The geometry of Islamic art becomes a game

The English word 'paradise' is from the Old Iranian word for 'walled garden'.

Fascinating, thank you very much!

I'm in the UK. "This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." So probably not pirated!

In case it's unclear, I believe people are down-voting you because you speak as though everyone in the US is anti-Islam. The Trump government and their supporters may well be, but more broadly the anti-Islam sentiment is a fiction, especially among the intellectually curious and doing-our-best-to-be-welcoming HN audience. I know you probably meant well with your comment, it just feels bad because this is such a sore spot.

My question is not to you specifically, but to history-aware users of HN. How much of cultural sense came there from Islam and how much from the original culture before so-called Islamic revolutions, which happened almost yesterday? Why do we attribute the culture to specific religion, which wasn’t even at the core of specific nation until some time?

I know that counter-attitudes are strong, but simply image-googling “xyz before islamic revolution” shows undeniable contrast. How to resolve?

I've been wanting to go to Iran for a long time! Did you go by yourself or with a tour agency? I feel like an organized tour would kill a lot of the allure but at the same time I think I would feel way too lost on my own.

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I rephrased it to: "The European Reinassance was essentially the assimilation of the cultural wealth amassed by the Islamic empire."

This is more accurate. But I think their influence was much more far reaching than just passing on Greek literature:

- Before paper, parchments were used. A bible took 3000 sheep or goat to print.

- They adopted Indian numerals and adapted them to the form we use today. Imagine Copernicus calculating trajectories of planets with Roman numbers.

- Nicolaus Copernicus started his studies using almanacs and tables such as the Alfonsine tables, the tables were originally in Arabic and were collected/translated by Alfonso X of Castile in Toledo. They included observations ranging from the days of Ptolomy onwards.

- Many Western discoveries came from innovations in optics (e.g: telescope, microscope). The Islamic empire did great contributions to the field of optics. They experimented with reflection, refraction, lenses, etc... and that is original work with literature to support it.

The “Greeks” (Hellenistic scholars) were actually from Egypt, Asia Minor, Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Italy, Macedonia, etc. in addition to Greece.

There was a 1000 year period where Greek was the lingua franca of math/astronomy/engineering in the Mediterranean, from about 500 BCE to 500 CE. There was a lot of contemporaneous science done in Persia, with knowledge shared back and forth. But calling these “Greeks” is sort of like calling anyone publishing science in English in 1990 (including Chinese, Russians, Brazilians, ...) “Americans”.

Many of those “Greek” ideas were originally developed during the 3000 years prior, when the centers of mathematics and technical culture were Egypt and Mesopotamia, written in Egyptian, Sumerian, or Akkadian.

Then from about 500 CE to 1500 CE, the centers of scholarship were in India and throughout the Islamic World (Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, ...). The first couple hundred years of Western European mathematics is basically republication of stuff that had been developed by the Arabs hundreds of years earlier.

At some point about 500 years ago Christian Western Europeans (Germans, French, English, Dutch, Italians, ..) got their mathematical shit together, and dominated science for about 400 years. More recently, science and technology happen around the world.

This is no longer held by most western medievalists/orientalists/etc. let alone by the descendant of the peoples of concern.

There are too many references, but here is one to start with: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/islamic-science-and-making-eu...