Isfahan And Cairo: The End Of The Golden Age

A vast empire once stretched from the shores of Iberia to the rough slopes of the Hindu Kush. Dominated by a unique blend of faith, science and art, this empire made scientific leaps and cultural bounds in a time where medieval Europe was paralyzed by superstition. To choose a few cities as more crucial to the empire as the rest is a trivial task, as each city was in its own way responsible for pivotal points in the Empire’s history, theology and flow of goods, people and ideas. If the value of a city is based on its contribution to humanity following the end of the “Golden Age” of Islam, however, the cities of Baghdad, Isfahan and Cairo are without a doubt the key players in the Islamic Empire. Founded in 762 by Caliph Al-Mansur, Baghdad

Much like in Baghdad, a great deal of scholarly focus in Isfahan centered on astronomy. Along with stunning mosques and palaces, Isfahan saw the construction of an observatory, overseen by Omar Khayyam, which aided in the creation of a more accurate calendar. Using this observatory, Khayyam succeeded in determining the length of a year to within 8 millionths of a day. Accompanying this feat was Khayyam’s model of a heliocentric system, a controversial idea that would place a future Italian astronomer under house arrest nearly 600 years later. While astronomy thrived in Isfahan, no discovery in the city could quite compare to those of the famed scholar ibn Sina. Considered the greatest medical mind of his time, ibn Sina wrote countless works on topics ranging from geology and theology to medicine, many of which are still referred to today. One work in particular, ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, covers pharmaceutical procedures, the inner-workings of the eye and heart, and even the mind-body connection, an idea that would later be confirmed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These contributions from ibn Sina, coupled with the findings of Omar Khayyám, make Isfahan one of the primary intellectual centers of the Islamic

In 972 the Fatimids founded the university known as al-Hazar in order to facilitate their pursuit of knowledge. Accompanying the university was an influx of great thinkers from across the empire including ibn al-Haytham. Recruited by al-Hakim, a Fatimid caliph, in order to control the flooding of the fertile land surrounding the Nile, al-Haytham arrived to the city from Basra. Although he was unable to reign in the flow of the mighty Nile, al-Haytham remained in the city to pursue his own discoveries. Al-Haytham’s discoveries transformed the world of optics and astronomy including the early investigation of refraction and calculus as well as the realization that light rays are absorbed rather than emitted from the eye. This discovery contradicted a major Ptolemaic finding, causing al-Haytham to question other teachings by the Greek scholar, specifically the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Coupled with Fatimid tolerance of non-Muslims, visionaries like al-Hakim and al-Haytham , driven by a need to understand the interworking of the world around them, placed Cairo as an intellectual powerhouse open to