 Save 10% with my code Bobby10 on raw, organic, grass-fed and grass-finished, freeze-dried organ meats from grassland nutrition. Link in the description box. All right, guys. Welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby guys. Fascinating video today. We're going to react to kings and generals with their video Islamic Golden Age, Philosophy and Humanities. The Islamic Golden Age is something that we hear about over and over again, especially here in the West. However, many people, myself included, do not know much about that golden period within Islamic history. The Islamic Golden Age was an era from the 8th to 14th century marked by the expansion of Islam and Arabic culture throughout North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South Europe, during which there was a great flourishing in the arts, commerce and science. Especially when it comes down to sciences and arts, this is in stark contrast to the perception of Islam in the West. I'm very excited to see today's video with no further ado. Let's have a look. Today, the religion of Islam boasts almost 2 billion followers. Still, the faith itself comes from humble origins. Islam began as a religious movement turned small nation, then empire in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. Then a sprawling multi-ethnic, multicultural and even multi-religious country at the crossroads of Eurasian trade and cultural exchange. It's no surprise then that the ideas, cultures and people moving through the Islamic Empire, combined with a friendly theology and government, led to what's called the Islamic Golden Age. This series will discuss the contributions made to humankind in this period, a time of massive developments in science, philosophy and medicine. Today, we're going to look at the humanities and social sciences, as well as explain how this Golden Age came to be. One major factor in how the Islamic Empire enjoyed such a blossoming of thought comes from Islam itself. Somewhat unusually, many parts of the Islamic holy texts, the Quran and the Hadiths, place value on education and scientific discovery, regardless of the information's origin. Muslim scholars did not, by and large, take issue with learning from the works of non-Muslims to advance their body of knowledge. A Muslim scholar by the name of Burhan al-Din proclaimed that education should be prescribed for everyone, a novel idea for the Middle Ages. Muslims would enjoy a high literacy rate due to their emphasis on learning and education as part of a well-lived life. Schools would not only give kids a good grasp of Islamic law and analysis, but bring young scholars from different classes and backgrounds. Man, God truly raises and destroys nations, this is what you see here. The Muslims were at the peak civilization a thousand years ago, even previously to the West. The West wasn't as evolved if you want to use this terminology like the Muslim world, but now it's all flipped on its head. Of course, it is due to the West, but that being said, the perception of Islam right now in the West is backwards. They do not associate Islam with learning, with knowledge, with sciences. Together, to share ideas. In a state as large and diverse as the Islamic Empire, this led to a lot of cross-pollination of ideas. Later in the Golden Age, this process of education was formalized by schools known as madrasas. They were mosques, boarding houses, and libraries in a single compound. Some of these became the first universities to give out degrees. Additionally, the Muslim Empire invested massively in the work of scientists and philosophers. The amount the government spent in translation was massive, rivaling some of the research budgets of our times. The symbol of this period would be the Great House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a massive library built by the Islamic Emperor Khalif al-Mansa. The House of Wisdom is so fundamental to the Islamic Golden Age that its construction and obliteration are viewed as the start and end of it. It was one of the world's biggest assortments of rare books in Persian and Arabic. The engine at the heart of this fast-growing Golden Age was the translation movement. The Islamic Empire just watching this, I come to think if the Muslim community, the Ummah wants to replicate this Golden Age, wants to return to its old glory, they would have to deeply analyze what those Muslims did right back in the day. And of course what they did wrong, why it all came to an end, just the way that you would analyze a fight, what went right, what went wrong, what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses. I believe with thorough analysis and the momentum that Islam has right now on social media, Islam could return to a Golden Age. Most of its domain contained 10% or fewer Muslims and very few spoke Arabic. As they expanded into the Sasanian Empire, they found a large class of Persian scholars, as well as Greek academics who left the Byzantine Empire. The Caliphate connected them into a vast network of trade and information, but also added Arabic into the linguistic stew. Much of the information coming into the empire was in Persian, Greek or Arabic, but could also be in Latin, Chinese or any number of written languages from around Eurasia at the time. Scientific advancement aside, if the Caliphate wanted to function as an empire, it needed an army of translators to keep the flow of information running. When it made Baghdad its new imperial capital, the elites were inspired by Persian and Hellenistic ideas. It drove a desire to learn more from the classical Greeks. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the Battle of Talas in 751, the empire captured several Chinese prisoners of war. What might seem like a banal event turned out to be one of the most important breakthroughs, as it allowed for the translation movement and possibly the whole Golden Age. These prisoners knew how to make paper, which could make books easier than vellum or parchment. The first significant translation projects included taking Islamic holy texts like the Quran and translating them into various languages to spread Islam around the empire and the world. Furthermore, the classical works of the ancient Greeks and Persian texts were translated into Arabic, which would become a new lingua franca around the empire. Proficiency in Arabic allowed for a language between cultures. One particularly gifted linguist translated well over a hundred works by famous authors like Galen and Hippocrates. In cases like the work of Aristotle, the Arabic translations are how the work even survived to modern day. Places like the House of Wisdom had extensive translations. These experts came from all over the empire, and many were Zoroastrians and Christians working with Muslims. Once a work was translated, they made several copies for distribution, using scribes with especially good handwriting. This movement is the work that kept the western canon preserved. With that established, now we can look into the social sciences and the humanities, which in the Middle Ages is just philosophy. The social sciences were a long way off from being formalized. However, a man by the name of Ibn Khaldun who lived during the Islamic Golden Age is often considered the founder of many social sciences like demography, economics, historiography and sociology. Ibn Khaldun was an upper class Tunisian scholar. Due to the status of his family, he received a top tier classical Islamic education. This education would include Arabic, Quran and Hadith studies and law and jurisprudence study. He also successfully underwent the tasks to become a Hafiz, which is a torturous process very few Muslims do to memorize the entire Quran. On top of this education, he learned maths, philosophy and classical logic. But Ibn Khaldun didn't get into all of his social science work until half day finished a successful career as a politician in particularly unstable times in Tunisia. In the last years of his life, he penned an autobiography as well as a world history book called the Kitab al-Ibar or the Book of Lessons. To this day, the book's chapters on the history of North African Berber people are still used as a source. In the book, he speaks of two different walks of life, both common in North Africa of his day, that of nomadic and sedentary peoples. He wrote of the effects of the conquest of a city on its inhabitants, both based on a central concept called asabia or social cohesion. It might seem rudimentary, but this is considered some of the first works of sociological research. As he broke down the concept, he spoke of social factors leading to economic, political and even psychological differences in cultures. This type of work would not see serious scholarly development until the 19th century. When discussing economics, it appears Ibn Khaldun is responsible for developing the labor theory of value, a central concept of economics even today. Ideas like economic growth, taxation and GDP are centuries ahead of their time, if not a millennium. Lastly, he made a strict by-facation of what he called the non-religious sciences and the religious sciences. It was an attempt to settle a significant debate between those who wanted to focus on science and philosophy and scholars who promoted a mystic understanding of Islamic theology. This mysticism, which is the heart of any religion, let alone Islam, later known as Tasawuf or Sufism, became then frowned upon. Especially after my last video on Imam El-Rizali, I got a lot of backlash. How Sufism is an invention, how Tasawuf is an invention, an innovation, how mysticism itself has no place in Islam. With all the respect, I do not understand how anybody can hold that position, especially if we look into the Islamic Golden Age. Where the humanities shined, however, was in philosophy. Islamic philosophy in this age subscribed to one of two major currents. The first was Calam, which focused more on questions to do with theology. This featured discussions about free will and rationality. One sect which took a rigorous adherence to rationality as the proper way to understand questions of theology were the Metazolites. They in turn debated with any other schools, such as Maturidia, which did not see the Hadiths as reliable texts at odds with reason, and largely believed in free will. Another major theological school was the Ashari, whose concepts of free will were limited to choosing possibilities outlined for you by an all-knowing god. Much of the logic and discussions these currents had with each other spoke of heavy influence from Greek philosophers. One medieval theologian, Ibn Tamir, even described many of these discussions as Greek solutions to Greek problems which should never have concerned Muslims in the first place. Ibn Tamir's criticism speaks to another significant theological divergence in Islamic philosophy. All of these schools used reasoned approaches to Islam and as such rejected literalist interpretations. This did not go unopposed by some in the clergy who worried that this kind of thinking challenged their status in society. However, the remnants of Kalam scholars still have a significant presence in the Islam of today. Kalam is now merely the word for theology and Islamic theology is still very academic. The second major school of philosophy is what we might more easily recognize as philosophy today. Even at the time they borrowed the word philosophy from Greek and called this school Phalsafa. These were the scholars who discussed and built upon the works of Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato, publishing massive commentaries and philosophical texts. Some of these scholars were responsible for introducing their ideas as well as those of the Greeks and Hindus into Western Christian thought. This transfer of knowledge is one of the main reasons Aristotle went on to play such a significant role in Christian theology. One philosopher, even sinner, broke ground in the realm of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the area of philosophy which attempts to understand the fundamentals of reality, the study of objects, properties and existence itself. One major schism when it comes to the prominent Greek philosophers of Aristotle and Plato was a debate about forms. The form, or essence of something, is what makes an object fundamentally that sort of thing. Its shape, highlights and so forth. A triangle is a triangle because it has three sides as a basic example. Plato believed that all things, even abstract things, existed in a world of forms where the perfect idea of a thing exists. What we see are mere shadows of that thing. Aristotle rejected this idea. This is essentially the description of God being all the potential there is and every time we get an idea it comes directly from God. We are manifesting it into this world but it already existed because God