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00:06This is a series about the Dark Ages, when civilisation was said to have stopped and ignorance flooded the world.
00:17I've been trying to convince you that it didn't happen, that the Dark Ages were a fine era for art.
00:25But in this film, I'm going further.
00:30The art we'll be looking at in this film is some of the most sophisticated ever made.
00:36If any art challenges the myth of the Dark Ages, it's the art of Islam.
01:00And I'm going further.
01:05We're going further.
01:29This is Cordoba in Spain.
01:32That's the great mosque of Cordoba up there.
01:35And this handy little dark age gadget is an astrolabe.
01:41Some people call this the first computer.
01:45And what this thing does is calculate exactly where you are by using the stars.
01:54Islamic stargazers perfected the astrolabe in the dark ages to work out the direction of Mecca.
02:02So they always knew which way to pray.
02:06And it filled their art with cosmic patterns.
02:12Later on, I'll be showing you how to use one of these, I hope.
02:16But first, we need to travel back in time to the beginnings of Islam.
02:22To the first fascinating creations of Islamic art and architecture.
02:30So right now, we're here in Cordoba, in Spain.
02:34To go back to the beginnings of Islamic art, we need to go right across the Mediterranean to here.
02:44Jerusalem, the heart of the religious dark ages.
02:49What huge dramas have been enacted here?
02:53What important art has been created?
02:56Most of it's gone, unfortunately.
02:59But not all of it.
03:00Some of it has survived.
03:03Notably, that magnificent golden dome on the horizon.
03:08The Dome of the Rock.
03:12It's one of the most significant buildings ever put up.
03:16A piece of architecture that changed history.
03:20You couldn't really ask for a more dramatic location, could you?
03:25And if you think it looks good from up here, on the Mount of Olives,
03:28just wait till we get closer.
03:35Muhammad died in 632 AD.
03:39And for the first 50 years or so after his death,
03:42Islam was preoccupied with conquest.
03:47The speed at which the Islamic empire expanded was remarkable.
03:53In just a few decades, it went from nothing to gigantic.
03:58It was the most dramatic, most aggressive and fastest feat of empire building the world has seen.
04:10This is the Islamic empire just 100 years after Muhammad's death.
04:16Up here, the whole of Spain.
04:19All of North Africa.
04:21The entire Middle East.
04:24As far across as the borders of India.
04:33But all this astonishingly successful conquest
04:37didn't leave much time for art.
04:40Almost nothing survives from the first years of Islam.
04:44Clearly, art wasn't a priority.
04:48And then, out of nothing, as if by magic, this appears.
04:54The dome of the rock.
04:59Nothing in Islamic art prepares us for this.
05:03It's just suddenly there.
05:06A definitive Islamic creation seemingly conjured out of thin air.
05:13It's like a flying saucer or something that's landed out of nowhere.
05:18And something you sense immediately, even from this distance,
05:22is the powerful geometry of it.
05:25That air of mathematical clarity.
05:29And that's something that continues in Islamic architecture.
05:40As you can see, it's an octagon. It's got eight sides.
05:44And octagons have a special symbolic presence.
05:48Because they combine the geometry of a circle with the geometry of a square.
05:54I'll show you.
05:56If I draw a circle here.
06:06And then, two intersecting squares.
06:16Here.
06:21And here.
06:26The shape they form.
06:28The shape in the middle.
06:40That's the octagon.
06:45The octagon is a surprisingly popular dark age shape, with powerful sacred meanings.
06:53If the earth is a square and heaven is a perfect circle, the octagon is a symbolic bridge between the
07:01two.
07:03All the proportions of the dome of the rock are meaningful.
07:06So these walls here, the walls of the octagon, each of those is about 20 metres long.
07:19And the dome in the middle, the height of that is again about 20 metres.
07:27And the diameter of it is also 20 metres.
07:32So all these proportions have been carefully calculated and have a purpose.
07:40It's as if the entire building has been shaped by a divine mathematics.
07:47And those divine mathematics have given it a sacred meaning.
07:55This location, Temple Mount, is the holiest spot in Jerusalem.
07:59This is where King Solomon built the first Jewish temple.
08:03The one destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar.
08:06And then Herod, the infamous King Herod, built the second temple here as well.
08:14Herod's temple was made entirely from white marble.
08:18And was so huge, it covered 67 acres of this sacred location.
08:24So grand, so pompous, and to my eyes, so inelegant.
