Transcript for:
Islamic Civilization Overview

[Music] [Music] all [Music] in Cairo Emozin calls faithful Muslims to prayer [Laughter] 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 bound together by the enduring spirit of Islam god is most great the moisin 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 [Music] in the unfolding of history Islamic civilization has been one of humanity's grandest achievements a worldwide power founded simply on faith a spiritual revolution that would shape the nations of three continents and launch an empire [Music] 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 civilization it was Muslim scholars who reclaimed the ancient wisdom of the Greeks while Europe languished in the dark ages it was they who swed the seeds of the Renaissance 600 years before the birth of Leonardo da [Music] Vinci from the way we heal the sick to the numerals we use for counting cultures across the globe have been shaped by Islamic civilization 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 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] 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 and it's very difficult to pull out from all of these different sources that are very adoring and the ordinary human being that uh the the the person that he was we do know that Muhammad was born in or around 570 AD in the sunblasted Arabian Peninsula a land of savage scarcity whose bedin tribes were locked in a constant state of tribal war [Music] while still an infant Muhammad's parents gave him his first taste of life in the desert muhammad was from a town in Mecca but he was sent off to live with the Bedawin because the people even in the town of Mecca felt that the Bedawin were the holders of the the deeper cultural Arab values and the Bedawin view the town's people as having lost their really authentic roots in Arab culture and the poetry and and uh animal husbandry and all the things that uh they 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 uh to be orphaned in a tribal society where clan and family relationships are your keys to everything success status honor dignity um is is to face what it really feels like to be marginalized and that obviously had a a 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 preislamic Arabian civilization was largely an oral culture and uh was tremendous respect for and admiration for people who could express themselves orally and 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 as they sang of the glory of the tribe they they told they told the story of the tribe to the bedin the word had a mystical [Music] importance poets linked the tribe to its ancestors and celebrated values older than memory poetry was the senue that bound the Bedawin 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 e 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 beereft 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 to the family immediately and at a larger extent to the tribe without the trib'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 well you have to understand in most of the lands are dry and so water is is something that's 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 uh are desert and in which uh it only rains once or twice a year and in which a little water makes the difference between life and death [Music] 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 Cabba the Arabic word for cube pre-islamic Arabs worshiped a number of spirits and they were generally nature oriented spirits sometimes associated with natural natural features like trees or rocks or springs and uh the Cabba in Mecca was one of a number of these sanctuaries centered around a particular cluster of deities it was said the Hebrew patriarch Abraham himself built the carba centuries before and that a sacred black stone it held within had fallen from the sky in these turbulent times the carba provided a rare place of peace only here would the Beduin submit to a temporary truce before returning to their conflicts of the open sands there was this one place in the middle around the Cabba which was from even pre-Islamic times was a place of a sacred enclosure where all people had to put down their arms and this of course facilitated trading um 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 Cabba and Mecca are are pretty hard to separate in as far as the pre-Islamic Arabs are concerned the Cabba made Mecca a vibrant center for trade here were found Arabian incense exotic perfumes and Indian spices Chinese silks and Egyptian linens [Music] but perhaps the greatest treasure to be found at Mecca was the rich mixture of cultures [Applause] there were people who came through town who had all kinds of interesting experiences to relate to far away places the local religion was mixed there were Christians there were Jews and there were also the Arabs of the desert who followed an animist type of religion muhammad's world was a center of trade connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean linking the aging empires of Baantium and Persia to the great bazars of India and [Music] China muhammad became a merchant in fact he had a great flare 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 wealthy widow named Khadijah she was so taken with Muhammad she proposed marriage ah Hadijah 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 peoples he must have had great charisma as well muhammad had a way with people and with resolving their disputes once when the Caba fell into disrepair the clan chieftains quarreled over who would have the honor of putting the sacred black stone back where it belonged before violence could erupt Muhammad proposed an equitable solution [Music] united in the effort the four leaders shared the weight and the honor in gratitude they invited Muhammad himself to replace the sacred stone he became known as Al Amin the trusted one there are all kinds of indications that he was tremendously interested in in religious questions this is obviously not something that an ordinary person probably was interested in in those days he talked to uh 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 and think about things and at some point had this extraordinary vision which is spoken about very evocatively and elusively 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 uh endowed with anything that would see 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 [Music] above all Muhammad was to bear one message to his people a simple yet radical proclamation that there is only one God the central tenate of Islam is the oneness the indivisible unity of God uh not something that is simply uh that one pays lip service to but something that is absolutely the most important concept divine unity is more than saying God is there's only one God and there aren't 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 [Music] 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 of in his early teaching that isn't isn't often talked about is the strong social justice message that he delivered in Mecca of the time there was an increasing separation between the halves and the have nots he insisted that this was not to be and that we should share the wealth and it was this social justice message that I think that 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 uh 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 this people in Arabia such an extraordinary ear for verbal expression where verbal expression was the commanding cultural force some people called