it was not the pagan people Muhammad come to destroy." "It was their gods." "He raised his staff and the tribal gods of his ancestors smashed into dust." "When Muhammad entered Mecca and entered the shrine, and destroyed the idols in the shrine, this is of great cultural and symbolic importance in Islam." "By breaking the idols, he was breaking apart the tribal system in which each tribe really had its own independent deity." "This was schocking to the Bedouin." "This was saying, the gods of our fathers are being destroyed." "In some sense, you are saying that our fathers themselves were deluded." "How can you say this in a tradition in which relationships to one's father and tribe were primary?" "So, this act of iconoclasm, then, is seen as an act of prophetic violence that has just as much importance in Islamic tradition as Moses's breaking of the tablets when he saw the idolatry at Mt Sinai" "or Jesus's casting of the money sellers out of the Temple." "The Muslims turned to the north," "They continued west, into Egypt, and quickly across North Africa, fortifying the coastline of the Mediterranean." "Only the seas stopped them." "Its growth was so explosive from 622, Year 1 of the Islamic calendar." "Within 50 years, people whose fathers had been camel herders were now governing one of the major empires in world history." "Within 200 years it extended from Spain to China." "The Muslims absorbed the Sasanian Empire of Iran and two thirds of the Christian Byzantine Empire." "By now the empire was larger than Rome." "It stretched from Morocco in the west to the Indus River in the east, where the border of India is today." "How had it happened, that so small an army could conquer an area so large, so fast, so easily?" "Islam's success in expanding into the central Middle East then across North Africa was due in large part because people were fed up with previous regimes." "So the idea that Muslims were going across the world saying that "Convert or Die"" "is really not accurate, not at all." "They didn't have a heavy hand, they didn't rule with a heavy hand." "They allowed the conquered people to maintain their administrative structures." "They allowed the Christians and the Jews to maintain their religious law and to be governed by them." "And so, in many cases, conquered peoples did not feel the presence of the new regime very heavily." "Certainly for individuals who felt themselves exploited or downtrodden by an oppressive and even sometimes parasitic priesthood, the idea of Islam being a religion essentially free from clergy must have seemed very attractive." "It's the times that create the movement and sometimes the men." "The Roman Empire had collapsed." "The Byzantine Empire wasn't strong enough." "There was a need for a new vision, a new way of looking to life and i think what happened at that time," "Muhammad's mission filled the void that the societies wanted." "They really wanted some sort of solidarity in their lives." "The lessons of the Qur'an, so successful for the Muslims in Medina and Mecca, were playing out on a global scale." "As the conquest swept through Syria, the Muslims held their friday prayers in the church of St John the Baptist in Damascus... allowing its Christian congregation to continue their services on Sunday." "Side by side, the two faiths shared the same building, in peace." "As the Muslim community grew, they bought the old church from the Christian congregation and built a huge mosque on the site." "With Byzantine artisans, they decorated it with golden mosaics of an Islamic paradise." "The Great Mosque of Damascus would become a model for new mosques to come, all across the empire." "The Arabs transformed their conquered lands, maintaining, improving or expanding the infrastructure." "In Tunisia, building on Roman ruins, they devised an ingenious system of water purification, using gravity to separate fresh water from sediments." "Part of this system were these two enormous basins that they built outside the city walls." "The clean fresh water would flow over into the larger basin where it would then be distributed by pipes to the city." "This is, you know, hundreds of years before anyone in Europe ever thought of having running water." "All over you find schemes for bringing water from the mountains, where there was more water, to the plains, where there might be less water." "They resurrected elaborate irrigation systems, filling the old stone aqueducts with precious water." "Agriculture flourished as life-giving staples like wheat were introduced to the Mediterranean region." "In just 100 years," "Muhammad's vision had transformed the spiritual and political map of the world and his followers had established an empire larger than Rome." "But Muhammad never lived to see it." "In the 11th year of the Islamic calendar, 632 AD, only two years after the taking of Mecca," "Muhammad died." "Medina fell into despair." "For days, the city was consumed with sorrow and ceremony." "He's known to have said that he wanted to be buried very simply with no marker over his grave." "He didn't want people to worship his grave." "That would interfere with their worship of God." "God had spoken to them only through Muhammad." "Now that the Prophet had left them, perhaps God would as well." "Muhammad's death set up a crisis in the young Islamic community." "The question of succession was the first thing that really occupied people's concerns." "At this point there was a divergence of opinion as to how the community should go about choosing a new leader." "According to the Shi'ites, a faction, the Shi'a of Ali," "Muhammad had indeed designated Ali his son-in-law and cousin, as his successor." "The opinion that came to be the majority, or Sunni opinion held that Muhammad had not appointed a successor during his life but had said "After I am gone, choose one from among your peers, from among the elders."" "And from the house there came out a man who would be his successor, Abu Bakr." "And he addressed the people and said..." ""If you worship Muhammad, know that he is dead"" ""If you worship God, know that he lives forever. "" "Here was the secret to Islam's strength and profound influence... the unifying power of one God, merciful and compassionate, the power of one people, bound by a common faith." "Muhammad did not lead the conquest of create the empire to come" "The transforming power of his message did." "Out of that message would spring a font of knowledge that would transform humanity, as Islam continued to spread its reach far and wide." "Awaiting the Muslims would be a new age." "They would be destined for enlightenment, for new horizons, and a clash of great powers the like of which the world have never seen..." "During the 7th and 8th centuries AD, a powerful new faith was about to change the world... the faith of Islam." "Its followers launched a conquest not only by the sword but with the power of ideas." "Two hundred years after the death of Muhammad his message, and the new Arab empire, were transforming three continents." "Now comes a new empire, a political new configuration, driven by a religious, newly defined civilisation." "This new civilisation, expanding beyond its own dreams within a period of very short time." "Literally, the largest empire civilisation had ever known." "The Arabic word for conquest, futuh, literally means 'openings'." "Islam sowed the seeds of its faith to the four winds and a world of opportunities opened before it." "But the vast empire's spiritual core remained at its birthplace... the holy city of Mecca." "From every corner of the Muslim world the faithful embarked on the traditional journey to Mecca, a sacred pilgrimage known as the Hajj." "The pilgrimage became a central devotional and ritual feature in Islamic life." "In fact, since the life of Muhammad himself, the pilgrimage has symbolised, probably more than any other Islamic ritual activity, unity among all people and equality." "The Hajj set humanity in motion." "For the first time since the reign of Alexander the Great, cultures and caravans now flowed freely." "Borders closed for a thousand years opened..." "Both ideas and goods went back and forth over incredible distances." "Since every Muslim is enjoined once in his life to visit Mecca." "It means that there were caravans carrying goods and pilgrims and ideas and people." "And they all met together in Mecca once a year, then things would radiate back home." "So if an invention was discovered in Samarkand it could be, within the year, known in Cordoba." "Where pilgrims trod, traders soon followed." "Muhammad himself had been a man of commerce and now the spread of his message brought with it the spread of trade and the Islamic way of life." "Trade was incredibly important in the Islamic world simply because of its geographical