08:33So the Dome of the Rock sits on layer upon layer of crucial religious history.
08:40And when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 AD and claimed this site for Islam,
08:47they took possession of what is probably the most loaded religious spot on Earth.
08:54And that's just the outside.
09:00For me, this mysterious interior is one of the most atmospheric achievements of the Dark Ages.
09:10There's something so haunting about the way the light works in here.
09:15The shimmer of the mosaics.
09:18The whispers of the calligraphy.
09:27Basically, it's a circular shrine.
09:30It's not a mosque.
09:31It's a place of pilgrimage that's been built around a sacred site.
09:37And the site that's all been built around is the site of this holy rock here.
09:45The Jews believe this is the rock on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac.
09:53And the Ark of the Covenant is thought to lie hidden somewhere underneath as well.
10:04Islam has a different tradition.
10:06Islam believes that this is the holy rock from which the prophet Muhammad set off on his great night journey
10:14to heaven.
10:16The angel Gabriel came to visit Muhammad in Mecca and brought him here to Jerusalem.
10:21And from this rock, the prophet ascended to heaven.
10:26And there, in paradise, he met God.
10:30And God instructed him on the Muslim duty of prayer.
10:40So this holy rock, like the architecture around it, is a point of contact between man and God.
10:48And that's the religious message of the whole building.
10:52If you saw the first film in this series, you'll recognise this shape.
10:58Because we've seen it before.
10:59This type of encircling architecture built over a precious site is something we found in the round churches of Byzantium.
11:11Remember San Vitale in Ravenna.
11:14And Santa Constanza in Rome.
11:20The Muslim Caliph, Abed al-Malik, who built the Dome of the Rock, was deliberately taking on the architecture of
11:28the Christians.
11:28This round shape, the proportions. None of it is an accident.
11:38Abed al-Malik also added an explicit inscription which runs all the way round.
11:44And which gives the date in which the dome was finished, 691 A.D.
11:50And it also includes a stern message to the Christians.
11:56Oh, you people of the book, it says, meaning the Bible.
12:02Jesus is only a messenger of God.
12:07God is only one God.
12:12It's a deliberate challenge to the Christians.
12:15Jesus is just a prophet.
12:17There's only one God.
12:19And gods don't have sons.
12:22This entire building is taking on Christianity.
12:29Look at that.
12:30From floor to ceiling.
12:33It's covered in the most exquisite mosaics.
12:37Gold and green.
12:38There's a palm tree.
12:41And these beautiful jeweled crowns.
12:45And all the pieces of the mosaic are set at different angles.
12:50So they reflect the light differently at different times of day.
12:55And all this, all these glorious mosaics, are intended to evoke a vision of paradise.
13:08When you look there in paradise, says the Koran, you will see delights that cannot be imagined.
13:17Fruits of every kind and all that you ask for.
13:23At a stroke, Islam had invented for itself an unmistakable new architecture.
13:31And at the centre of this new architecture was a vision of paradise.
13:45The Islamic paradise is a green and verdant alternative to the harsh desert landscape in which Islam was born.
13:54These are lands where water is precious.
13:58And so is hope.
14:03Just a few years after the Dome of the Rock was finished, the Umayyad Caliphs in Damascus gave the world
14:11another wonderful Islamic structure.
14:15The Damascus Mosque.
14:17I think it's one of the most exciting buildings I've ever been in.
14:23And look what's on the walls.
14:27Inside the fabulous Damascus Mosque, the Umayyad Caliphs set out actually to describe paradise.
14:37And to surround the Islamic pilgrim with delightful and irresistible visions of it.
14:45It's one of Islam's most dramatic artistic moments.
14:50These are the joys that await us in heaven.
14:53These are the beautiful cities in which we all live.
14:58And this is the water, the cool and endless water, that we will drink.
15:12Those magnificent images of paradise in the great mosque at Damascus are like images of a wonderful oasis in the
15:20desert.
15:21With water, palm trees, flowers, everything that's so hard to find out here.
15:28And the Islamic paradise promises so many pleasures in the next life to the true believer.
15:37All you can drink, all you can eat, and all you can dream of.
15:49This is Khazir Amra.
15:51It's one of the desert palaces which the Umayyad rulers of Damascus built out here to get away from the
15:58city.
15:59Its heat and its pressures.
16:04No one's certain which of the Umayyad princes chose this distant desert location.
16:10Was it the Caliph, al-Walid I, or al-Walid II?
