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I hope you enjoy the program. Hello one night in Baghdad so it goes in the

ninth century the caliph al--Mamon was visited by a dream.

The philosopher Aristotle appeared to him saying that the reason of the Greeks and the revelation

of Islam were not opposed. On waking the caliph demanded that all of Aristotle's

works be translated into Arabic and they were. It wasn't just Aristotle, over the next 200

years Greek philosophy, medicine, engineering and maths were all poured

and sometimes squeezed into Arabic. It was a translation movement of extraordinary depth and significance.

Hundreds of years before Aristotle reached the west, the intellect of Greece

was woven into the tapestry of Arab thought, and then through another translation in

the 11th and 12 centuries into Latin, it transferred north to feed and even create the Renaissance.

With me to discuss the translation movement of Greek ideas into Arabic, a Ramirezan,

senior lecture in Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Peter Porman, Welcome Trust Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick,

and Peter Adamson, Reader in Philosophy at Kings College London.

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