position." "It was, and still is, between what we call the West, and what people always called the East." "So it was a natural land bridge connecting China to Europe." "In only two centuries, Islam had extended its reach from Spain all the way to the edge of India." "It took nearly a year to travel from one end of the Arab empire to the other." "At its heart was a fabled city of wealth." "It was called Baghdad." "The palaces of ancient Baghdad have been lost over the centuries but in its glory it rivalled ancient Athens or Rome." "It was a magnificent architectural achievement, the pride of Islam in a new age." "One visitor left this account." ""All the exquisite neighbourhoods covered with parks," ""gardens, villas and beautiful promenades" ""are filled with bazaars and finely built mosques and baths." ""They stretch for miles on both sides of the glittering river."" "But what made this the greatest city of its time was more than just what met the eye." "It was the company it kept." "Scholars made Baghdad the jewel of the world." "Certainly from the 8th century on," "Baghdad was the centre of learning in the Islamic world and all major innovations either came from Baghdad or quickly came to Baghdad" "Because the best people came to Baghdad, the best thinkers, the best philosophers, the best artists." "The empire's meteoric growth had left its new leaders overwhelmed." "They had staggering engineering and logistical problems to contend with." "Solving them would take the greatest minds of the day." "Under the new empire now, you're responsible for public hygiene, you're responsible for the marketplace, for the goods being sold in the marketplace." "All of this require some basic elementary science." "This new civilization having a need for science, really stems from the need to run that empire." "The best minds rose to the call." "The finest were welcomed at a centre of scholarship," "Baghdad's renowned House of Wisdom." "It was a magnet for scholars and intellectuals who came and worked in the academies." "There were public libraries associated with the palace and scholars came from all over the empire." "There were scholars from Iran, there were scholars from Byzantium." "Some were Christians, some were Muslims, some were Jews." "And all of these different..." "sort of threads of human knowledge" "So, the net effect of this is that you've got human individuals from radically different cultural traditions being thrown into the same crucible." "The challenge that greeted these scholars was daunting." "The great works of the ancients, had to be transformed into a wholly new body of knowledge." "Competition for jobs developed within a new intellectual elite." "And from there on, every single scientist is competing for that job." "They were competing among themselves almost just... in the same way that modern bureaucrats and academicians will fight among themselves." "Scholars were dispatched across the empire to locate as many ancient texts as possible... the first international scientific venture in history." "Unlike their Christian counterparts," "Muslim thinkers saw no insurmountable contradiction between their faith and the laws governing the natural world." "So they embraced Aristotle and Plato, writers the Christian church considered blasphemous." "So this is the time when we begin to see scientists, bureaucrats, what have you... going and seeking from whatever civilisation that had any sciences before, be it the Greek, the Indian, the Persian, and so on." "From the Hindus came mathematical concepts that guide us today." "It was the scholars of the House of Wisdom who developed the system of Arabic numerals, still in use." "It is they who translated and transformed the writings of the Greeks and made a gift of them to the modern Western world." "The Renaissance had its beginnings in Baghdad." "They managed to assimilate quite a lot of the rich legacy of the Hellenistic world, translate it into Arabic, initially, which was then made available to all other participants in the new Islamic civilisation." "Arabic emerges as the language of learning throughout the region." "This is a very significant development in human intellectual history." "Having amassed the knowledge, the Muslims began to challenge it." "This was perhaps their most important contribution." "The scientific process was born." "They wanted to know why a very intelligent Greek scientist whose texts they were just admiring and they were verifying it..." "Why would he make a mistake in the first place?" "So they began to dig." "Was it because he didn't have the right instruments?" "Or is it because he didn't have the right methodology to use the instruments for the verifications of observation?" "It is this spirit, you see, this spirit of questioning, the spirit of saying that we have to build science constantly on a systematic, consistent basis, where we make a physical proposition of how the universe ought to be run," "and the mathematical representation of that physical universe ought to match." "Now you begin to have what i call the birth of the new Islamic science." "Algebra and trigonometry, engineering and astronomy..." "Countless disciplines integral to our lives today trace their roots to Islamic scientists." "More surprising, perhaps, were their innovations in medicine." "At a time when Europeans were praying to the bones of their saints to cure their illnesses," "Muslim physicians developed an innovative theory... that disease was transmitted through tiny airborne organisms, the precursor to the study of germs." "They determined that sick patients should be quarantined and then treated." "This is the basis of the institution most fundamental to medicine today... the hospital." "Funded mainly through religious endownments," "Muslim hospitals had separate wards for patience suffering from different kinds of disease." "Even mental illness was treated." "Their studies of anatomy were so sophisticated that they remained in use by Muslim and European physicians for 600 years." "Muslim scientists were especially intrigued by light, lenses and the physiology of the human eye." "The father of optics was a muslim named Ibn al-Haytham." "His work with lenses eventually led to the invention of the modern camera." "He produced the first treatise that ventured to explain how the eye actually sees." "A thousand years before the West dared to take up the practice," "Muslim doctors were removing cataracts surgically, clearing them from the eye with a hollow needle." "But for all this knowledge to transform and illuminate an empire, it had to be copied and shared across a hundred different cities in the Islamic world." "For this, there was a new invention, one that is still fundamental to learning and knowledge today... paper." "Around the year 700 to 750, when Muslim armies reached Central Asia, they encountered paper for the first time." "And, very quickly, the Muslim bureaucracy started using paper." "You find that within 50 years it's in Syria." "Then a few years later it's in Egypt." "Then it's in North Africa." "Then it's in Sicily, then it's in Spain." "And that's where Europe learned to make paper." "They learned to make it from the Arabs." "We begin to have people with family names like Papermaker." "So, in other words, it was not only that paper was available." "It must have become a very, very widespread industry." "And hence the acquisition of books must have also become very easy." "With the wide use of books and paper, hundreds of scribes, some of whom were women, were kept busy transcribing the translations and new writings of the Baghdad scholars." "All of this knowledge that's being acquired from the Greeks and from the Indians and from Central Asians is all beingswritten down in books on paper." "And these books are being copied and re-copied and sent around." "We know, for example, that there was a street of booksellers with more than a hundred shops, each one with paper and books for sale." "And this is a time when, you know, in Europe, a monastery would be lucky if it had five or ten books." "While the monks of the West were hoarding their wisdom on scraps of expensive parchment, paper enabled Islamic civilisation to spread its newfound knowledge far and wide, creatingu single community, linking three continents." "So, the chief distinction, therefore, of Islamic civilisation, in addition to the fact that it made new leaps of originality," "New transformations in traditions of learning and everything else possible, is the fact that it enabled human beings to consider the possibility of thinking about the globe as a single unit... humanity." "In all the broad empire, there was one place the Christian world could experience the lifestyle" "Muslims now took for granted... southern Spain." "Here, on the European continent