16:16What is sure is why they chose this particular spot.
16:22Khazir Amra is built in a wadi, the Wadi al-Batum.
16:26And wadis are desert valleys that fill up seasonally with water.
16:31So when it rains in the desert, the precious water floods through the wadi and fertilises it.
16:41Round the back of the building, over here, are various contraptions for channelling this water through the palace.
16:52Because, believe it or not, what you have before you here is a bathhouse.
17:03Khazir Amra is a bathing establishment in the desert.
17:08One of the earliest surviving secular buildings of Islam.
17:17The reason we've driven all this way across the desert to find it is because this fabulous bathhouse in the
17:25sands has something remarkable inside it.
17:28Something you'd never expect to find here.
17:34Floor-to-ceiling Islamic frescoes.
17:41A troupe of acrobats gives a busy performance.
17:45And there's a bear strumming a lute.
17:50There's so much going on in here.
17:54And a group of statuesque female dancers show off their figures and their beauty.
18:05The dancing girls are particularly surprising.
18:09We're just not used to Islamic imagery as abandoned as this.
18:13But it's important to remember that this is just as old and just as traditional as everything else we've seen.
18:20This, too, is a precious Islamic heritage.
18:25A negative way to understand Khazir Amra's remarkable frescoes is to see them as signs of moral relaxation.
18:36Away from Damascus, deep in the desert, a wayward Umayyad prince is indulging an appetite for wine and music and
18:46women.
18:50But I don't think that is what it's about.
18:53If we go back to the many descriptions of paradise in the Koran, there are constant references to the pleasures
19:01available there.
19:02Rivers of wine served in crystal cups, beautiful flowers, beautiful jewels and beautiful girls.
19:13For the righteous, says the Koran, there shall be gardens and vineyards and high-bosomed virgins for companions.
19:23Dark-eyed and bashful, as fair as corals and rubies.
19:31Inside here is the caldarium, the hot room.
19:35And in here, the Umayyad prince would soak himself in hot water, heated up by all those gubbins we saw
19:43outside.
19:44And as he lay here in his bath, the Umayyad prince would stare up at the dome,
19:51where he'd see something wondrous, an evocation of the stars at night.
20:01This is the earliest known Islamic star chart, painted onto the dome at Qasir Amra.
20:09Around the edge are the twelve signs of the zodiac.
20:13And in the middle, frescoed representations of the constellations.
20:20The great bear.
20:22The little bear.
20:25What a thing to find in an eighth-century bathhouse.
20:29A fabulous image of the heavens at night above your head.
20:34It's as if someone's taken the roof off the dome and looked out into the sky at night in the
20:40desert,
20:41full of twinkling stars.
20:43What a beautiful idea.
20:56It takes a bit of getting to Qasir Amra, but I wanted to make it clear right from the start,
21:01that Islamic art, from its beginnings in the dark ages, has this sensuous dimension to it.
21:08A relationship to pleasure that you just don't find in other art.
21:17Scattered across this great Syrian desert are the remains of fantastical Umayyad palaces,
21:25filled once with beautiful mosaics and marvellous colonnades.
21:30What tangible sensuousness you find here, in this first Islamic art.
21:42These eighth-century desert palaces must once have been filled with the accoutrements of pleasure.
21:49Vases, hangings, plates and cups, almost all of which have disappeared.
21:58But in 1986, here in Jordan, they dug up this.
22:03It's an eighth-century Islamic brazier, and it gives us a tiny hint of what life was like in the
22:11Qasir Amra bathhouse.
22:16The brazier was used to heat up the prince's room, and for burning incense.
22:23Originally, there were wheels on it, and it could be wheeled around from room to room to fill them with
22:30sweet smells.
22:32It's made of iron and bronze.
22:35And at the front here, as you can see, there are these arches, a little bit like the ones in
22:39Qasir Amra.
22:40And inside the arches are scenes of love-making and couples canoodling.
22:46And it's all so atmospheric and so beautifully done.
22:51I mean, look at these eagles at the bottom, the way they've been shaped, their wings, their feathers.
22:57This is metalwork of the highest quality.
23:04At the four corners, four cuddly nudes prepare to release a small bird into the incense-filled air above them.
23:16And there's a floaty feeling to this marvellous metalwork.
23:22What a beautiful thing.
23:24And the figurative sculptures you see here, the female figures, are again very surprising.
23:29Because this is an aspect of Islamic art that was there at the start.
