knowledge and technology from across the world in Islamic institutions like the House of Wisdom. Yet the Abbasid age was also one in which the Muslim world’s center of gravity shifted, like its capital, to the east. The caliphs now sat geographically and culturally removed from the old Roman territories that—along with Arabia—had formed the core of the first two caliphates. Developments in the dar al-Islam therefore affected the western world at one or more steps of remove. One of the great and lasting stories of the Middle Ages is one of increasing ignorance and hostility between the Islamic
...more