him a poet and there's a Quranic uh surah basically saying uh Muhammad is not a poet poets speak through desire uh this is not the voice of desire this is the voice of [Music] 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 Quran the Quran was revealed orally but very soon people realized that it had to be written down in order to make sure that it wasn't corrupted and that the original message was maintained and from a very early date and it's it's very unclear when that date was because no early manuscripts of the Quran survive people began copying it [Music] down the Quran is a revelation of spiritual teaching of both ethical and social guidance it was revealed and remains in Arabic and what's so extraordinary about the Quran is its naturalenness so that it can say the most powerful cosmic things with a sense of of intimacy so that power and tenderness come together constantly in the Quranic language with words alone the Quran delivers its vision to the faithful its imagery conjures a picture of the afterlife that resonates with all the power of traditional Bedawin [Music] 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 color the uh world of water and paradise are symbolically tied to one another and the Quran conjured that up with just a few briefly chosen [Music] words yet for all the imagery of paradise in the Quran 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 anthropomorphizing God to make God into a projection of our own human self and that's why Muslims don't uh like sculpture for example traditionally because they believe that there's that danger and the Quran avoids that by constantly shifting the pronouns so we can't really reify God and get a an image a physical image of God [Music] rather than a physical image of God or of Muhammad it is the beauty of the Quran itself that is celebrated in Islam islam developed in this context where pictures were not favored the Quran 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 God's word was the Quran itself not any picture of of of God certainly not because you couldn't represent God and certainly not a picture of Muhammad because he wasn't divine [Music] 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 worshiped they're not images of a saint or of God they are images of Muhammad as a historical figure he's sort of given honor by having a very bright blue background or a white cloud near him um but he's he's not otherwise distinguished from the other characters in the story at other times people did represent the prophet but he was always represented with a white cloth over his face to hide his face so that 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 skeptical and said "Look if you're a prophet where's your miracle?" And the prophets in the Quran uh Moses had miracles Jesus had miracles where's your where's your miracle the Quranic answer to that challenge is this is the miracle this Quran 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 Quran presents people as really being skeptical you mean to tell me that after I die and my body has has gone back to the elements and I've been putrified that I'm going to be put back together again and brought back to life that of any of the messages in the Quran that struck the people of Arabia as being the most hard to believe [Music] muhammad also spoke of eternal damnation for the unjust he used the language of apocalyptic imagery talking about the signs of the ends 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 uh 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 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 Cabba in Mecca [Music] 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 they didn't want him 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 away from the Cabba they did everything they could to kind of run him out of town they demanded that Muhammad's uncle remove his clan's protection from the prophet which would clear the way for his murder without the threat of retribution [Music] 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 Bedawin to give up u many of their notions of multiple gods um to give up their attachment to their ancestors and their tribal warfare in the way they had uh things that would could and did make him the object of scorn persecution um and um an 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 Yatri 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 they heard that he had great arbitration skills and they thought "Let's see if we can't get him up here and help us out." So they invited [Music] him muhammad agreed to travel to Yatre 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 [Music] devotion in doing so they began a new community a new tribe [Music] 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 Hijra 622 in the Christian calendar marks the Muslim year [Music] 1 muhammad's goal among the people of Yatre was the same as his larger mission to bring unity and peace with his message he was asked to be a solommonic 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 and to try and forge a community of believers in a way that would uh bring people together in a sort of [Music] 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 Quran 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 abbiscinian slave named Bilal was the first to call believers to prayer at Muhammad's house allahbar Allahbar it was the first mosquebill [Music] the call to prayer has within it the first Islamic pillar which is the affirmation of God's unity that beautiful phrase which many Muslims chant over and over in their mind or vocally to constantly remind themselves of unity of God and unity of what we should focus on in our life [Music] [Music] praying together is a good thing it cements the idea of belonging to a movement to a religion to an organization 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 of uh bowing and touching our head to the ground toward that exact center uh 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 Cabba 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 [Music] 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 mechans 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 [Music] [Music] the 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 um at one point the entire young Muslim community was right on the edge of annihilation for 3 years the Muslim army held out against staggering odds as word of the fighting spread other Beduin 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 the tide began to turn [Music] 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 mechans could expect a big revenge the men are usually killed uh 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 u the people in his mur so um within the very founding of a religion one finds episodes of great generosity um uh often extraordinary acts of of kindness and mercy but not all of Mecca escaped Muhammad's wrath flush with victory his troops marched straight to the harbor 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 had 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 this hall by breaking the idols he was breaking apart the tribal system in which each tribe really had its own independent deity this was shocking to the better this was saying the gods of our fathers are being destroyed in some sense you're 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 um is seen um as a as an act of um prophetic violence that has just as much importance in Islamic tradition as um Moses's breaking of the tablets when