The Islamic Golden Age: When Science Flourished 

The Islamic Golden Age was a period of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century.[1][2][3]

This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809), with the establishment of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, one of the world’s largest cities at the time. The institution attracted scholars from across the Muslim world to translate the classical knowledge of the known world into Arabic and Persian.[4] The intellectual and cultural activity also flourished in other urban centers of the medieval Islamic world, including Al-Andalus—especially Umayyad Córdoba, as well as Seville and, in later centuries, Nasrid Granada—along with Fatimid Cairo and other major cities linked through shared intellectual and commercial networks. The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate following the Mongol invasions and the siege of Baghdad in 1258.[5][6]

Alternative periodizations have also been proposed. Some scholars extend the end of the golden age to around 1350, thereby including the Timurid Renaissance.[7][8] Others extend it to the 15th century, including the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, whose court remained an important centre of scholarship, culture and literature, or even to the 16th century, incorporating the rise of the Islamic gunpowder empires.[9][1][2][3]

History of the concepts

The metaphor of a golden age began to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history, in the context of the western aesthetic fashion known as Orientalism. The author of a Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine in 1868 observed that the most beautiful mosques of Damascus were "like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying" and relics of "the golden age of Islam".[10]

There is no unambiguous definition of the term, and depending on whether it is used with a focus on cultural or on military achievement, it may be taken to refer to rather disparate time spans. Thus, one 19th century author would have it extend to the duration of the caliphate, or to "six and a half centuries",[11] while another would have it end after only a few decades of Rashidun conquests, with the death of Umar and the First Fitna.[12]

Improvements to the astrolabe were one of the achievements of this era

During the early 20th century, the term was used only occasionally and often referred to as the early military successes of the Rashidun caliphs. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that the term came to be used with any frequency, now mostly referring to the cultural flourishing of science and mathematics under the caliphates during the 9th to 11th centuries (between the establishment of organised scholarship in the House of Wisdom and the beginning of the crusades),[13] but often extended to include part of the late 8th or the 12th to early 13th centuries.[14] Definitions may still vary considerably.

Equating the end of the golden age with the end of the caliphates is a convenient cut-off point based on a historical landmark, but it can be argued that Islamic culture had entered a gradual decline much earlier; thus, Khan (2003) identifies the proper golden age as being the two centuries between 750 and 950, arguing that the beginning loss of territories under Harun al-Rashid worsened after the death of al-Ma'mun in 833, and that the crusades in the 12th century resulted in a weakening of the Islamic empire from which it never recovered.[15]

Regarding the end of the Gola, Mohamad Abdalla argues the dominant approach by scholars is the "decline theory.":

The golden age is considered to have come into existence through a major effort to acquire and translate the ancient sciences of the Greeks between the eighth and ninth centuries. The translation era was followed by two centuries of splendid original thinking and contributions, and is known as the "golden age" of Islamic science. This so-called "golden age" is supposed to have lasted from the end of the ninth to the end of the eleventh century. The era after this period is conventionally known as the "age of decline". A survey of literature from the nineteenth century onward demonstrates that the decline theory has become the preferred paradigm in general academia.[16]