The Ascent of Civilisation: Die Araber

SINOSSI

The Arabs, a linguistic group of tribal clans on the world's largest and driest peninsula named later from a Semitic term for nomads, only became a people when united in the seventh century by Mohammed, Prophet and founder of Islam, who clever mediated between the cities and Bedouin hordes just as his faith combined elements from regional paganism and the infiltrated Judeo-Christian tradition, which dominated most of the vast empire conquered as caliphate by his Ummayad dynasty, mainly on Byzantines and Persians but extending further to Iberia and Central Asia, tolerance and eclecticism proving key. Rising to great wealth at the trade crossroad between the Silk road and Europe, the became great patrons, especially at the caliphs' courts of Bagdad and Cordoba, combining and progressing on heritages from all those cultures plus Eastern novelties from India, with Arabic, not kinship, as the glue between scientists, doctors, artists, philosophers and libraries, all well ahead of the Christian Middle Ages which would have been truly dark without superior Arab input before, during and after the Crusades to the Holy land. Mongol and Turkic invasions crushed their political power, but the Islamic civilization conserving the holy language of the Quran remained unsurpassed until well into Western Enlightenment.

Sceneggiatura: Susanne Utzt