he saw the idolatry at Mount Si or Jesus's um casting the money sellers out of the temple [Music] the destruction of the idols was a new beginning a breaking from the past and the creation of a powerful new force mecca was just the beginning one after another the tribes of a nation were summoned to the fold and united under the banner of Islam a worldwide community of faith was begun born in an extraordinary alignment of history personality and conviction what Muhammad did was to bring a sense of solidarity a sense of mission and he united all these separate segments within the peninsula from then on moved eastward westward northward southward the Muslims turned to the north swept into present-day Lebanon and Syria 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 uh from uh 622 the year one of the Islamic calendar um within 50 years people whose father had 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 Cassanian Empire of Iran and twothirds of the Christian Bazantine Empire by now the empire was larger than Rome it stretched from Morocco in the west to the Indis 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 [Music] easily islam's success in expanding into the central Middle East and across North Africa was due in in large part because people were fed up with previous regimes so the idea that Muslims were going across the world saying convert or die is is really not accurate not at all that it didn't have a heavy hand they didn't rule with a heavy hand they they allowed the the conquered peoples to maintain their their administrative uh 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 the new regime very heavily certainly for individuals who felt themselves uh 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 creates 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 uh way of looking to life and I think what happened at that time Muhammed's mission filled the void that the societies wanted they really wanted some sort of solidarity in their lives the lessons of the Quran so successful for the Muslims in Medina and Mecca were playing out on a global [Music] 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 [Music] peace as the Muslim community grew they bought the old church from the Christian congregation and built a huge mosque on the site [Music] with Baantine 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 [Music] the Arabs transformed their conquered lands maintaining improving or expanding the [Music] 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 the into the larger basin where it would then be distributed by pipes to the city um 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 [Music] agriculture flourished as life-giving staples like wheat were introduced to the Mediterranean [Music] region but Muslims saved their most monumental feat for the holy city of Jerusalem islam's first great work of art is the Dome of the Rock it was built in a city that was holy to Christians and Jews and it's spectacular like Mecca and the Ka the significance of this holy site goes back to Abraham for the rock within is said to be the place he nearly sacrificed his son [Music] it was built to rival the nearby church of the Holy Sephila where Jesus was said to have been buried what's extraordinary about the Dome of the Rock is how perfect it is people revered this site as some place that was holy to Abraham and to Isaac imagine if you will these new guys coming in and taking over this piece of prime real estate and building a new building for a new religion that sits on top of a mountain and sparkles and glitters in the sunlight for everyone to see this is not something that a fly by night this is something big and important islam has come to stay in just a 100red 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 2 years after the taking of Mecca Muhammad [Music] 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 Shiites the faction the Shia of Ali Muhammad had indeed designated Ali his son-in-law and cousin as his successor the opinion that came to be the majority opinion or the Sunni opinion held that Muhammad had not appointed a successor during his life but had said after I'm gone choose one from among your peers from among the elders and from the house there came out the 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 or 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 had never [Music] seen during the seventh and 8th centuries AD a powerful new faith was about to change the world the faith of Islam [Music] its followers launched a conquest not only by the sword but with the power of [Music] ideas 200 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 and newly defined civilization this new civilization expanding beyond its own dreams within a period of very short time literally the largest empire civilization had ever known [Music] the Arabic word for conquest fatu literally means openings islam swed 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 a central devotional and ritual feature in Islamic life in fact since the life of Muhammad himself the pilgrimage has symbolized probably more than any other Islamic ritual activity unity among all people and [Music] 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 and then things would radiate back home so if there was an invention that was discovered in Samarand it could be within the year that it would be known in Cordova 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 and it was and still is between west what we call the west and what people always called the east uh 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 [Music] 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 [Music] the palaces of ancient Baghdad have been lost over the centuries but in its glory it rivaled ancient Athens or Rome it was a magnificent architectural achievement the pride of Islam in a new age [Music] one visitor left this account all the exquisite neighborhoods covered with parks gardens villas and beautiful prominards are filled with bizaars 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 center 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 uh philosophers uh the best artists they came in search of answers to pragmatic questions 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 are responsible for public hygiene you are responsible for the marketplace you're responsible for goods being sold in the marketplace all of those require some basic elementary sciences 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 center of scholarship baghdad's renowned house of wisdom it was a magnet for scholars and intellectuals who came um and worked in themies 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 who came some were Christians some were Muslims some were Jews and all of these different sort of threads of human knowledge came together in the city of Baghdad so the net effect of this is that you've got uh human uh 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 modern bureaucrats and modern 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 civilization that had any sciences before be it the Greek be it the Indian being 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 [Music] 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 Henistic world translated into Arabic initially which was then made available to all other participants in uh the new Islamic civilization arabic emerges as the language of learning throughout the region this is a very significant development in human intellectual history