23:33It's very traditional, but which modern Islam often forgets.
23:39The beautiful brazier was an object of private delectation.
23:44It had no religious purpose.
23:47But it's important to remember that sensuality played a role in the art of these times.
23:54In the beginning, this was Islamic art too.
23:58And this.
24:00This.
24:01And this.
24:06When joy was called for, Islamic art inspired great joy.
24:13And when sobriety was more appropriate, it achieved great sobriety.
24:22This is the finest early mosque in Cairo, the mosque of Ibn Tulun.
24:28I like everything about it.
24:32But most of all, I admire its architectural seriousness.
24:38The way you know, as soon as you step in here, that this is a space devoted to important understandings.
24:49Ahmed Ibn Tulun, who founded this mosque in 879 AD, was the son of a Turkish slave who became governor
24:58of Egypt.
24:59Originally, the mosque stood at the centre of a new city that Ibn Tulun also founded.
25:05The city of Al-Qatai.
25:07But Al-Qatai was destroyed in the 10th century.
25:11And this is all that's left of it.
25:16They say Ibn Tulun chose this site because this is where Noah's Ark came to rest.
25:24There was certainly water here.
25:27That domed creation in the centre is the eblutions fountain, where all Muslims must wash themselves before prayers.
25:37All mosques, and not just this one, are based on the very first mosque, which was the prophet's own house
25:44in Medina.
25:46It was a typical mud brick dwelling with a courtyard.
25:49And in that courtyard.
25:50And in that courtyard, the prophet's followers would gather to hear him speak.
25:55So all these great courtyard of Islam, all of them, are descended directly from the prophet's own courtyard.
26:07Their evocative sparseness is an echo of their origins, and their sun-baked simplicity has been there from the start.
26:19The walls that encircle you here are like the walls of the prophet's own courtyard.
26:26Their task is to keep the outside world at bay.
26:30And here, at Ibn Tulun, there's actually two sets of walls.
26:36A kind of double glazing that separates you from the hustle and bustle out there.
26:45I like these playful crenellations, arranged along the top as well.
26:51They look like paper cut-outs.
26:54Something my daughter might have made.
26:59To protect his followers from the sun, the prophet built a simple shelter at the end of his courtyard,
27:06with a roof made out of palm branches and leaves.
27:10And that simple shelter was the inspiration for these great arcades,
27:17which still protect the prophet's followers from the sun.
27:24The shelters in his courtyard were also used as somewhere to meet and discuss community affairs.
27:34And that marvellous communal atmosphere of a space with many purposes is something else that survives to this day in
27:43the Islamic mosque.
27:48The largest covered space was the prayer hall, which was basically the prophet's own house at the end of the
27:55courtyard.
27:56And in every prayer hall today, there's a continuation of this marvellous Islamic sense.
28:04That underneath all this mighty religious architecture, you can still feel the humble presence of the prophet's own dwelling.
28:15These prayer halls are so welcoming.
28:19They have a sense of the living room about them.
28:23A home from home.
28:28Most mosques are square or rectangular in plan.
28:33And that's because they're all arranged in relation to this wall here, which is called the Qibla wall.
28:44The Qibla wall indicates the direction of Mecca.
28:49In Arabic, the word Qibla means direction.
28:54And in Muhammad's house, a simple spear stuck in the ground would mark the way to pray.
29:04The centre of the Qibla wall is marked by the mihrab, which is always the most ornate part of the
29:12wall, usually a niche.
29:15And these niches were probably inspired by the culminating niches of Byzantine churches, Christian architecture.
29:25And to the right of the mihrab is the minbar, or pulpit.
29:30And this is based once again on the prophet's own house.
29:36They say that when Muhammad had gathered so many followers, he could no longer be heard by everyone.
29:44He stepped up onto some blocks of wood.
29:47And those are the origins of the minbar.
29:54How fascinating that all the great mosques of Islam inherited their wonderful clarity, their simplicity and their underlying sacred geometry
30:06from the humble house of the prophet.
30:11Look at all that wonderful stucco work around the arches, all that repetition and variety.
30:17This is art used in a different way, not to illustrate something, but to create a visual rhythm.
30:28Christian churches are full of pictures that tell you stories.
30:33But there are no pictures in these great Islamic interiors.
30:38The decoration here communicates in other ways.
30:44There's a sense of endlessness to it.
30:47It develops in all directions.
30:50And it makes you feel part of something that's bigger than you.
