OSHER 275 - Islamic Golden Age

This course will cover the evolution and practice of the Islamic sciences, during the Islamic renaissance or Islamic Golden Ages, from origins until the fall of the Islamic civilization. The goal of the course is to encourage the attendees to think about Islamic sciences from an historical perspective, and to appreciate how Islamic sciences can inform the study of history. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's largest city by then, where Islamic scholars and polymaths from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the world's classical knowledge into Arabic and Persian. Several historic inventions and significant contributions in numerous fields were made throughout the Islamic middle ages that revolutionized human history.