having immersed the knowledge the Muslims now 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 text 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 the 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 [Music] 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 endowments muslim hospitals had separate wards for patients 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 [Music] years muslim scientists were especially intrigued by light lenses and the physiology of the human eye the father of optics was a Muslim named Iban Al-Ham 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 [Music] 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 [Music] needle but for all this knowledge to transform and illuminate an empire it had to be copied and shared across a 100 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 700750 when Muslim armies reached Central Asia they encountered paper for the first time and very quickly the Muslim bureaucracy um started using paper you find that you know within 50 years it's in Syria and then few years after that it's in it's in Egypt and then it's in North Africa and then it's in in Sicily and then it's in Spain and that's where Europe learned to make paper from they learn to make it from the Arabs we begin to have people with family names like paper maker so in other words it not only that paper was available it must have become a very very widespread indust 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 being written down in books on paper and that these books are being copied and recopied and sent around we know for example that there was a street of book sellers um with more than 100 shops each one with paper and books for sale um and this is a time when you know in u Europe a monastery would be lucky if it had five or 10 books while the monks of the west were hoarding their wisdom on scraps of expensive parchment paper enabled Islamic civilization to spread its newfound knowledge far and wide creating a single community linking three continents so the chief distinction therefore of Islamic civilization uh in addition to the fact that it made new leaps of originality new transformations in traditions of learning and 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 [Music] humanity in all the broad empire there was one place the Christian world could experience the lifestyle Muslims now took for granted southern [Music] Spain here on the European continent itself Islamic culture would begin to have an effect on the European civilization around it a thousand years ago the Spanish city of Cordoba was a center of learning and culture that rivaled 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 street lights and paved roads libraries hospitals and palaces this was a city of light a Muslim city the city of Cordova in the 9th and 10th centuries was one of the biggest and most exciting in Europe we have descriptions of it by people coming and saying all these flowers everywhere this these open streets this this wonderful light coming down uh northern cities were dark cordova 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 Cordova Cathedral of today began its life as a mosque one of the grandest of the Islamic Empire the great mosque in Cordova was simply the biggest mosque in the biggest city in southern Europe when you climb up into the church tower which used to be a minouret you look out over this expanse of of roof it's quite amazing to see this cathedral complete with flying buttresses popping up out of this the middle of this massive mosque many many people came to visit it to view the wonders of the mosque which had rivoling the kind of vaulting which is like this and which 100 years later by a mere coincidence you might think but not at all a coincidence appears in the Gothic cathedrals of Northern Europe in Lincoln Cathedral in Charter 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 traveler Cordoba was their one opportunity to glimpse 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 enlightenment in the um 10th century there was a Saxon nun with the unpronouncable name of who called medieval Cordoba the ornament of the world she was very very taken with the place and there you are she's a Christian [Music] 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 but be 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 is called the Alhhamra the Alhhamra is perhaps the most famous example of of Islamic architecture to to most Westerners it is the the best remaining example of what a medieval Muslim palace would have looked like [Music] echoed in the finely carved geometric plaster work and marble pillars is a vanished lifestyle of extraordinary luxury [Music] the Alhhamra reveals the pinnacle of Islamic culture and urbanity the beauty of the Alhhamra is not so much in the individual details no it's more the combination of everything that is this wonderful um sort of orchestrated interplay of different textures and surfaces of light and space and water playing inside and outside of buildings [Music] it's almost like a symphony of different elements that are very carefully brought together to provide exquisite enjoyment here the Muslim elite relished the good life reposing on lush carpets surrounded by perfume and music the privileged few debated the nature of God the subtleties of Greek philosophy or the most recent mathematical revelations from India while they dined on spiced delicacies served on Chinese [Music] porcelain they strolled the grounds through gardens irrigated by complex gravity-fed water systems 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 [Music] but at the dawn of the 11th century a tragedy in Jerusalem would put Muslims and European Christians on a collision course jerusalem was ruled by an Egyptian caiff an infamous man named Alhakim al-hakim was certainly a deviation from the norm clinically speaking I suppose today we'd regard him as a madman as someone who was simply insane for 200 years 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 separ Jerusalem now nobody knows quite why he did it and you can have your own theories about it but uh the fact of the matter was that that sent shivers of terror and anxiety through Christendom in a way of course al-Hakim was the one exception that proved the rule for Christians that Christians had been speaking of for centuries of Muslims as intolerant mad uh uh slavering heretics who simply could not uh be expected to abide by the rules of civilized human beings [Music] the fact that Alhakim's successor um rebuilt the church of the holy separate with baantine help didn't cut any ice um there was this perception now that things were not going well in the holy [Music] land in Europe anti-Muslim sentiment simmered By 1095 it reached the boiling point pope Urban II spent most of that year traveling 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 naval of the world she cries out to be liberated christ himself commands it so we've got a merging or a coming together of uh military service and religion which uh served the purposes if you like of a pope who in 1095 made his famous call to crusade to rescue the endangered holy places um in the east and in particular Jerusalem 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 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 Baantine who were coming as usual to be a nuisance and and fight on the borders they had no idea that there was this extraordinary surge of religious fervor and fanaticism coming from Western Europe and