30:58So there are no pictures.
31:00Instead, all the way round runs this Quranic inscription carved into wood.
31:07You know, I said this mosque was built on the site where Noah's Ark was said to have come to
31:13rest.
31:13Well, another story they tell here is that this Quranic inscription is carved on the actual wood from Noah's Ark.
31:24At the mosque of Ibn Tulum, the Quranic inscription runs for two kilometres around the building.
31:32That's one-fifteenth of the entire Quran written up on these walls.
31:39This is the word of God in its most sacred and purest form.
31:46The power of the word is one of the great creative obsessions of the Dark Ages.
31:53And in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the most beguiling of the first Quran's, the so-called Blue Quran,
32:03turns the words of God into such glorious art.
32:23I don't know if you remember the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s.
32:28It was rather controversial.
32:30The President of Egypt, President Nasser, joined up with the Russians to build a dam across the Nile.
32:37And various archaeological sites were lost forever or had to be moved to new locations stone by stone.
32:45All sorts of ecological disasters were predicted for the dam, most of which haven't happened.
32:57The conquest of water was another of Islam's great achievements in the Dark Ages.
33:04In Cairo, the Nile would overflow its banks every summer.
33:09And the agriculture of the entire Nile Delta depended on the success of this fertile flooding.
33:18Thick black silt, rich with nutrients, would be deposited across the flood plain, ensuring a splendid harvest.
33:27That was in the good years.
33:29In the bad years, the levels were either too low, which meant disaster, or too high, which also meant disaster.
33:38The Aswan Dam was built to control that process.
33:44So, you might wonder, what did they do before?
33:51In Islamic times, they used this, the celebrated Nile-O-Meter of Rhoda Island on the Nile.
34:00Opened for business in 861 AD, it's one of the oldest Islamic monuments in Egypt.
34:08And what dramatic evidence it offers of the aquatic brilliance of Islam's engineers.
34:17What this thing does is measure the height of the Nile flood.
34:22It's basically a big well, sunk some ten metres under the level of the river.
34:28In the middle is an octagonal marble column.
34:32A kind of giant ruler, which, as you can see, is marked off at different heights.
34:42The measurements are in cubits, and one cubit is about half a metre.
34:47So, around 16 cubits is the perfect flood. Fertile, controllable.
34:55Below 16 cubits, there's not enough water. So, famine conditions ahead.
35:02And higher up, once you get past 19 cubits, that's really bad.
35:08A catastrophic flood.
35:14The Islamic authorities in Cairo used the Great Nile-O-Meter to calculate their annual tax demands.
35:24The perfect flood meant perfect profits ahead.
35:29Thus, this brilliant piece of design was an early Islamic alternative to the pocket calculator.
35:39Before they built the Aswan Dam, these tunnels here led off into the Nile at three different levels.
35:47So, if they weren't closed off now, I would be under water.
35:53And look at those pointed arches above the tunnels.
35:58I mean, that's pure Gothic, 400 years early.
36:06The Nile-O-Meter was designed by the famed Persian astronomer Abul Abbas Ahmed ibn Muhammad ibn Khatir al-Fagani.
36:16Better known to us by his Latin name, Alphraganus.
36:23Alphraganus's most famous achievement as an astronomer was calculating the diameter of the Earth.
36:29Copernicus was said to have used his results.
36:32And there's even a crater on the moon named after him, the Alphraganus crater.
36:39But it isn't just science that created this, and it isn't just commerce either.
36:45All the way round, there are also these beautiful Quranic inscriptions in a lovely Kufic script.
36:53Thou seest the Earth barren and lifeless, it says at the 17 cubit mark.
37:00But when we pour rain on it, it is stirred to life.
37:08At the Nile-O-Meter in Cairo, science, commerce and faith have combined in a uniquely Islamic fashion to create
37:18a technological wonder.
37:20This entire series is about how the Dark Ages weren't dark.
37:26But sometimes I should just shut up and let you see the proof for yourselves.
37:32Because it couldn't be more obvious.
37:44This is Karawan in Tunisia.
37:48Once this was a city of enormous power, the most important Islamic outpost in North Africa.
37:55Now, it's a marvellous place to visit for any true student of the Dark Ages.
38:04Karawan, they say, was founded by the great Arab warrior, Sidi Akbar ibn Nafi,
38:10who conquered these parts for Islam just 50 years after the death of the prophet.