itself," "Islamic culture would begin to have an effect on the European civilisation around it." "A thousand years ago, the Spanish city of Cordoba was a centre of learning and culture that rivalled Baghdad." "Today, Cordoba's narrow lanes hearken to its medieval past." "During the Dark Ages, this was the most prosperous and sophisticated metropolis on the continent." "It had streetlights and paved roads, libraries, hospitals and palaces." "This was a city of light..." "a Muslim city." "We have descriptions of it by people coming and saying" ""All these flowers everywhere, open streets," ""this wonderful light comingtown..."" "Northern cities were dark." "Cordoba had running water." "People lived in big houses." "In contrast, in Paris, people lived in shacks by the side of the river." "The glory of medieval Cordoba is here, in what is now the great Roman Catholic cathedral in the middle of town." "But the Cordoba Cathedral of today began its life as a mosque... one of the grandest of the Islamic empire." "The Great Mosque in Cordoba was simply the biggest mosque in the biggest city in southern Europe." "When you climb the church tower which used to be a minaret, you look out over this expanse of roof." "Complete with flying buttresses, popping up out of the middle of this massive mosque." "Many, many people came to visit it, to view the wonders of the mosque, which had rib vaulting." "The kind of vaulting which is like this and which, 100 years later," "but not at all a coincidence, appears in the Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe, in Lincoln Cathedral in Chartes Cathedral in France." "Where does that come from?" "Obviously, influenced by the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the south of Spain." "For the occasional European Christian traveller," "Cordoba was the one opportunity the climpse the Islamic world" "What they saw, was shocking..." "Most of Europe at that time languished in poverty and squalor." "Cordoba was a pageant of prosperity and enlightment." "In the 10th century there was a Saxon nun with the unpronounceable name of Hrotswitha who called medieval Cordoba "the ornament of the world"." "She was very, very taken with the place." "and she was a Christian nun." "As Europeans made their way from the cold stone of their northern castles... into the glorious Muslim cities of Southern Spain, they couldn't help of being impressed." "In the green hills above Granada, was a palace of startling elegance." "A shining example of the richness and sophistication Islam brought to medieval Europe." "It's called the Alhamra." "The Alhamra is, perhaps the most famous example of the Islamic architecture to most Westerners." "It is the best remaining example of what a medieval Muslim palace would've look like." "How far Muhammad's followers had come from the life of desert nomads." "How distant they felt from the rest of the European continent they now shared." "Christian Europe, due north, was struggling on through the Dark Ages." "a tragedy in Jerusalem would put Muslims and European Christians on a collision course." "Jerusalem was ruled by an Egyptian caliph, an infamous man named al-Hakim." "But at the dawn of 11th century," "Clinically speaking, I suppose, today we'd regard him as a madman, as simply insane." "For 200 years, the Christian holy places in Jerusalem had been respected and protected by Muslim rulers." "In 1009, the Egyptian ruler al-Hakim broke with that tradition." "He ordered the holiest church in Christendom destroyed." "And, horror of horrors, he burnt down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem." "Nobody knows quite why he did it, and you can have your own theories about it, but the fact of the matter was that that sent shivers of terror and anxiety through Christendom." "In a way, of course, el-Hakim was the one exception and proved the rule for Christians that Christians had been speaking of for centuries, of Muslims as intolerant, mad, slavering heretics who simply could not be expected to abide by the rules of civilised human beings." "The fact that al-Hakim's succesor rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre... it was done by 1048 with Byzantine help... didn't cut any ice." "There was this perception now that things were not going well in the Holy Land." "In Europe anti-Muslim sentiment simmered." "By 1095 it reached the boiling point." "Pope Urban II spent most of that year travelling through France, imploring his feudal lords to unite in a campaign of bloodshed." "'Hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of your eastern brethren' the Pope demanded." "'Jerusalem is the navel of the world." "'She cries out to be liberated." "'Christ himself commands it.'" "So we've got a merging or a coming together of military service and religion, which served the purposes, if you like, of a pope who in 1095 made his famous call to crusade to rescue the endangered holy places in the East" "and in particular Jerussalem." "In 1097, Muslim shepherds in Syria caught their first glimpse of a sight that would soon strike terror throughout the Holy Land." "When the Crusaders struck, by sheer chance, the Arab empire was at its most vulnerable, broken into feuding kingdoms and petty dynasties." "They couldn't have chosen a better moment because the Muslim world was in a very fragmented state." "The great rulers of the time had died and into that power vacuum there came this most unexpected enemy, the Crusaders from Western Europe." "Who would have thought that a new enemy would come to the Islamic world from that unexpected quarter?" "It was completely unprecedented." "It was a real surprise." "The Muslims didn't really know who they were." "They thought they were just another lot of Byzantines who were coming, as usual to be a nuisance and fight on the borders." "They had no idea that there was this extraordinary surge of religious fervour and fanaticism coming from Western Europe and that the aim of this group was Jerusalem." "History is haunted by days of incomprehensible horror." "Few are darker than July 15th, 1099 when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem." "The massacre must have been terrible." "The fear... the fleeing of the population..." "It must have been horrendous." "From a letter to the Pope from the Crusaders..." ""If you want to know what was done to the enemies we found in the city; know this," ""Our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses."" "They saw the Holy city and they were in a state of exultation." "And perhaps that's why, when they flooded through the gates of the city, that they were fired up with fanaticism and zeal." "And that's why there was this terrible massacre in the name of Christendom." "It was a blot on the name of Christendom in the Muslim view and justifiably so." "Even Christians weren't spared." "At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, dozens of worshippers from Eastern sects were massacred." "To the Crusaders, they were nothing more than foreigners." "The Christian chronicles record the carnage." "'The Saracens who were still alive dragged the dead ones out 'and made huge piles of them." "Such a slaughter of pagans no one has ever seen or heard of." "The pyres they made were like pyramids." "They shocked the Muslim world when they came." "There are a number of extremely moving lamentations in poetry which date from that period." "And the Arab poets of the time talk about the feelings of anguish and terror which the Crusaders, or the Franks, as they're called in the Arab sources, caused the local people..." "the old women, the young girls..." "Those who are cloistered away in their houses are trembling with fear." "The whole imagery is that of... the rape of their land and the..." "terrible impurities caused by these barbarian infidels coming into their sacred space." "'We have mingled blood with flowing tears 'and there is no room left in us for pity." "'To shed tears is man's worst weapon 'when the swords stir up the embers of war," ""when blood has been split," ""when sweet girls must hide their lovely faces in their hands for shame."" "The First Crusade was over." "Of the 100,000 men who began the campaign most would eventually return to Europe, having had only a glimpse of Muslim life." "The job of occupying Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside fell to the 20,000 who remained..." "indefinitely." "To secure their occupation the intruders did here what they had done in Europe" "They built castles." "The Crusaders built the finest castles that the Near East has ever seen." "And the proof of that is that they're still there." "When everything else may have faded away, the Crusaders castles remain a living testimony to their presence and Crac des Chevaliers in Syria is THE Crusader castle of them all." "It's