that the aim of this group was [Music] 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 the the the fear the fleeing of the population it must have been horrendous [Music] 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 sariss up to the knees of their horses they saw the holy city and they were in a state of exaltation and perhaps that's why when they flooded through the um 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 Sephila dozens of worshippers from Eastern sects were massacred to the crusaders they were nothing more than foreigners the Christian chronicles record the carnage the Sarosins 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 ps they made were like pyramids [Music] 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 were cloistered away in their houses are trembling with fear the whole imagery is is that of uh the rape of their land and the um 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 spilt when sweet girls must hide their lovely faces in their hands for [Music] 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 [Music] 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 Crusader castles remain a living testimony to their presence and Crack Desalier in Syria is the crusader castle over 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 from miles and miles from it and see the other castles that would have been you know in visual distance for communication by fire and smoke signals it's got you know all the accutrants of a 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 marrynt and 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 uh friendly so you had to watch their movements all the time it it was a 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 well materially the crusaders were just blown away by what they found in the Middle East and they took a lot of it back with them uh inlaid metal work uh textiles silks things like that they had just never seen in such quantities before the good life these things they brought back to Europe some as souvenirs and in fact there was a whole uh industry that developed in the Middle East of providing souvenirs for the crusaders to take back [Music] 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 bunkering down in their castles Islam was spreading its influence and flourishing muhammad's message rang out as clear and strong as it ever had allahbar Allahbar 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 [Music] [Music] [Music] 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 suck a check that could be written in Spain and cashed in India writing a check assumes that someone's going to honor it and cash it at the other end and that if you give the money or you have the money in one place that someone will say I have access to that somewhere else so this implies that you have some kind of central bank or central loan organization who's going to be good for the money um so it frees up your ability to travel um it frees up commerce because again the money doesn't have to be moved from Samarand back to to Cordova in order to go back the other way the next year so that you can base it all on trust and faith uh and Muslims became some of the greatest merchants of Middle [Music] Ages and the greatest craftsmen as [Music] 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 [Music] 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 and it was the dyes that were particularly expensive and uh imported the farthest and then you need all the fixtures and mortants and uh equipment for looms and then you need to transport these textiles so collectively the industry of making and transporting textiles was the main stay of the [Music] economy while Europeans settled for coarse woolen and linen garments Muslims wore brocaded fabrics of orgundi damusk and tapeta words that came into the English language from Arabic and Persian the fabrics that were 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 um cloth of gold where silk thread is wrapped with gold um and um 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 [Music] [Applause] loom but sometimes the fabrics were trimmed with decorative Arabic text from the Holy Quran 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 um or woven with gold designs sometimes they would say things with an Arabic inscription on it which says there is no God but God muhammad is his prophet in [Music] Arabic after almost 100 years of broken treaties and sporadic fighting the Muslims reached a turning point in their struggles against the crusaders it came in the person of one of Islam's most celebrated figures his name was Salah Udin but the West would remember him and come to rever him as Saladin there is certainly one thing that we must recognize about Saladine and that is that he was successful where many others of his faith and of his part of the world had not been that he possessed one unusual feature uh 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 plane between two hills called the Horns of Hatin [Music] 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 we're talking 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 uh panic set in the flames bore down on them and the heat became intense saladin 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 um the uh the victory at Hatine was a real turning point for Saladin it meant that he could then proceed to take Jerusalem later on that [Music] year 3 months later Saladin entered Jerusalem for the first time in almost a century the call to prayer floated over the holy city once again [Music] and yet remarkably Saladin leveled no retaliation against Christians or their holy places in the church of the holy sepulcha mass was celebrated as usual saladin also decreed that Christians who wished to could leave 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 in Jerusalem over the conquest he gradually became the most uh famous Muslim of all time [Music] 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 returned 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 that they found there i mean the quality of the merchandise the quality of the goods was far better than anything they could find 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 taste buds had been wetted by a different cuisine we know that uh they um found out the delights of using soap when they were in the Middle East and um it would appear that that caught on back in Europe after the Crusades uh many Europeans were far more open to the ideas of what was going on to the east what what was happening in other parts of the world they they simply couldn't be as insular as before lots of people were open to well what's out there let's explore this let's see this um new intellectual thoughts let's see what these people are writing let's learn languages this is when people start to learn Arabic slowly in the west as the barrier of 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 Aquinus used the writings of the Muslim philosopher Avareroas 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 avarerois himself appears in Rafael'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 uh of Islamic civilization uh has now reached levels uh which certainly were not uh accomplished uh by any other civilization known civilization 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 [Music] 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 descended upon them not from the west but from the east it's known as the Mongol catastrophe [Music] the Mongols were