Light from the East
How the Science of Medieval Islam helped to shape the Western World
By John Freely
2010
First Published
3.96
Average Rating
264
Number of Pages
Long before the European Renaissance, while the Western world was languishing in what was once called the “Dark Ages,” the Arab world was ablaze with the knowledge, invention, and creativity of its Golden Age. Through the astrologers, physicians, philosophers, mathematicians, and alchemists of the Muslim world, this knowledge was carried from Samarkand and Baghdad to Cordoba and beyond, influencing Western thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Copernicus and helping to inspire the cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance. John Freely’s spellbinding story is set against a background of the melting pot of the cultures involved and concludes with the decline of Islam’s Golden Age, which led the West to forget the debt it owed to the Muslim world and the influence of medieval Islamic civilization in forging the beginnings of modern science.
Avg Rating
3.96
Number of Ratings
70
5 STARS
31%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
29%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
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goodreads
Author
John Freely
Author · 19 books
John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents, and spent half of his early childhood in Ireland. He dropped out of high school when he was 17 to join the U. S. Navy, serving for two years, including combat duty with a commando unit in the Pacific, India, Burma and China during the last year of World War II. After the war, he went to college on the G. I. Bill and eventually received a Ph.D. in physics from New York University, followed by a year of post-doctoral study at Oxford in the history of science. He worked as a research physicist for nine years, including five years at Princeton University. In 1960 he went to İstanbul to teach physics at the Robert College, now the Boğaziçi University, and taught there until 1976. He then went on to teach and write in Athens (1976-79), Boston (1979-87), London (1987-88), İstanbul (1988-91) and Venice (1991-93). In 1993 he returned to Boğaziçi University, where he taught a course on the history of science. His first book, co-authored by the late Hilary Sumner-Boyd, was Strolling Through İstanbul (1972). Since then he has published more than forty books.