very, very big." "It's strong." "It's impenetrable." "It's a living example of the way that a number of the Crusader castles couldn't be taken by siege." "You can see for miles and miles from it and see the other castles that would have been in visual distance for communication by fire and smoke signals." "It's got all the accoutrements of a good medieval castle with battlements and turrets and places for pouring boiling oil and other liquids down onto the enemy." "But inside that castle, what was life really like?" "It wasn't merriment and festivity." "It was constant fear." "You had to be on the lookout in case someone was trying to mine the castle or to climb over the walls with scaling ladders." "The people outside, the population, the local peasantry... they were not friendly." "So you had to watch their movements all the time." "It was a terrifying place." "The Crusaders made treaties..." "and broke them." "They harassed the traders who passed by their castles." "As they raided caravans, the Crusaders learned of a luxurious lifestyle unheard of in Europe." "Materially, the Crusaders were just blown away by what they found in the Middle East." "And they took a lot back with them." "Inlaid metalwork, textiles, silks... things just never seen in such quantities before... the good life." "These things they brought back to Europe, some as souvenirs." "In fact, a whole industry developed in the Middle East." "Of providing souvenirs for the Crusaders to take back." "It is perhaps a Western bias to imagine the Crusaders were a decisive force in world events, devastating to the Islamic culture and trade." "The truth is, while the Knights of the Crusades were bunkeringndown in their castles," "Islam was spreading its influence and flourishing." "Muhammad's message rang out as clear and strong as it ever had." "Allahu akbar!" "Mosques were now on every horizon." "They welcomed traders." "They housed schools and hospitals." "Through Islamic architecture, literature and music a vibrant culture was emerging in celebration of a singular faith." "Faith had launched an empire." "Culture was now enlightening it." "But ultimately what united it was trade." "For the Muslims, trade, like science, brought innovation." "Business was expedited by a revolutionary concept called the sakk, a cheque that could be written in Spain and cashed in India." "Writing a cheque assumes that someone will cash it at the other end." "And that if you have money in one place someone will say "I have access to that somewhere else."" "So this imply that you have some kind of central bank or central loan organisation who's going to be good for the money." "So it frees up your ability to travel." "It frees up commerce because the money doesn't have to be moved from Samarkand back to Cordoba, and back the other way the next year." "So you can base it all on trust and faith." "And Muslims became some of the greatest merchants of the Middle Ages." "And the greatest craftsmen as well." "From the Persians, Muslim blacksmiths learned how to fold steel to give it strength and flexibility." "The swords made in Toledo and Damascus had no equal in the world." "But the economic backbone of Islam's expanding wealth was textiles." "The demand for the products of Muslim looms was enormous... for cashmere, cotton and silk." "Textiles were simply the gas and steel industry of medieval times." "Because you have to think of textiles not only as growing the plants but making all the dyes." "The dyes were particularly expensive and imported the farthest." "Then you need all the fixtures and mordants and equipment for looms, then you need to transport these textiles." "So, collectively, the industry of making and transporting textiles was the mainstay of the economy." "While Europeans settled for coarse woollen and linen garments," "Muslims wore brocaded fabrics of organdie, damask and taffeta, words that came into the English language from Arabic and Persian." "The fabrics produced in the Islamic world were among the finest ever produced." "And they were made of not only plain linen or cotton but also very, very fancy silks, cloth of gold, where silk thread is wrapped with gold, and with very, very complicated patterns." "These complex patterns were coveted by wealthy Europeans and the Church as well." "When the Christians needed a cloth worthy of wrapping the bones of their saints, the choice was obvious." "They looked to a Muslim loom." "But sometimes the fabrics were trimmed with decorative Arabic text from the Holy Qur'an." "And so the words of the Prophet sometimes appeared in shocking proximity to Christendom's holiest icons." "It is not unusual to find in Italian Renaissance paintings, for example, to find paintings of the Virgin wearing a robe of very fancy patterned cloth and precious silks embroidered with gold or woven with gold designs." "Sometimes they would say things with an Arabic inscription on it which says " There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet", in Arabic." "After almost 100 years of broken treaties and sporadic fighting," "The Muslims reached a tuning point in their struggles against the Crusaders." "It came in the person of one of Islam's most celebrated figures." "His name was Salah ad-Din." "But the West would remember him, and come to revere him, as Saladin." "There is certainly one thing we must recognise about Saladin and that is that he was successful where many others of his faith and his part of the world had not been." "He possessed one unusual feature." "In addition to his intelligence and his robust physical strength, he certainly seems to have been a great inspirer of his military followers." "In 1187, Saladin amassed an army of 12,000 mounted warriors and lured the Crusaders out of Jerusalem onto a plain between two hills called the Horns of Hattin." "On the evening of July 3rd, after a long march, the Crusaders camped on a barren hillside." "There was nothing but a waterless terrain." "And we're talking about July." "We're talking about the Middle East, about incredible heat and no water." "As dawn approached, Saladin's men set fire to the tall grass and a strong wind carried the flames into the Christian encampment." "And very soon they found themselves surrounded, as in the Muslim tactic, by their enemy, and panic set in." ""The flames bore down on them and the heat became intense"" "Saladin's secretary wrote." ""The people of the Trinity were consumed by the fire of flames," ""the fire of thirst and the fire of arrows."" "The army of the Crusaders was totally decimated." "And the victory at Hattin was a real turning point for Saladin." "It meant that he could then proceed to take Jerusalem later on that year." "Three months later, Saladin entered Jerusalem." "For the first time in almost a century, the call to prayer floated over the Holy City once again." "And yet, remarkably," "Saladin levelled no retaliation against Christians or their holy places." "In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre., mass was celebrated as usual." "Saladin also decreed that Christians who wished to could leaye the city with their property." "Those who chose to stay would be allowed to worship freely." "When his reputation reached Western Europe of the way he had behaved in Jerusalem over the conquest, he gradually became the most famous Muslim of all time." "Saladin's victory did not put an end to Western aspirations in the Near East." "Other crusades would follow, though, as with the first, they would hardly have an impact on the larger Islamic culture." "The Crusaders would eventually be driven from their citadels along the coast and return to Europe, their only lasting legacy a few abandoned castles." "But the returning Crusaders found themselves changed by their contact with Islamic culture." "The long term impact on European life would be profound." "They were just amazed by the material culture they found there." "The quality of the merchandise was far better than anything at home and they brought it home with them." "They came back, for example, with a taste for highly spiced food." "They imported pepper and cinnamon and other oriental spices because their tastebuds had been whetted by a different cuisine." "We know that they found out the delights of using soap when they were in the Middle East and it would appear that that caught on back in Europe." "After the Crusades, many Europeans were far more open to the ideas of what was going on to the East and in other parts of the world." "They simply couldn't be as insular as before." "Lots of people were open to "What's out there?" "Let's explore this."" "New intellectual thoughts..." ""Let's see what these people are writing."" "This is when people start to learn Arabic, slowly, in the West." "As the barrier of the language dissolved, ideas