Turo Mongolian nomads from the steps 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 yourself and three horses and you lived off the horses first you drank their blood and then when you moved far enough away you killed them you slaughtered them and you 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 and in doing that he evokes the anger of the Mongols who want to use him as an example and they use this retaliatory technique often of killing off entire towns wiping them out as examples and so they build these fantastic towers of skulls where they pile up all the dead bodies as an example and then then all the other towns around immediately um give way city after city fell before them it was only a matter of time before they reached the center 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 civilization 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 [Music] and historically the most significant thing about the Mongols for us would be that they became Muslims most of them uh in the end um 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 [Music] it is not surprising to me that the land conquered the conquerors the Mongols themselves became Muslims or uh Islamic leaders parexelance 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 [Music] islam was now set on a new course of expansion to both the east and the west marching to the beat of Turkish drums [Applause] [Music] the Ottoman Turks began as a nomadic people from the step beyond the Arrol Sea for centuries they had wandered present-day Turkey looking for new pasture lands [Music] 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 [Music] Bay 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 always more easy to digest than reality i don't think he realized 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 gazis whose destiny was to bring Islam to the world gazis 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 uh thought about uh themselves or any harm that could come to the group uh by going into dangerous conditions but it made the Ottoman Empire almost fearless going into regions that nobody had been there before [Music] 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 Turkmen Emirs the Muslims and a Muslim should not be fighting against a Muslim so they said at the time so the only place he could expand was towards the Christian territories westward osman's warriors moved to the north and west across the Anatolian plateau into territory controlled by the traditional Christian power in the area the aging Baantine [Music] Empire by Osman's time the thousand-year-old Baantine 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 Baantine Empire to a few small waring states the Ottomans quickly overran these splined Baantine factions uniting northwestern Anatolia into a single domain in 1326 the Ottomans took the powerful Bzantine city of Bersa a victory that would change the character of the Ottoman Turks [Music] forever the most important part of Bersa was that it enabled Osman and his uh descendants to establish a seat of the government [Music] the restless nomads of the step would settle down to build an empire what we're witnessing is this huge demographic [Music] event the movement of a whole civilization from a nomadic way of life to a settled way of life now when the Ottomans took Borsa and set it up as their capital they were very concerned to establish themselves as the rightful standardbearers of Muslim civilization civilization meant organization and the Ottomans set out to manage the vast regions they now controlled leaving the Bazantine clerks in place they began to organize the new empire first and foremost taxation and recordkeeping the word bureaucracy has since lost its noble connotations yet this was a great innovation as ambitious as any triumph in battle the Ottomans are known for including and synthesizing the cultural elements through the lands that they passed they are known for creating structures by which the peoples who lived there before could carry on their lives and their beliefs in the way that they chose in fact the Ottomans had fewer 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 i mean 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 constantly 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 [Music] 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 practice was called Devshare the young boys were technically slaves of the Sultan but they weren't treated like slaves first they were brought into the Muslim faith taught rituals of washing and prayer in the Arabic and Ottoman [Music] languages this served a political as well as a religious purpose through the dev shame system the Ottomans could create a cast without any conflicting loyalties to tribe or family the children had such great future that a lot of the times Turks or even Muslims pretended that their children were Christian-born and would register them with the deer officials the system was so beautiful in that they only had one allegiance to the Sultan no family no region no other ties these children were then given the best possible education available in the world perhaps at the time and they were then 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 vazers and governors it even became uh grand visiers those who were broadly went to the janiser corps the janiseries 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 they were trained with all the precision and discipline pomp and circumstance of a modern army for the first time an army wore uniforms and went into battle to the accompiment of a military band the Janiseries were the most feared troops in the Western world a force that was worthy of 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 g the Ottoman Sultan that with his domains now stretching all the way into Asia and far far into Europe in the west they remained right in the center of his domains the greatest prize of all the capital city of Constantinople the most powerful the richest the 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 would 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 [Music] hands then a Sultan came to power whose dreams of conquest would not be denied [Music] history would honor him as Mmet the conqueror when he assumed the Sultenate 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 [Music] the empire always meant everything more so than the family in order to stop the empire from splitting as had happened to other Turkish uh dynasties uh 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 when on the death of his father he finally then took over it meant an enormous change in the policy and direction of the Ottoman Empire in the direction of a much greater energy memed immediately set his sights on the one prize as grand as his ambitions mamemed had to conquer Constantinople there was no other choice gonzatol was sitting like a perfect gem or a perfect fruit waiting to be [Music] picked 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 [Music] 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 nearly 100 ft high and 30 ft thick and they had already stood for a thousand years but Memet had an answer for these walls and 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 Mahmed the Conqueror saw the first dramatic application of this in the form of huge cannons that had not been seen before which Mhmed had specially commissioned for the occasion earlier cannons had been assembled with strips of forged metal bound with hoops they 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 