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Hello, 9th Century Baghdad was a prosperous city at the center of an expanding empire.

It was also a place of learning, where the leading scholars met and were the most important works of Greek

philosophy were translated into Arabic for the first time.

Among the great minds at the Court of the Caliphs of Baghdad was a man known to later write as as the

philosopher of the Arabs. His name was Al-Kindy, and in addition to supervising the translation

of Greek scholarship, he produced more than 200 works of his own. He believed religion and philosophy

were not separate disciplines, but part of the same project.

He wrote about an astonishing range of subjects from pharmaceuticals to music and from the

workings of the human eye to the manufacture of swords. But today is best known for founding an entire

philosophical tradition on which Islamic thinkers were able to build for centuries.

With me to discuss the life of work of Alkindi R. Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at Sowas University of London,

James Montgomery Sir Thomas Adams' Professor of Arabic Elect at the University of Cambridge,

and the Mira Benison, senior lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic

studies also at the University of Cambridge.

Mirabennison, Al-Kinde lived in the ninth century in the time of the Abbasid

Caliphate. Can you give us some idea of the Abbasids and who they were?

Yes, the Abbasids were the second Khalifal dynasty in the history of Islam. They ruled from

750 up to 1258 but their heyday was

very much 750 up until about 950 and they founded the city of Baghdad in Iraq, which by the ninth century had become a huge

metropolis. It was one of the biggest cities in the world. It was extremely wealthy.

...