born in the great Muslim cities began to filter into Europe., ideas that would forever change Western thought." "The great Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas used the writings of the Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rüsd)" "To justify the clear separation of faith and reason, a Muslim ideal that formed the basis of all scientific inquiry and led to the European Renaissance." "Averroes (Ibn Rüsd) himself appears in Raphael's classic Renaissance painting of great Western thinkers." "Here, alongside Plato and Aristotle, stands a vivid reminder of the debt the world owes Islam." "The scope of Islamic civilisation has now reached levels which certainly were not accomplished by any other known civilisation of the world." "It actually unified parts of our globe in ways that had not been witnessed before." "But this golden age of Islam was not to last." "After shrugging off the Crusades and bringing the precious gift of knowledge to Europe, the great cities of the Islamic empire would be brought to ruin by a force more terrible than anything the Europeans could muster." "Their libraries destroyed the wealth plundered, the empty cities stood mute in the aftermath of a devastation that desended upon them not from the West, but from the East..." "It's known as the Mongol Catastrophe." "The Mongols were Turko-Mongolian nomads from the steppes of Central Asia." "In the 13th century, they rampaged across much of Eurasia between the Ukraine and China." "It wasn't long before they entered Islamic Persia." "To the cultured, urban Muslims, these guys were a bunch of savages." "When you entered the Mongol army, you came with three horses and you lived off the horses." "First you drank their blood, then when you'd moved far enough away you killed them, you slaughtered them and ate their meat." "And that's why they could go so far and survive so long." "Terror was the Mongols' principal tactic." "One of the local Iranian leaders foolishly decides to kill off the emissary that the Mongols have sent." "In doing that, he evokes the anger of the Mongols, who want to use him as an example." "They use this retaliatory technique often, of killing off entire towns, wiping them out as examples." "So they build these fantastic towers of skulls, piling up all the dead bodies as an example." "And then all the other towns around immediately give way." "City after city fell before them." "It was only a matter of time before they reached the centre of Islamic power." "On February the 10th, 1258 the Mongols took Baghdad." "According to the Arab chroniclers, the Mongols put Baghdad to the torch and killed 10,000 inhabitants." "Mosques and libraries, the collected knowledge of centuries, were all set ablaze." "Within less than 50 years, the Mongols seized the heart of the Islamic empire from the Arabs." "Islamic civilisation seemed poised for destruction..." "lost to posterity." "But then something remarkable happened" "While the consensus of opinion is that Mongols were a devastating force," "I personally feel that they also had a very positive effect on Western Asia and the world of Islam." "They opened the world tremendously." "Historically, the most significant thing about the Mongols for us would be that they became Muslims." "Most in the end... converted to Islam and then became, after being these tremendously destructive forces some of the greatest patrons of the arts and letters in all of Islamic history." "The conversion, and its lasting effect, was extraordinary." "Within a decade, the Mongols had gone from building towers of human heads to building mosques glorifying God." "It is not surprising to me that the land conquered the conquerors." "The Mongols themselves became Muslims, or Islamic leaders, par excellence." "The Mongols transformed Islam." "Now, Islamic power could be held by anyone, not just the Arabs who had created it." "The Mongols threw open the door for the great gunpowder empire to follow..." "The empire of the OTTOMAN TURKS." "Islam was now set on a new course of expansion to both the east and the west... marching to, the beat of Turkish drums." "The Ottoman Turks began as a nomadic people from the steppe beyond the Aral Sea." "For centuries they had wandered present day Turkey, looking fof new pasture lands." "Muslim Sultans had enlisted them as mercenaries to fight off the Mongol Hordes" "But in the upheaval following the Mongol invasion, the Turks began to stake out their own territorial claims." "From their ranks emerged a warlord of legendary ambition." "His name was Osman Bey." "It's said that Osman had a miraculous dream of a magical tree whose many branches foretold his siring a powerful lineage." "One wonders how much of it is truth, how much of it is legend..." "It makes a lovely story." "And miracles are almost more easy to digest than reality" "I don't think he realised that he was setting up such a fantastic dynasty a dynasty that was to rule the crucial link between three continents." "The followers of Osman became known as Ottomans." "They considered themselves warriors for the faith, or Ghazis." "Whose destiny was to bring Islam to the world..." "Ghazis were somewhat like freelancers who moved the empire forward either for ideology, theology, or for the sake of pure conquest." "They were probably very brave, never thought about themselves or any harm that could come to the group by going into dangerous conditions." "But it made the Ottoman Empire almost fearless going into regions that nobody had been there before." "For the early Ottomans, the direction of expansion would always be to the west." "For good reason" "They could not expand to the east or to the south because those were controlled by their brothers the Turkoman emirs, the Muslims." "And a Muslim should not be fighting against a Muslim, so they said at the time." "So the only place you could expand was towards the Christian territories, westward." "Osman's warriors moved to the north and west across the Anatolian pleateu into, territory controlled by the traditional Christian power in the area, the ageing Byzantine Empire." "By Osman's time, the 1000-year-old Byzantine Empire was reaching the end of its age, dwindling to an isolated stronghold in Eurasia." "The Crusaders had already wreaked havoc across the region on their way to Jerusalem, sacking the capital city and helping to reduce the once proud Byzantine Empire to a few small warring states." "The Ottomans quickly overrun the splintered the Byzantine factions." "Uniting north-westem Anatolia into, a single domain." "In 1326, the Ottomans took the powerful Byzantine city of Bursa... a victory that would change the character of the Ottoman Turks forever." "The most important part of Bursa was that it enabled Osman and his descendants to establish a seat of the government." "The restless nomads of the steppe would settle down to build an empire." "What we are witnessing is this huge demographic event." "The movement of a whole civilisation from a nomadic way of life to a settled way of life." "Now, when the Ottomans took Bursa and set it up as their capital, they were very concerned to establish themselves as the rightful standard bearers of Muslim civilisation." "Civilisation meant organisation and the Ottomans set out to manage the vast regions they now controlled." "Leaving the Byzantine clerks in place, they began to organise the new empire." "First and foremost, taxation and record keeping." "The word 'bureaucracy' has since lost its noble connotations." "Yet this was a great innovation, an ambitious as any triumph in battle." "The Ottomans are known for including and synthesising the cultural elements through the lands that they passed." "They are known for creating structures by which the people who lived there before." "Could carry on their lives and beliefs in the way that they chose." "In fact the Ottomans had fever conflicts with their Christian subjects than those of their own faith..." "Muslim adversaries intent on challenging Ottoman rule." "One of the bureaucratic, or let us say, management problems facing the Ottomans was that there were still... rival Muslim, sort of proto kingdoms around them." "They were conquered by the Ottomans but they had old grudges to bear." "And they had certain claims to dynastic glory of their own." "And they were constatly worried about these old Muslim families rising up and creating a rebellion." "And so the story goes that they felt it would be imprudent to have the army made up of these sorts of people." "And so they wanted to recruit children who were not connected with any rival Muslim family." "And so they went into the Balkans and they recruited primarily Christian children." "This practise was called 'devshirme'." "The young boys were technically slaves of the Sultan" "But they weren't