Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Arab philosopher al-Kindi. Born in the early ninth century, al-Kindi was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy and supervised the translation of many works by Aristotle and others into Arabic. The author of more than 250 works, he wrote on many different subjects, from optics to mathematics, music and astrology. He was the first significant thinker to argue that philosophy and Islam had much to offer each other and need not be kept apart. Today al-Kindi is regarded as one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic world.
With:
Hugh Kennedy Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London
James Montgomery Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic Elect at the University of Cambridge
Amira Bennison Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
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| 0:48.4 | Hello 9th century Baghdad was a prosperous city at the center of an expanding empire. |
| 0:53.4 | It was also a place of learning, where the leading scholars met and where the most important |
| 0:57.5 | works of Greek philosophy were translated into Arabic for the first time. |
| 1:01.9 | Among the great minds at the court of the |
| 1:03.6 | Califfs of Baghdad was a man known to later write as as the |
| 1:06.8 | philosopher of the Arabs. His name was Al-Kindy, and in addition to |
| 1:10.7 | supervising the translation of Greek scholarship he produced more than 200 works of his own. |
| 1:16.0 | He believed religion and philosophy were not separate disciplines but part of the same project. |
| 1:21.0 | He wrote about an astonishing range of subjects from pharmaceuticals to |
| 1:24.9 | music and from the workings of the human eye to the manufacture of swords. But today is |
| 1:29.7 | best known for founding an entire philosophical tradition on which Islamic |
| 1:33.4 | thinkers were able to build for centuries. With me to discuss the life and work |
| 1:37.2 | about Kindy R Hugh Kennedy, professor of Arabic at Sowas University of London, |
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