Islam, the youngest of all the world's religions emerged on the world scene in 622 CE. It all started with the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and his small band of followers from Mecca to Medina in northwest Arabia. This migration was known as the “Hijra”. One hundred fifty years later the Muslim government, which claims Allah as the ultimate authority had become the Islamic Empire. “The empire controlled the Mediterranean Sea from Syria and the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, it stretched east to southern China and western India, and was as far south as what had been the Persian Empire and Saudi Arabia, they controlled the west through Egypt and across North Africa, and controlled north through Spain to the Pyrenees.”(Doak) Founding the city of Baghdad and putting the Abbasid Caliphate in power, which consisted of Muslim leaders who were the successors of Muhammad set the stage for Islamic Golden Age. By the mid-8th century, Islam's golden age began to emerge. For 400 years, all the way until the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in the mid-9th century. Muslim culture was comparable to that of Rome which we just finished studying, in its explosion of culture.
A number of fortunate circumstances came together to make Islam’s golden age possible. Perhaps most significant was the creation of a vast empire without internal political problems, and also largely free from attack by foreigners. “Trade began to flow freely across the Asian continent and beyond.” (Lombard) The fact that Islam was so accepting of other cultures made it seem as though that the Islamic Empire was merging with them rather than taking them over. The advanced cultures of India and China combined with that of Persia, ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt led to a type of world trade that was never even previously possible. “In most cases civilizations conquered by Islam remained politically and culturally intact, unlike those overrun by northern barbarians. Thanks in part to Prophet Muhammad's assertion that "the ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs," Islamic leaders valued the cultural treasures and information that could be gained from the territories they took over.”(Khalidi) In addition, the Muslim use of the Arabic language, which was the language of the Quran helped solidify Islam’s Golden Age. “It led to its standardization throughout the empire as the language of faith and power, and likewise of theology, philosophy, and the arts and sciences.”(Doak)
Unification under one faith and language alone, however, did not produce the explosion of literacy and learning experienced by the Islamic Empire. “In the mid-8th century, Chinese paper-making technology arrived in Samarkand, on the eastern border of the empire. Suddenly, the labor-intensive processing of hides and papyrus was replaced by mass-production of paper from pulped rags, hemp, and bark; large personal libraries as well as public ones became commonplace.”(Benlafquih) At about the same time, the so-called "Arabic" numerals inspired by India began to replace the previously accepted Roman numerals, and introduced the concept of zero for the first time. Public education, also ordered by the Prophet , spread rapidly.
The Golden Age was a period of unrivalled intellectual progress in the field of literature, particularly dealing with biographies and history due to the intense studying being done of the Islamic faith . “Scholars, for example, in collecting and re-examining the hadith, or "traditions" - the sayings and actions of the Prophet - compiled immense biographical detail about the Prophet and other information, historic and linguistic, about the Prophet's era.”(Lombard) This led to such literature works as "Life of the Messenger of Allah," by Ibn Ishaq. “One of the earliest Arabic historical works, it was a key source of information about the Prophet's life and also a model for other important works of history”(Benlafquih)
