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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 Rameera Benison, senior lecture in

Middle East in Middle Eastern 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 King's College London.

Now that story is apocryphal, but it has the mythical power which shows that people believe there's a great deal in it.

Is that how it started with the Caliphs calling on their scholars to bring the knowledge of

Greeks into the Islamic Empire.

It did start with the Kailiff in the sense that it was a translation movement that was

directed and promoted from the top down as it were.

One misleading thing about that is that it didn't actually begin with

...