Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

Starr (Central Asia-Caucasus Inst., Johns Hopkins Univ.) is that rare scholar with the horsepower to write about the medieval culture of this vast region that is bounded by Persia to the west, China to the east, and India to the southeast. He argues that much of what we subsume as "Arabic" contributions to the intellectual life of medieval Islam, because they were expressed in the Arabic language, should be termed Central Asian instead because the region was not simply Islamic. It was rich in polymath scholars who used geometry, mathematics, and formal logic to explore a variety of subjects with astonishing results. Starr is convincing that Central Asia was for centuries "the center of the intellectual world." By the late 11th century, when the Persian divine Al-Ghazali attacked reason and intellectual disagreement in defense of faith, the atmosphere of intellectual openness that made this rich ferment of ideas possible had dissipated. Central Asia's intellectual dominance of the Islamic world soon ended. Starr's spacious book enables him, for example, to discourse at length on such subjects as Al-Biruni's remarkable 11th-century history of India, an early monument of cultural anthropology.