The golden age, decline, and the debates about both

Family: Knowledge: science, medicine, astronomy and the rest · 4 entries

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• Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

  c. 980 CE · c. 370 AHPersian polymath (c. 980–1037) whose Canon of Medicine and Book of Healing shaped medicine and philosophy across the Islamic world and Europe for centuries.

Screening Room

• The Physician

  2013 CE · 1434 AH†Based on Noah Gordon's novel: an English youth travels to 11th-century Isfahan to study medicine under Ibn Sina.

• Science and Islam

  Jim Al-Khalili's three-part BBC series on science in Islamic civilisation — from the House of Wisdom to the present.

• Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain

  Gardner/UPF's PBS documentary on seven centuries of Muslim-Christian-Jewish coexistence in al-Andalus and its end.

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Controversial topics

• Sexuality and gender diversity
• Converts and those who leave
• Images and figural art
• Takfir and its critics
• Dissent, heresy and freethought
• Conquest and its debates
• Violent extremism and the Muslim response
• Islam and atheism or secular thought