Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists

click here for more details, find new or used items	Michael Morgan Our price £11.49 (£14.99) New from £7.93 Used from £8.56 Pages: 320 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1426200927 Pub: National Geographic Society Pub date: 2007-06-19 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 12633

Reader Reviews:

Superb balanced exposition of our shared history (2/2 people found this helpful)

As someone from the East who studied at an American liberal arts college, and quite rightly enthused with Western philosophy, science, and the development of rational thought, it has slowly dawned on me that the story is ever more complex.

Great thinkers from various cultures have enriched us - passing ideas and approaches to succeeding generations. Above all, great civilisations and thinkers have always been open to the ideas of others. The inquiring mind is driven by thirst, unconstrained by restrictive ideology that proclaims superiority of one culture over another. Ultimately there is no such lasting superiority - human beings are human beings, and no one has a claim to ascendancy. We ought to celebrate the insights and breakthroughs of all individuals no matter their background, culture and beliefs - though we often don't.

It may sound like yet another politically correct statement, but in truth that debate is sterile. What matters most to the inquiring mind is the truth - the concept of social acceptance or rejection, or of political correctness, is, and ought to be, an irrelevance. Morgan's book is not a statement about political correctness - it is a search for our history.

Studying mathematics and physics, especially its history, it slowly dawned on me that the simple story of Greek thought followed by Age of the Enlightenment in Europe is a truncated story. The truncations are in the middle - perhaps written out for biased reasons, perhaps just forgotten. There are now in fact telling clues that the Crusades played a large part in bringing the West in touch with rational thought - with science, discovery, and the spirit of inquiry.

It is sad when we cheat our children by telling them incomplete stories of human history and development. Our history is a collective history. For me the awareness that the typical Western philosophic education has chosen to eschew telling the tale of great thinkers from other cultures is a slight disappointment - given that I have always taken the Western method to be all about openness and inquiry. But then no one is perfect - be it individual or culture.

Morgan tells the story impartially and with no hint of bias. The theme is the same - that not knowing our rich history, even if belonging to the various Islamic eras in different regions in different centuries is ultimately everyone's loss. From Al Khwarizmi to Avicenna, to Caliph Rashid and his libraries in Baghdad, to the first man to develop a working parachute, Morgan tells the story of an Islamic culture embraced with a love of knowledge, spirit of inquiry and openness. It is easy to see the links to the flowering of Western thought - after the West came in touch with the East.

It is an enrichening read, all the more so because the author has no axe to grind, but to tell the actual history, and to share it with all. To both sides of the current carefully cultivated divide between East and West, this is simultaneously a delightful and sobering read. Closing one's mind to others serves no purpose. We lose our history and who we were, and where we are headed.

Tiresome minds, both from the East and the West, obsessed with proclaiming the superiority of their own cultures, will find this book an irritant. But those who are curious, and with a genuine thirst for understanding, will find this a refreshing and invaluable read. It will fill in the missing links in intellectual history that leave confusion, blindness and a sense of dissatisfaction in the inquiry mind. I would suggest a read.

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