Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane.

• Author: Smits, Amina
• Position: Book review

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

By S. Frederick Starr

Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 2013, 680 pages, $39.50, ISBN: 9780691157733.

This book tells the magnificent tale of the spread of knowledge and the development of sciences in Central Asia during what is commonly known as the 'Islamic Golden Age,' roughly starting with the rise of the Abbasid Dynasty and ending after the Tamerlane's reign. It aims to deal with three questions mainly: 1) What did Central Asian scientists, philosophers, etc. achieve during this period? 2) Why did this happen? 3) What happened to this movement? Starr deals with these questions throughout the fifteen chapters that make up this book. The author himself felt compelled to write this book not because he knew the answers, or was an expert on the field (he is, in fact, an archeologist), but because no one had up until then produced a work dealing with these questions and thus he tried to fill this void himself (p. xv).

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In the first chapter of the book, "Introducing the Players," Starr explains his methodology by discussing which questions he will be dealing and not dealing with and why, while briefly illustrating the main characters and the scene as a sort of guideline to what is yet to come in this book. The second chapter, "Worldly Urbanists, Ancient Land," shows the reader how the now rather barren lands that make up Central Asia were once the home of highly urbanized centers of great wealth and bustling trade. He calls this civilization an "intensive," "hydraulic civilization" (a term coined by Karl Wittfogel), because of its almost complete dependence on water and it's strict organization around water due to its scarcity (p. 37).

The third chapter illustrates how these rich cities formed the perfect base for the (further) development of sciences throughout the Islamic Golden Age, as they constituted a "cross roads civilization" (p. 69), i.e. a civilization made up of elements of many different civilizations such as the Indian, Persian and Chinese, mixed with a tad of Greek and Nomadic, and reformed into a new, unique civilization that was the Central Asian civilization at the time, a true melting pot as it were.

Chapter four recounts how the Arabs conquered Central Asia, while chapter five explains how Baghdad became the capitol of the Abbasid empire and the center of science and arts, especially under the patronage of Harun...