resides in a place that has no time and space and therefore in this time frame we are extracting ideas that come from the ether so to speak than not our own ideas. If you look at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for example, it is absolutely mind blowing if you ever tried it because the human bodies act like puzzle pieces. For you to be able to catch an armbar on another person, it requires all of those limbs that have been created by God. We fit onto each other like puzzle pieces. Those moves existed somewhere but we didn't practice them. It took thousands and thousands of years for humans to discover that they can use their bodies in that certain fashion and that means that potential has to come from somewhere, from somewhere outside, not from ourselves. And this is why I have to agree with Plato here. All things, no matter if abstract or not, already exist within God. It is up to us to extract those ideas and bring them into the physical. The perfect idea of a thing exists. What we see are mere shadows of that thing. Aristotle rejected this idea, opting to believe that an object's form existed in this world and that all objects were made of both object and form. Ibn Sina wanted to marry these two ideas in an exploration of the soul and also to prove the soul exists. He did so with a thought experiment. It's a famous one from philosophical history, the floating man. In this, he wants to imagine a man falling freely in the air. With no ability to see other things in reference to oneself, a person could still experience their presence and consciousness. Ibn Sina believed this to be evidence that there is a soul, which is immaterial within, showing both external properties but also of another plane, attempting to marry the two concepts. This idea is very similar to the famous starting point for Descartes, who centuries later would become famous for his line, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. In the realm of epistemology, the philosophical work of understanding knowledge, learning and understanding, philosophers works to understand the human mind. For the sake of this video, let's discuss one back and forth in the realm of the story of self-education, also known as autodidactism. Arab philosopher Ibn al-Nafis, to explore the idea of how one might learn without any other humans, wrote a philosophical novel called Theologious Autodidactus. This novel was a first on many fronts, founding many literary mainstays. It was one of the first Arabic language novels ever made. It had a coming of age story, long before that was to become a popular theme. It took place on a desert island, of which it may have been one of the first examples. It even had elements of the apocalypse and explaining the afterlife with astronomy, biology and theology, which have led some historians to consider it a very early inkling of what would become science fiction. The novel itself is about a boy who spontaneously came to life on a desert island and meets castaways who wind up on his home. Ibn al-Nafis wrote the main character, Camille, to be a complete human blank slate in which to observe the world. It's about how an uninitiated person comes to find the necessity of God, Islam and rationality. The character then explores the sciences and philosophy. It's not a page-turner, but it acted as an essay to explore many different ideas about the world Ibn al-Nafis knew about as a polymath. It was a response to a desert island book called Hey ibn Yaqdan, which itself was a response to the incoherence of the philosophers. They were interested in which aspects of rational thought and belief came innately from the human mind and which had been learned. Theologious autodidactus and Hey ibn Yaqdan both featured feral children who explored their various ideas on it. These philosophers would have massive impacts on philosophers throughout the centuries. Ibn Sina, mentioned earlier, is often called in the West Avicenna and is one of the greats. Avaroys or Ibn Rushd, as well as Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali and Al-Kindi are all some of the most revered philosophers in the history of ideas. Their work influenced how Western Christians came to conceive of God, the ways they argued his existence, and conceptions of the soul. The translation projects brought the Greco-Roman Philips. It's so fascinating to see that Christians argue for Christianity based upon Muslim philosophy, where they otherwise might not have been preserved. It's tough to conceive of Western civilization without the contributions of the Muslim philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age, and we're just scratching the surface with philosophy. Over the next videos in this series, we'll look at other places where the Islamic Golden Age changed the world. Next time we'll look at the sciences, as well as mathematics, then medicine and healthcare, then inventions and engineers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the multitude of technological innovations. So make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button. I personally learned a lot of new things here and I would love to continue my exploration of the Golden Age, as I said throughout the video guys. If there is something, an event in history, a specific performance, a chess move, whatever it may be, it can be replicated by thorough analysis. All you have to do is identify the strengths and weaknesses. You have to really particularly look into the details of what went right and what went wrong. If you take all parameters into account, you cannot go wrong. You simply replicate the same thing. It is very, very simple ultimately. This is the law of physics. So I truly believe in a reoccurrence of the Islamic Golden Age, especially, as I said yet again, with the current momentum that Islam has. Look at it. How many new converts to Islam. Look at how much exposure Islam is getting on social media or even the mainstream media. Of course, this would be a momentum effort, but I truly believe if the Muslim community works together and not against each other, it can be done. All right guys, but this is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave the thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. And if you want to support this channel via Patreon, for example, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support guys. As always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.