treated like slaves" "First, they were borught into the Muslim faith told rituals of washing and praying and the Arabic and Ottoman languages." "This serve the political as well as a religious purpose" "Through the 'devshirme' system," "The Ottomans could create a cast without any conflicting loyalties to tribe or family." "These children had such great future." "That a lot of the times" "Turks or even Muslims pretended that their children were Christian borned and would registered them to the 'Devshirme' officials..." "These children were then given the best possible education available in the world, perhaps, at the time." "And they were than able to move into the highest positions of power in the empire." "Those who were brainy went to the palace schools and graduated into different levels of viziers and governors." "They even became Grand Viziers." "Those who were brawny went to the Janissary corps." "The Janissaries were the Sultan's elite infantry." "It was an army that would set the standard for centuries to come." "They were the strongest, trained as military machines, no fear of dying, totally fearless." "And their only love was to serve the Sultan." "For the first time an army wore uniforms and went into battle to the accompliment of military band." "The Janissaries were the most fear troops in the western world" "A force that was were to this new Islamic empire, and its restless visions of conquest..." "By the middle of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire spread from present-day Turkey, known as Anatolia, deep into the Balkans." "With one critical exception." "It must have galled the Ottoman sultan that with his domains now stretching all the way into Asia and far, far into Europe in the West, there remained, right in the centre of his domains, the greatest prize of all," "the capital city of Constantinople, the most powerful, the richest, most magnetic city in the entire world, still in the hands of the dying but not yet dead Byzantine Empire." "To the Ottomans," "Constantinople's strategic and economic importance was considerable." "Its symbolic significance was even greater." "It was The City." "There was no other city." "If you were going to rule that area, obviously you'd rule it from that city." "It's said that the goal of laying claim to Constantinople was decreed by Muhammad himself." "Every Ottoman ruler since Osman had wanted to, seize the city but it had always remained firmly in Christian hands." "Than a Sultan came to power whose dreams of conquest would not be denied." "History would honour him as Mehmet the Conqueror." "When he assumed the sultanate, he was only 12 years old but he was already well versed in Ottoman politics." "To remove any threat of competition for power, he had his half-brother strangled." "The empire always meant everything, more so than the family." "In order to stop the empire from splitting, as had happened to other Turkish dynasties, ruling the Islamic world, when a young man became sultan upon the death of his father, all the other brothers had to be eliminated." "This prevented segmentation of the empire." "It may have been cruel, but it worked for the Ottomans." "By the middle of the 15th century, the city was a shadow of its former self." "The population had plummeted from 400,000 to a mere 50,000." "But a besieging army would still be at a tremendous disadvantage." "Constantinople was surrounded on three sides by water, and massively fortified." "It was encircled by a triple ring of walls neady 100 feet high and 30 feet thick." "And they had already stood for a thousand years." "But Mehmet had an answer for these walls." "Part of the military superiority of the Ottomans came from their sophisticated and diverse use of the possibilities of gunpowder." "The siege of Constantinople in 1453 under Mehmet the Conqueror saw the first dramatic application of this in the form of huge cannons that had not been seen before and which Mehmet had specially commissioned for the occasion." "Earlier cannons had been assembled with strips of forged metal bound with hoops." "The fired stone projectiles with little more power than a catapult." "A new breed of cannons could be cast of solid bronze and packed with enough gunpowder to propel metal cannonballs with staggering force." "But Mehmet was not staking his hopes on cannon alone." "The mile wide channel of the Bosphorus Strait was all that connected the city to the Black Sea." "If he could cut it off, Constantinople would be at his mercy." "Mehmet needed to construct a strategically positioned fortress to close the strait." "He built it, right in the shadow of the great city walls." "It took less than four months." "To build a massive seven towered citadel called Rumeli Hisar." "Mehmet himself is said to have carried stones during its construction." "No sooner was it completed than he tightened his noose round the neck of the Bosphorus." "The first ship to defy his orders to stop was sunk, its crew decapitated and its captain impaled on the castle walls." "To stop Mehmet's ships from approaching, the Byzantines strung a massive chain across the strait." "On April 22nd, 1453 the besieged city watched in horror." "As Mehmet's troops hoisted 70 of his ships ashore, sliding them over land on greased planks, passed the barrier chain." "More than 100,000 Ottoman soldiers now stood before the walls of Constantinople." "Braced for the greatest bombardment the history of warfare had ever known." "Under relentless fire, the city's 7000 Christian defenders held out for nearly a month." "In desperation, the Byzantines who occupied the city appealed to, their fellow Christians across the continent for help." "But of course, 15th-century Europe was completely incapable of mounting any kind of concerted opposition to the rising Turkish threat in the east." "At that time, the kings of Europe had military and political problems of their own." "Constantinople would have to, fend for itself." "Shortly before dawn on 29th, 1453 the Turkish army breached the walls of the city." "Within hours, Constantinople was in the hands of the Ottomans." "Mehmet rode into the city and went straight to its most celebrated prize, the magnificent church of Hagia Sophia." "Built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, its name meant the Church of Holy Wisdom." "It was the largest enclosed space in the world." "Surely other groups of Muslims and the Ottomans themselves had come across many, many churches..." "they had seen churches before." "But they had never seen anything... nobody had ever seen anything like Hagia Sophia." "The Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, as it's called in Turkish, was one of the marvels of architecture, marvels of the world." "It had the largest and highest dome in history and it was beautifully embellished with gold, mosaics... and the space is incredible." "For Mehmet, it was a great booty." "Inside the church, a Turkish voice rose, proclaiming in Arabic the First Pillar of Islam..." ""There is no god but God." "Muhammad is his messenger."" "The single greatest church in Christendom was now a mosque." "The Hagia Sophia became the inspiration for all Ottoman domed mosques to come." "But none would evemmatch its size and scope." "And it belonged to Mehmet the Conqueror." "News of his triumph sent shock waves around the world." "For Europeans, it was a concomitant diaster." "Constantinople was, after all, the new Rome." "It was Constantine's capital city, it was the symbol of Christian dominance in the East." "The Ottoman rulers had long stacked up titles for themselves..." "Khan, which is Turkish for 'emperor'..." "Shahinshah, Persian for 'king of kings'... and Sultan, the Arabic word for 'ruler'." "But now, with all the former Byzantine Empire under their command," "Mehmet and his successors claimed yet another title..." "Holy Roman Emperor." "The Ottomans had reached the gates of the West and were poised to push on towards what they now claimed as their ultimate destiny... the conquest of Europe." "That quest would fall to the most legendary sultan of all." "He was born at the beginning of the 10th century by the Muslim calendar and he was the tenth sultan descended from Osman." "He was a child of destiny, whose greatness was expected." "In the parlance of the day he was the Sahip Karan, the 'universal ruler', the master of an auspicious conjunction whose coming has been foretold whose identity is confirmed astrologically." "His name was Süleyman, after Solomon, the wise king of the Old Testament." "The Ottoman Empire would reach its apex under Süleyman's reign." "Süleyman was extremely well educated." "He was trained to the sultanate from the day he was born." "As a young prince, he formed a relationship that would have a tremendous impact on his life, and on the empire