38:16When Sidi Akbar got here, this was all desert.
38:20But something made him pause and look down at his feet.
38:26When Sidi looked down, he saw a miraculous spring of fresh water bubbling up.
38:32And in that water, a golden cup, which he'd lost many years before at the Holy Spring in Mecca.
38:40The underground waters seemed to have carried it here, so it was clearly a sign.
38:47And on this holy spot, Sidi Akbar founded Karawan.
38:58At the centre of the new city, he built a new mosque.
39:02The oldest such mosque in North Africa.
39:06From the outside, there's not much sign of it.
39:10Islam isn't a religion that flaunts itself in the streets.
39:14But when you get inside, into the great courtyard of the Sidi Akbar mosque,
39:20what a powerful sight awaits you.
39:26Another practical use for these great mosque courtyards,
39:30particularly here in Karawan, where it's so dry,
39:32is for collecting water.
39:35When it rains, all the water is channelled down here to the centre.
39:40And see these decorative openings?
39:43They actually have a practical purpose.
39:45When the water flows through them, all these arabesques,
39:49they actually filter out the impurities, the dust, the feathers.
39:53And then the water, pure and clean, is saved below in two giant cisterns,
39:59so all of Karawan can make use of it.
40:05Because it was built from nothing,
40:07Karawan is a particularly pure Islamic city.
40:12There are few traces here of the Romans or the Vandals or the Byzantines.
40:20In Karawan, Islam started from scratch.
40:29Except here, in the courtyard of the mosque.
40:32Look at this column, look at the top.
40:33What is that, Corinthian?
40:35Next to it, I don't know, Phoenician?
40:38Over here? Roman, perhaps?
40:41Could even be Egyptian, who knows?
40:44Of the 414 columns arranged around this great courtyard of the mosque in Karawan,
40:51no two are the same.
40:53Every column is different.
40:57That's because they were all taken from other people's temples and palaces and city halls.
41:04This entire mosque was built from bits and pieces of other ancient buildings.
41:12In the old days, it was actually forbidden to count the columns in here.
41:17Anyone caught doing it was blinded.
41:22If you look closely, you find some really surprising things about this courtyard.
41:27For example, up here is a Christian cross.
41:31So this column must have come from a Byzantine church.
41:35But through some miracle of architectural power, despite all this busy borrowing,
41:43the end result is an unmistakable sense of Islamic unity.
41:49This space could have come from nowhere else.
41:52This is unmistakably an Islamic space.
42:03There are many remarkable things about the Karawan Mosque.
42:08But particularly remarkable, I think, is the proof that is offered here
42:13that architecture is an art form of spaces, not of details.
42:19Of courtyards, not of capitals.
42:27See the tower here? It's got these slabs of stone at the base, with Latin inscriptions on them.
42:34See this one here? It's upside down.
42:37So these must have come from a Roman building.
42:42This is actually the oldest surviving Islamic minaret.
42:46And it's got a bulky, militaristic presence,
42:49rising up in these three squat pieces.
42:53But, like all minarets, its original purpose is glorious.
42:58To spread the word.
43:00To share the news.
43:02To shine a light.
43:07The minaret is one of the defining Islamic achievements of the Dark Ages.
43:14Islam did much that was inventive and progressive in architecture.
43:19But in its minarets, it surpassed itself.
43:26This word minaret comes from the Arabic manara, which means lighthouse.
43:31Lighthouse.
43:32And that's its function.
43:33To be a beacon of hope.
43:35To offer safety and protection.
43:38And, of course, the faithful were called to prayer from up there.
43:42In the very first mosque, built by Mohammed,
43:45the faithful were called from the rooftops.
43:48But as cities got bigger, mosques got bigger,
43:52you needed somewhere higher up from which to broadcast the faith.
43:59And look what inventive shapes were found for this conquest of the sky.
44:05This is the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samara in Iraq.
44:09Its nickname, for obvious reasons, is the snail shell.
44:15No one else in the Dark Ages built anything as aerially ambitious as this.
44:23And it wasn't just the mosques.
44:26This extraordinary brick masterpiece in Iran
44:30is the tomb of the Zirayad prince, Kabus ibn Vashimgir.
44:36It's a thousand years old.
44:39But looks like something the bower house might have come up with, don't you think?
44:46Inside, Kabus had himself suspended at his death,
44:50in a coffin of pure rock crystal.
44:56What a thrilling Islamic conquest of the heavens.