Memet 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 [Music] mercy memed 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 4 months to build a massive 7 to citadel called Rumle Hisar memed himself is said to have carried stones during its construction no sooner was it completed than he tightened his noose around 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 Memed's ships from approaching the Bazantine strung a massive chain across the straight on April 22nd 1453 the besieged city watched in horror as MeT's troops hoisted 70 of his ships ashore sliding them over land on greased planks past the barrier chain [Music] more than a 100,000 Ottoman soldiers now stood before the walls of Constantinople braced for the greatest bombardment the history of warfare had ever [Music] known under relentless fire the city's 7,000 Christian defenders held out for nearly a month in desperation the Baantine who occupied the city appealed to their fellow Christians across the continent for help but of course Europe in the 15th century was completely incapable of mounting any kind of a concerted opposition to the rising Turkish threat in the [Music] east at that time the kings of Europe had military and political problems of their own constantinople would have to fend for [Music] itself shortly before dawn on May 29th 1453 the Turkish army breached the walls of the city within hours Constantinople was in the hands of the Ottomans memmet rode into the city and went straight to its most celebrated prize the magnificent church of Haya Sophia built by the emperor Justinian in the sixth 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 [Music] Sophia the Hay Sophia or Sophia 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 uh embellished with gold mosaics and uh the space is incredible for manet it was a great uh 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 [Music] the single greatest church in Christendom was now a mosque [Music] i know [Music] the higher Sophia became the inspiration for all Ottoman domed mosques to come but none would ever match its size and scope and it belonged to MeT the conqueror news of his triumph sent shock waves around the world for Europeans it was a conccommittent disaster 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 khn which is Turkish for emperor shahish Sha Persian for king of kings and Sultan the Arabic word for ruler but now with all the former Bzantine Empire under their command Memet 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 [Music] all he was born at the beginning of the 10th century by the Muslim calendar and he was the 10th Sultan descended from Osman he was a child of destiny whose greatness was expected in the parliament of the day he was the sahib Kuran the universal ruler the master of an auspicious conjunction whose coming has been foretold whose identity is confirmed astrologically his name was Sulleon after Solomon the wise king of the Old Testament the Ottoman Empire would reach its apex under Sulamon's reign sleant was extremely well educated he was trained to the sultenate uh 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 uh a convert a Greek convert who took the name Ibraim the two were very close in age and apparently very close in other ways personally intellectually uh educated together to uh to a certain extent and as was common practice when Sullean acceded to the throne on the death of his father he took his faithful Ibraim with him to Istanbul solomon was 26 when he took the throne determined to make his mark on the world as soon as his ministers would let him in his early years Sullean had to contend for example with grand visitors and generals who simply refused to obey him feeling apparently that here was a 26-year-old kid uh who had never seen very much in the way of action and hadn't done very much to show that people ought to in fact obey [Music] him the way to prove his metal 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 sulleon 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 Sullean 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 roads 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 [Music] the 50,000 defenders of roads manned one of the strongest forts in the world sulleon 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 [Music] Balkans the resulting explosion signaled 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 roads to the empire sulleon was now a Sultan to be taken seriously his march of conquest had begun [Music] europe grew to fear the name of [Music] Sulamon but within his own borders he had another reputation islamic history remembers him as Kunan the lawgiver ottomans were really uh bureaucrats in 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 Sulleon a single legal system was defined for the sprawling empire his laws would later become the basis of constitutions for several other nations well Sullean was the supreme monarch of the area he was the center of the world [Music] he inaugurated a classical age in Ottoman architecture commissioning some of the most spectacular buildings the world has ever [Music] seen sullean was in a unique position of wealth and 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 the things that come to mind when Muslims think about God a building that is grand and maj majestic can immediately remind people of the glory of God sulleon's chief architect Senon was a man whose vision perfectly complemented the empire builder sinon perfected the signature structure of Islam the domed [Music] 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 Jerusalem but for the Sultan of course he built his masterpiece the Slemania mosque in Istanbul 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 Sullemania they were doing it to say "Yeah I've got the power i've got the money i am the Sultan i'm the king of kings." But at the same time there was also tremendous spiritual value in these things the symbolism is not only that of empire but of the faith in the spirit of Muhammad's teaching the great mosque was a center of social services complete with a hospital school and library at its inauguration it said Sulleon gazed at it with awe and exclaimed "Oh Solomon I have surpassed [Music] thee no less impressive was Sulleon's palace top Copy was both the seat of government and his private dwelling [Music] suleman 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 uh or the arts of his period uh show the first golden age of the Ottoman world everything that came out of his palace was [Music] exquisite sulleman himself was a goldsmith ottomans believe that every sultan had to have a tangible trade being a sultan was not considered a practical or a tangible trade and he was a very demanding patron insisted on checking the work even commissioned few things and I think each artisan group or each core uh working for the palace tried to outdo one another to please the sultan because to please him had wonderful rewards and the Ottomans of course exercised quite a lot of influence on the European imagination and the royal and the political if you will ceremony and pump of the Ottomans was such that it would have humbled um any citizen of the known world then uh 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 Sulleon required that all those around him remain completely silent while he made his wishes known with the slightest nod or gesture it must have been a tremendously impressive site to see the courtyard of the palace filled with some 6 or 