as well." "When he was still a crown prince, he also developed a great friendship with a convert, a Greek convert who took the name Ibrahim." "The two were very close in age and apparently very close in other ways... personally, intellectually, educated together to a certain extent." "And, as was common practice, when Süleyman acceded to the throne of the death of his father, he took his faithful Ibrahim with him to Istanbul." "Süleyman was 26 when he took the throne, determined to make his mark on the world... as soon as his ministers would let him." "The way to prove his mettle was on the battlefield." "Every new sultan was expected to begin his reign by expanding the empire." "Ottomans now controlled Kurdistan, Egypt and the holiest cities of Islam," "Mecca and Medina." "Süleyman set his sights on Belgrade, in Hungary." "The stepping stone to Europe." "He was the head of the Ottoman dynasty and he had certain duties to perform." "One was conquest." "And the first task Süleyman took upon himself, a year after he ascended the Ottoman throne, was to head towards Belgrade and capture it." "Belgrade was very important strategically because it was from there the army could move further on west." "A year later, he turned his ambitions on the island of Rhodes." "The tiny island was a troublesome outpost of Christianity in an otherwise Ottoman sea." "It was also a haven for pirates, preying on Muslim trade ships." "The 50,000 defenders of Rhodes manned one of the strongest forts in the world." "Süleyman decided on a tactic other than relying on gunfire from his huge cannons..." "A new tactic, seldom used until that time." "The Ottomans are the first major force to actually develop new ways of harnessing gunpowder to the cause of military expansion in creative ways." "Ottoman sappers dug out a series of 50 tunnels near the base of the fort so they could mine its foundations." "Performing this dangerous work were expendable Christian conscripts from the Balkans." "The resulting explosion signalled a furious 6-hour Ottoman assault." "But the Turks were beaten back." "Then, after 145 days of siege," "The exhausted Christian defenders finally negotiated a truce." "The Ottomans had won." "Victory did more than deliver Rhodes to the empire." "Süleyman was now a sultan to be taken seriously." "His march of conquest had begun." "Europe grew to fear the name of Süleyman." "But within his own borders, he had another reputation." "Islamic history remembers him as Kanuni, the Law Giver." "Ottomans were really... bureaucrats in the full sense of the word." "They kept every single record and in order to control the different peoples who participated in the world of the Ottomans, they had to have very carefully sorted out legal systems." "Under Süleyman, a single legal system was defined for the sprawling empire." "His laws would later become the basis of constitutions for several other nations." "Süleyman was the supreme monarch of the area." "He was the centre of the world." "He inaugurated a classical age in Ottoman architecture, commissioning some of the most spectacular buildings the world has ever seen." "Süleyman was in a unique position of wealth and of consolidation and he focused his attention on developing monumental architecture to commemorate his great dynasty and himself." "Great religious architecture can really give people a sense of what is at the heart of the faith." "Grandeur and majesty are what come to mind when Muslims think about God." "A building that is grand and majestic can immediately remind people of the glory of God." "Süleyman's chief architect, Sinan was a man whose vision perfectly complemeted the empire builder." "Sinan, perfected the signature structure of Islam... the domed mosque." "His career spanned half a century and produced well over 300 buildings... including the refurbishment of one of the most important monuments in Islam... the Dome of the Rock in Jarussalem." "For the Sultan, of course he built his masterpiece, the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istabul." "It is truly befitting Sinan who's called the great master..." "These buildings were horrendously expensive, huge things that took, many many years to build and a great deal of architectural talent and engineering skill and engineering experience." "When they built a mosque like the Süleymaniye, they were doing it to say, "Yeah, I've got the power and money."" ""I am the Sultan, I'm the King of kings." "But there was also tremendous spiritual value in these things." "The symbolism is not only that of empire, but of faith." "In the spirit of Muhammad's teaching, the Great Mosque was a centre of social services, complete with a hospital, school and library." "At its inauguration, it's said Süleyman gazed at it with awe and exclaimed" ""O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!"" "No less impressive was Süleyman's palace." "Topkapi was the both the seat of government and his private dwelling." "Süleyman was also a great patron of the arts." "And since the empire was very rich, the best artisans were there." "So everything started flourishing." "The architecture or the arts of his period show the first golden age of the Ottoman world." "Everything that came out of his palace was exquisite." "Süleyman himself was a goldsmith." "Ottomans believed that every sultan had to have a tangible trade." "Being a sultan was not considered a practical or tangible trade." "And he was a very demanding patron, insisted on checking the work, even commissioned a few things." "And I think each artisan group, or each corps, working for the palace tried to outdo one another to please the Sultan" "Because to please him had wonderful rewards." "The Ottomans, of course, exercised quite a lot of influence on the European imagination and the royal and political, if you will, ceremony and pomp of the Ottomans was such that it would have humbled any citizen of the known world then." "This was arguably one of THE greatest world empires and European observers could not walk away without feeling of respect for the sheer power of the Ottomans." "In public, Süleyman required that all those around him remained completely silent, while he made his wishes known with the slightest nod or gesture." "It must have been a tremendously impressive sight to see the courtyard of the palace filled with some 6000 or 7000 Janissaries and other functionaries, no one saying a word." "What was going on here was the creation of sovereignty." "So mysterious and yet so far reaching as to be seen as nearly divine." "As Süleyman's power grew, his life-long friend Ibrahim rose in the court structure." "And Ibrahim Pasha who became a pasha later on, became his devoted Grand Vizier." "In fact, Ibrahim married his sister." "So they were not only good friends they were also related." "Ibrahim campaigned with his own army, growing in influence and ambition, till his power was second only to Süleyman's." "But for power and ambition, the secret world of the Sultan's harem had no equal." "Contrary to the Western stereotype, it was not the Sultan's playpen but lay at the centre of dynastic power." "The harem was the private quarters of the Sultan." "We tend to think of the Harem as where the women live." "But what it means is the place where you're not on display." "Home is what it means" "Islam allowed the Sultan four wives and many concubines." "It was a system designed to produce heirs... is what it was." "When you look into the actual details of how these things were carried out," "It was hardly anything terribly erotic." "I mean, the Sultan did not have much choice in his selection of female companions." "The Sultan was not in a position to look around and say "I want her"" "because his mother would have a lot to say about it." "With his first wife, Süleyman had a son and heir, Mustafa." "But while he was in his mid 30s, the Sultan fell deeply in love with a Slavic slave girl named Hürrem." "In the West, we know her by a different name..." "Roxelana." "Roxelana would bear him a rival heir and become Süleyman's most trusted confidante." "The Sultan was supposed to be protected from any undue influences." "He was supposed to be protected from any rivals." "And in a way this creates a vacuum around his person into which the harem life can enter." "And so the fact that he was so protected works in a funny way to expose him to the influence of his female companions, with whom he spend so much time." "And there were tremendously intelligent and ambitious women around him," "Roxelana being the most famous of all." "Süleyman is a complex character... a man that we know from his own life was capable of the emotions both toward his male friends and especially toward his... the great love of his life, his wife Hürrem Sultan," "and toward his family as well." "He