Reframing History: The Commentator

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[3] Hey, everyone, we're doing something a little different for the next few weeks.

[4] We've been thinking a lot about what history is taught in school and how it's taught in school.

[5] Yeah, it's one of the reasons this show exists.

[6] We wanted to fill in the gaps of what we learned in.

[7] history class and reframe some of the history we did learn.

[8] So a few months ago, we started asking teachers for some of their favorite throughline episodes that do just that and that they'd like their students to hear before returning to school.

[9] Our hope was that through line was of use, and we heard from many teachers who said that it was.

[10] This week...

[11] Hi, yes.

[12] My name is Sean Ryan, and I used the ThruLine episode, The Commentator, in an introduction to academic research and inquiry classes passed free.

[13] The commentator tells the story of a medieval Islamic philosopher, Averroes, who put his pen to paper and shaped the modern world.

[14] And your story on Averroes provided opportunities to make connections between what Averroes was doing in the 12th century and what academic researchers do today.

[15] The hope of this course, just like your podcast, is for students to understand that our current reality is shaped by the past and those who came before us.

[16] Many of the issues and challenges faced by previous generations are very similar to what we were experienced today.

[17] Just want to say, really enjoy the show.

[18] I hope to use more of your episodes in future classes I teach.

[19] Right.

[20] Thank you.

[21] Bye.

[22] Hey, I'm Randabh Fattah.

[23] I'm Ramtin Arablui.

[24] And on this episode, how one medieval Islamic philosopher put his pen to paper and shaped the modern world.

[25] As a kid growing up here in the U .S., I heard the same general story you probably did about the history of Western civilization.

[26] First, there was Greece, where they invented democracy and philosophy.

[27] Then came the Roman Empire, until it eventually fell and Europe went into the dark ages.

[28] Until the Renaissance, when people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo basically painted and wrote Europe's way out of ignorance.

[29] I was told that this is what began the process of the world moving into the age of science and secularism.

[30] And the main characters in this story were almost always white, European men.

[31] While this tale is partially true, it leaves out a lot of details that might have made that kid version of me and you think differently about what we call the Western world.

[32] The truth is that between 900 and 1 ,300, most of the world's learning and scholarship was happening in places like Baghdad, Cairo, Timbuktu, and Cordova.

[33] In those cities existed vast libraries and schools that people tracked.

[34] from all over the world to study and practice medicine, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics.

[35] The people of Islamic lands created a canon of medicine that was used in Europe until the 1800s.

[36] They developed algebra and even invented the first corrective lenses.

[37] It was the golden age of Islam, and that's where we're going to go in this episode, to meet a Spanish Muslim thinker whose story shows us just how much Islamic philosophy influence the shaping of what we now call the Western world.

[38] From Kigali, Rwanda, and you're listening to Thurline from NPR.

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[42] Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace.

[43] More information at carnegie .org.

[44] We're going to start this story by discussing a painting.

[45] Not just any painting.

[46] It's one of the most famous of the Renaissance period in Europe.

[47] It's called The School of Athens, and it's by the artist Raphael.

[48] It's colorful and bold and depicts.

[49] all the great philosophers who influence the thinkers of the Renaissance.

[50] At the center of the image are Plato and Aristotle striding forward, and then fanning out somewhat behind them in the wings are a whole host of minor philosophical figures, and one can go through and identify who these folk are in various ways.

[51] Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, and they're all depicted as you'd expect.

[52] They're white men dressed in European robe.

[53] But then, just beneath them, in the bottom left portion of the painting, is someone who immediately sticks out.

[54] He's dark -skinned with a green robe and a yellow turban and a big mustache.

[55] He's looking over the shoulder of someone who's writing in a book.

[56] His hand is pressed against his chest in a mix of veneration and awe.

[57] His name is Abu Al -Waleed, Muhammad bin Ahmed bin -Mohammed bin Roshed, or as he came to be known in the West.

[58] Averroes.

[59] So Averroes is a figure of the 12th century, living at a time at which Islam had already expanded incredibly from its beginnings on the Saudi Peninsula.

[60] In just a few hundred years, the Islamic world spread all the way east to India and west to the Iberian Peninsula in Europe.

[61] Islam was the dominant cultural force over a lot of the world at that point.

[62] Averroes was born in 1126 in Cordova, a city in what we today call Spain.

[63] By the time he was born, Spain had been ruled by an Islamic caliphate for hundreds of years.

[64] Today it's easy to imagine him as a Middle Eastern man, but really...

[65] He was just an ordinary European.

[66] It's just that at this time, Europe was not entirely a Christian continent.

[67] This is Robert Passnow.

[68] I'm a professor of philosophy at the University of...

[69] University of Colorado and Boulder.

[70] Robert explained that southern Spain at that time was...