45:09Speaking of rock crystal, it's a very special substance, isn't it?
45:16According to the Koran, when the chosen arrive in paradise,
45:21they'll be given drinks of ginger, served in goblets of crystal.
45:33Crystal, or rock crystal to be more specific,
45:37was a substance with which Islam seemed to have a special affinity.
45:42They say it was Ahmed ibn Tulun himself
45:45who introduced the art of carving rock crystals into Egypt.
45:50What's certain is that it was in Egypt
45:53that this difficult art reached perfection.
46:00I don't know about you, but I can't think of many substances in the world
46:04with a presence as magical as rock crystal.
46:11Particularly when it has passed through the hands of the master carvers of Islam.
46:17Only a handful of these gorgeous Islamic ewers have survived.
46:23And that just makes them feel even more precious.
46:29Rock crystal itself is actually very common.
46:33It's just a type of quartz.
46:35And quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth's crust.
46:39You get it everywhere.
46:40Look.
46:43There's a stripe of it here.
46:47What isn't common is pieces of quartz so pure and perfect and transparent
46:53that they satisfy the demands of the great crystal carvers of Islam.
47:00No one has ever carved rock crystal more finely than this.
47:06What they'd do is find a perfect lump of crystal and shape it on the outside
47:12and then begin hollowing out the inside.
47:16And they'd hollow it further and further and further.
47:19Till in the very best Islamic art, the walls of the crystal were only a couple of millimetres thick.
47:28Now that was unbelievably difficult.
47:35The shimmering images carved into these gorgeous crystal ewers
47:40would transport the drinker to paradise.
47:45Hunting scenes, flowers, beautiful birds.
47:50So crystal clear that none could resist them.
47:57And it wasn't just Islam that saw something magical in this rock crystal.
48:03In Ireland, when Ireland was still pagan,
48:06they used to put pieces of rock crystal at the entrance of the burial chambers.
48:12And in Egypt, they carved it into perfect spheres,
48:17which apparently kept your hands cool when you touched it.
48:21And of course, it was used for telling the future.
48:25And it still is.
48:32All sorts of Dark Age societies were fascinated by rock crystal.
48:38The Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, believed that rock crystal was actually frozen water,
48:47trapped for eons under the glaciers.
48:52Even the early Christians worshipped it.
48:55For them, rock crystal had a natural relationship with divine perfection.
49:01So they put it on the outside of their reliquaries and up in their golden crosses,
49:07where its perfect presence seemed somehow to connect them to God.
49:16Christian rock crystal has a different feel to it.
49:21In Christian hands, the light-filled paradise of Islam seemed to fill up with shadows.
49:29With Christian rock crystal, the dark ages are what you expect them to be.
49:36Mysterious, spooky and talismanic.
49:45The water engineers of Islam perfected their hydraulic skills in lands where water was precious and rare.
49:56So their relationship to it had something of the dream about it.
50:02For Islam, water wasn't just a necessity.
50:06It was an enticement too.
50:10This is Cordoba in Spain.
50:12The Muslim armies got here in 711 AD
50:16and conquered it from the Visigoths.
50:19Remember them from the last film.
50:21And when Islam arrived in Spain, it could not believe how fertile this new territory was.
50:28How full of paradisical waters.
50:35This is the Guadaljivir in Andalusia, the largest navigable river in Spain.
50:41The name is Islamic.
50:43It comes from Al-Wadi Al-Kabir, which means the great valley.
50:50These days, the Guadaljivir river is only navigable up to Seville.
50:55But in Islamic times, you could sail all the way up here to Cordoba.
51:01And in this great city, Islamic water architecture surpassed itself.
51:07All along the Guadaljivir, a cunning system of mills, dams and water wheels,
51:15channelled the energy of the waters.
51:18The water wheels of Cordoba lifted water from the river high up to the bank,
51:24where the gardeners of Islam used it to recreate paradise on earth.
51:34This isn't actually an Islamic garden.
51:38It's an Islamic style garden, built by the Christian kings here in Cordoba.
51:44Unfortunately, the original Islamic garden has disappeared.
51:48But Islam was here for 500 years.
51:52So this style of garden making is ingrained in the culture.
51:57And what you still get here is a vivid sense of how the Islamic garden felt.
52:06Fountains, waterways, flowers.
52:10These are the divine atmospheres of those magical paradisical mosaics we saw in the great mosque at Damascus.
52:19Except this time, they're real.