had a number of extremely talented sons on whom he lavished much affection." "Süleyman groomed his firstborn son Mustafa for power." "In the Ottoman tradition the young prince entered the military and quickly won recognition as a talented general." "Mustafa was clearly the heir apparent." "For Süleyman, the future of his empire seemed limitless." ""I am GOD's SLAVE and SULTAN of this WORLD"" "Süleyman would carve on a conquered fortress." ""I am Süleyman" ""in whose name the Fridal sermon is read in Mecca and Medina." ""In Baghdad, I am the Shah." ""In the Byzantine realms, I am the Caesar" ""and in Egypt, the Sultan."" "He, of course, at the height of his powers, clearly saw himself as dwarfing all his rivals." "Perhaps rightly so." "One of Süleyman's greatest rivals was to the east, the empire of the Persian Safavids." "This was a Muslim enemy, whose rival creed made them fierce antagonists of the Ottomans for centuries." "The Safavids were also Turkic in their ethnic origins and indeed spoke Turkish as a language of daily life." "But they were moving into the Muslim world, unlike the Ottomans who were moving into the West." "So, for the Ottoman Empire, they formed sort of the boundaries, the easternmost boundaries of the Ottoman realm." "The Safavid dynasty were Shi'ite Muslims, bitter rivals to the Sunni Ottomans." "According to the Shi'ites, a leader had to be designated by his predecessor and had to be of the family of Muhammad." "According to the Sunni view, it was not designation that was necessary and a person could be a leader of the community without being a direct descendant of Muhammed." "This challenge to legitimacy is the basis of the Shi'ite-Sunni split, a bitter division that still separates the Muslim world to this day." "And I would say the Ottomans never really thought of themselves so much as Sunni until the Safavids came forth as this rival Shi'i." "So, the Safavids developed a rival ideology to the Ottomans, which then became an occasion for war over, of course, what wars are usually fought over." "Wars are fought over land, wealth, territory, prestige..." "And the Safavids waged a war of ideology in eastern Anatolia, which was always for the Ottomans the most worrisome part." "The terrain is difficult to conquer, difficult to control." "The Safavid military was formidable but they were cultural rivals to the Ottomans as well." "They were great patrons of the arts." "I think we know them more for their artistic patronage than of their great conquests and laws and systems and administration." "And when you look at Isfahan, it is the most beautiful city in the world, and that is the Safavid city, the Safavid capital." "But it doesn't give you the same sense of power that the Ottoman Empire had or the Ottoman capital had." "It's a different sense of power." "It's more eloquent, perhaps, more precious in its decoration and its ceremonial spaces." "It's a totally different aspect of Islam." "In the soaring palaces of the Safavid shahs, murderous intrigues against Süleyman and his dynasty were hatched that would reach into his very household." "But Süleyman's eyes were on the West, where a fragmented and vulnerable Europe awaited his conquest." "The Ottoman Empire encompassed everything from Egypt to Kurdistan and he now had Hungary as well." "But he had ambitions of going beyond that and actually bringing the larger portions of the world known to him, if not all of it, under his control." "Süleyman's next step would be Vienna." "Its conquest would drive a dagger into the heart of the European Habsburg Empire and open the way to the West." "But as the heavily armed Ottomans set out for Vienna, the weather turned against them." "The heavy cannon that had swept the Ottomans to victory after victory bogged down in the mud." "Süleyman had to move on without them." "With only light artillery, the Ottomans relentlessly shelled the city" "But the smallest breach was ferociously defended." "After a lengthy siege, with winter fast approaching," "Süleyman withdrew his forces." "He was not concerned." "He was sure he would return soon enough." "He never did." "Süleyman's failure to take Vienna was pivotal for Europe." "It was the first major defeat after a long time." "The Europeans had been losing and losing and losing and this was the dawn of a new day for Europe." "But Süleyman had little to fair from Europe." "Rival Muslim Safavids, and his own family, would bring the cruellest of sorrows to the Sultan." "And ultimately to his empire as well." "Süleyman in some ways serves as a sort of epitome of the 16th-century idea of the wise and just ruler who was at the same time a very tragic figure." "In the power laden world of the Sultan's household, the intrigues never ceased." "The Topkapi Palace, as it was originally conceived, had no quarters for the ladies." "The women lived in what was called the Old Palace." "But Hürrem always complained about her husband, as most wives would, spending too many days and months campaigning outside the capital." "She kept saying she feels very lonely and the children miss him." "Well, surprisingly, there was a fire in the Old Palace, fire in Hürrem's quarters." "So she had to be moved to the Topkapi Palace, temporarily, while her old quarters were being renovated." "Well, she moved in and never moved out." "Now, Hürrem was at the centre of power, promoting her own son as heir apparent and immersing herself in a web of deadly gossip and suspicion." "She was incredibly devoted to her husband." "And any threat to Süleyman was a threat to her and she had to get rid of it." "The first threat came from Ibrahim Pasha who assumed titles that were only given to sultans." "So Hürrem knew something was going to happen eventually and, to protect the empire and the dynasty, Ibrahim Pasha had to go." "On March 15th, 1536," "Süleyman and Ibrahim Pasha dined together, as was their custom." "In the morning, Ibrahim's body was found, strangled." "But Süleyman's desolation and loss had only begun." "A few years after Ibrahim's death," "Hürrem claimed to have uncovered a plot to overthrow Süleyman, devised, with Safavid help, by his beloved firstborn son and heir, Mustafa." "This is a continuous problem in Ottoman history, sons trying to eventually replace their father." "This happens in monarchies." "Succession could become a problem, and it was an acute problem, and Süleyman had his share of it." "And perhaps did not always play his hands right." "Without hesitation, Süleyman ordered Mustafa's execution... than sat by the young man's body for days, refusing to allow anyone to touch him." "The best hope for the empire's future was dead." "When Hürrem herself died the following year," "Süleyman fell deeper into despair, finding solace in his poetry." "Most of the poetry, I think, was written after he lost his wife, since he talks about the loneliness of being in office, that he has nobody left any more and he's dying to join her." ""Even if your reign on the imperial throne seems everlasting," ""don't be taken in." ""One day, a hostile wind will blow and bring to your land of beauty heaven's misfortune and deepest suffering."" "In all his loneliness, there was only one refuge for the Sultan whose power, like his sorrow seemed limitless." "He returned to the field of battle, to the work of conquest." "He personally led thirteen campaigns." "The last one was at Zigetvar, which is in Hungary now." "I think he knew that this was going to be his last campaign." "He personally led it, knowing that he would not come back alive." "In 1561, the man who had ruled the empire longer than any other died in his grand war pavilion surrounded by his generals." "He was 67." "No Ottoman sultan would ever achieve his greatness again." "The nexus of world power would move from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and the New World, slowly leaving the Ottomans behind." "In Istanbul today, the Sufi dervishes still turn with the same prayerful pirouettes they danced in Süleyman's day." "It is a meditation in motion, whose mystic origins go back even further, to the time of the Prophet Muhammad." ""You have become the best community ever raised up in mankind"" "the Qur'an assures all believers," ""enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong" ""and having faith in God."" "Islamic and Western civilisation have the same roots." "Their dawning in the Fertile Crescent." "The monotheism of the Jews and the Christians." "The classical intellectual culture of the Ancient Greeks." "The two traditions are kindred spirits, alike, yet very different." "Islam's legacy is intertwined with the West's." "And to the billions of Muslims who make it the second largest religion in the world, it is a living legacy." "An elemental part of the great human venture that is world civilisation."