7,000 janiseries and other functionaries no one saying a word was going on here was the creation of a sovereignty so mysterious and yet so farreaching as to be seen as nearly divine as Sullean's power grew his lifelong friend Ibrahim rose in the court structure and Ibrahim Pasha who became a Pasha later on became his devoted grand vazier in fact Ibrahim married his sister so they were not only good friends they were also related [Applause] ibrahim campaigned with his own army growing in influence and ambition till his power was second only to Sullemans but for power and ambition the secret world of the Sultan's Harim had no [Music] equal contrary to the western stereotype it was not the Sultan's play pen but lay at the center of donastic power the herum was the private quarters of the Sultan we tend to think of the herum as where the women live but what it means is the place where you're not on display home is what it means [Applause] 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." You know because his mother would have a lot to say about [Music] it with his first wife Sullean had a son and heir Mustafa but while he was in his mid30s the Sultan fell deeply in love with a Slavic slave girl named Harm in the west we know her by a different name [Music] roxalana roxalana would bear him a rival heir and become Sulleon's most trusted confidant 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 haram life can enter and so the fact that he was so protected worked in a funny way to expose him to the influence of his female companions with whom he spent so much time and there were tremendously intelligent and ambitious women around him roxalana being the most famous of all [Music] sulaman is a complex character a man that we know from his own life was capable of the tenderest emotions both toward his male friends and especially toward his uh his the great love of his life his wife Huram Sultan and toward his family as well he had a number of extremely talented sons uh on whom he lavished a great deal of affection [Music] sulleman 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 Sulleon the future of his empire seemed limitless i am God's slave and sultan of this world solomon would carve on a conquered fortress i am Sulomon in whose name the Friday sermon is read in Mecca and Medina in Baghdad I am the Sha in the Bazantine 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 Sulleon's greatest rivals was to the east the empire of the Persian Safavidids this was a Muslim enemy whose rival creed made them fierce antagonists of the Ottomans for centuries the Safavidids were also Turic 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 uh the eastern most boundaries of the Ottoman rail [Music] the Safavid dynasty was Shiite Muslims bitter rivals to the Sunni Ottomans according to the Shiites 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 Muhammad this challenge to legitimacy is the basis of the Shiite 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 Safavidids came forth as this rival she so the Saves 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 over wealth over territory over prestige and the Safies 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 [Music] control the Safavidid military was formidable but there 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 when you look at Isvahan it is the most beautiful city in the world and that is the Safavidit city it's the Safavidit capital but it doesn't give you the same sense of power that the Ottoman uh 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 zavi art and architecture is is on a finer scale it's known it's known for its filigree it's known for its intricate brush work you know uh rather than for its stunning scale in the soaring palaces of the Safavidid Shars murderous intrigues against Solomon and his dynasty were hatched that would reach into his very household but Sulleon'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 uh under his control sulleon's next step would be Vienna its conquest would drive a dagger into the heart of the European Hapsburg 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 sulleon had to move on without [Music] them with only light artillery the Ottomans relentlessly shelled the city but the smallest breach was ferociously defended after a lengthy siege with winterfast approaching Sullean withdrew his forces he was not concerned he was sure he would return soon enough he never did sullean'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 [Music] Europe but Sulleon had little to fear from Europe rival Muslim Safavidids and his own family would bring the crulest of sorrows to the Sultan and ultimately to his empire as well sullean 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 [Music] figure in the powerladen world of the Sultan's household the intrigues never ceased the Topkapa Palace as it was originally conceived had no quarters for the ladies the women lived in what was called the old palace but Huram 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 Heram's quarters so she had to be moved to the top copper palace temporarily while her old quarters were being renovated well she moved in and never moved out now Horem was at the center of power promoting her own son as he apparent and immersing herself in a web of deadly gossip and suspicion she was incredibly devoted to her husband and any threat to Sullean was a threat to her and she had to get rid of it the first uh threat came from Ibrahim Pasha who assumed titles that were only given to sultans so Irram knew something was going to happen eventually and uh to protect the empire and the dynasty Iran Basha had to go on March 15th 1536 Sullean and Ibraim Pasha dined together as was their custom in the morning Ibraim's body was found strangled but Sulleon's desolation and loss had only [Music] begun a few years after Ibrahim's death Hurm claimed to have uncovered a plot to overthrow Sulleon devised with Safavidid help by his beloved firstborn son and heir Mustafa this is a continuous problem in Ottoman history sons trying to eventually replace their father and this happens in monarch monarchies succession could become a problem and it was an acute problem sulleon had his share of it and perhaps did not always play his hands right without hesitation Sulleon ordered Mustafa's execution then 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 Hurm herself died the following year Sulleon 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 anymore and he's dying to uh 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 13 campaigns the last one was uh at Zigetvar uh 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 [Music] behind in Istanbul all today the Sufi dervishes still turn with the same prayerful pirouetses they danced in Sulamon'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 Quran assures all believers enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong and having faith in God islamic and Western civilization have the same roots their dawning in the fertile [Music] crescent the monotheism of the Jews and Christians the classical intellectual culture of the ancient [Music] 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 civilization [Music] islam Empire of Faith continues at PBS online click through our interactive timeline to learn more about the history and culture of Islam or take a virtual tour of the Dome of the Rock and other extraordinary sites it's all online at pbs.org or americaon online keyword PBS [Music]