52:25To enter the mosque at Cordoba, you need to pass through another beautiful evocation of the paradise ahead.
52:35An orange grove, so divinely harmonious.
52:41This was obviously a very desirable location.
52:45They say there was a Visigoth church here originally.
52:50And later, when the Muslims were finally kicked out of Spain,
52:55a Catholic cathedral was plonked in the middle of the mosque,
52:59creating this ungainly hybrid.
53:02It was the Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman I, who began building the Cordoba mosque.
53:10He actually bought the land from the Christians.
53:14And in those early days of religious tolerance, Muslims and Christians shared the building.
53:23The Cordoba mosque is famous for its columns.
53:29856 of them.
53:32Like a rose of palm trees in the oasis of Syria, is how someone's described them.
53:39Columns are very laborious to make.
53:42And they use up a lot of precious stone, so they're very heavy.
53:46And if you can avoid making them, you will.
53:50For the Cordoba mosque, the columns came from the Visigoth church that was there before,
53:56and also from nearby Roman temples.
53:59But these reused Visigoth columns weren't quite tall enough.
54:05So to make the Cordoba mosque higher and more airy,
54:09the architects of Islam came up with a brilliant new idea.
54:14The double arch.
54:19Two arches for the price of one.
54:22At the bottom, the horseshoe arch, borrowed, as we saw in the last film, from the Visigoths.
54:30Then, on top of that, a round arch, arch number two, making the mosque taller, less solid-looking.
54:38More see-through.
54:41For the first time in European architecture, the aesthetics of light were shaping a building.
55:05Do you know, Cordoba, when the Muslims were here, had half a million people living in it.
55:10It was by far the largest and most prosperous city in Western Europe.
55:15And all of those inhabitants had running water.
55:19They had toilets that flushed.
55:22Street lamps.
55:23In the tenth century.
55:27In urban planning, architecture, mathematics and water engineering, Islamic knowledge was peerless.
55:37And in one area, it was spectacular.
55:41Astronomy.
55:43The study of the stars.
55:4790% of the 200 brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names.
55:54Vega, Betelgeuse, Algol, Deneb.
55:59They're all creations of the Dark Ages.
56:02Because Arabic astronomy allowed the Dark Ages to glimpse the cosmos.
56:10Remember those stars painted onto the roof at the palace in Kaziramra?
56:16Well, that was just the beginning.
56:19While Christian science was insisting on a backward, biblical understanding of the cosmos,
56:27Islamic science was investigating the heavens more adventurously.
56:37This little baby here, the astrolabe, has been called the first computer.
56:43It was developed to pinpoint the direction of Mecca.
56:47Muslims needed to pray five times a day in a specific direction at specific times.
56:53The astrolabe could work all that out in relation to the stars.
56:58So this was the first compass as well, and the first clock.
57:06So the way it works, the first thing you need to do is decide on which star you want to
57:11focus on.
57:11And I'm going to choose Vega.
57:15So, I find Vega in the sky, and with these sights here, I line it up until I can see
57:22Vega in the middle.
57:25It's exactly there.
57:28And that gives me a reading here, in degrees, degrees from the horizontal.
57:33So I can see that Vega, right now, is 35 degrees.
57:39So the next thing to do is to set the date, measured, of course, in the old fashioned way, in
57:44phases of the zodiac.
57:45Right now, we're in Gemini. So, in fact, we're in the 15th degree of Gemini.
57:52About there. Otherwise known as the end of May.
57:58So this is basically that, in diagrammatic form.
58:04And whatever is true on here is also true out there.
58:08So, I know the date. I know where Vega is.
58:11So, with the help of this handy, dark-aged sat-nav, I can finally work out where I am.
58:20It was Alfred Gainus, the multi-skilled designer of the Nylometer in Cairo,
58:26who undertook the first great Islamic exploration of the stars.
58:33He was followed by many others.
58:37Without Islamic science and its sensuous delight in the cosmos,
58:42perhaps this really would have been a dark age.
58:45With Islamic science, it was anything but.
58:50In the next film, we'll be heading north,
58:54to celebrate those fine craftsmen, the Vikings.
58:58And to investigate those particularly skilled jewellers of the Dark Ages,
59:05the Anglo-Saxons.
59:07With Islamic science, the English and the English and the English and the English List.
59:09DAVID SE i Liszt
59:09Here we go.
59:20The UK libro защition
59:21Clifford PennyIDiyeähänin
59:45You
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