I’ve written three books on the Knights Templar and tried to avoid a common mistake of seeing the medieval Crusades solely through European eyes. Because the Arab world of that time was immensely sophisticated, rich, and powerful. In fact, a succession of Arab civilisations had an enormous impact on the west in fields like medicine, mathematics, and architecture. So, let’s take a trip through the glorious and ancient cities of Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba to reveal what the Arab world did for us.
Before Islam: The Desert Kingdoms
The story begins before the rise of Islam. Centuries earlier, Arab peoples had already built sophisticated trading civilisations along the incense and spice routes linking the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.
The Nabataeans, based at Petra in modern Jordan, engineered an extraordinary desert city — carved facades, hydraulic systems that captured and stored scarce rainfall, and a trading network that made them middlemen for frankincense and myrrh moving from southern Arabia to Rome. Their wealth and hydraulic ingenuity briefly made Petra one of the ancient world’s great cities before Rome absorbed the kingdom in 106 AD.
In 2023, I visited Nabatean remains further south in modern Saudi Arabia at AlUla. These are a series of gargantuan tombs in the desert. Here I am with my local guide who is photo bombing me with a thumbs up!
Further north, Palmyra — the “Bride of the Desert” — became a cosmopolitan caravan city so wealthy and self-confident that under Queen Zenobia in the 3rd century it briefly carved out an empire stretching from Anatolia to Egypt, directly challenging Rome. Its ruins, tragically damaged by the terrorist group ISIS in 2015, still testify to a fusion of Greco-Roman, Persian, and local Arab artistic traditions.
In some ways it’s fortunate that beautiful statues from Palmyra have found their way to museums all over the world and so were saved from the chisels and explosives used by ISIS in their attempt to obliterate all trace of these glories. Here are two of several artefacts from Palmyra in the Vatican Museums that I saw in August 2026.
In the south, the Himyarite Kingdom of Yemen controlled the maritime spice trade and built dams — most famously the Marib Dam — that sustained agriculture in an unforgiving landscape for centuries. These pre-Islamic Arab civilisations established something crucial: Arabia was never a cultural backwater. It sat astride the trade arteries of the ancient world, and its peoples had long practice at building cities, negotiating between empires, and moving goods and ideas across vast distances.
The Caliphates: From Conquest to Cosmopolis
The emergence of Islam in the 7th century transformed this trading and tribal world into an imperial one with astonishing speed. Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, Arab armies had built an empire stretching from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the borders of China — one of the fastest expansions in human history.
The Umayyads: Building an Empire
The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), ruling from Damascus, did the unglamorous but essential work of turning conquest into administration. They standardised coinage, made Arabic the language of government across a bewilderingly diverse empire, and built monuments of real architectural ambition — the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus among them. Their buildings borrowed freely from Byzantine and Persian traditions and fused them into something new, setting a template for Islamic architecture that would echo for a thousand years.
The Abbasids: The Golden Age of Baghdad
If the Umayyads built the empire, the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) built its mind. Moving the capital to newly founded Baghdad, the Abbasids presided over what’s often called the Islamic Golden Age — and its impact on world history is difficult to overstate.
At the heart of it was the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, a Baghdad institution that sponsored the systematic translation of Greek, Persian, and Indian texts into Arabic. Works of Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy that had been lost or neglected in the Latin West were preserved, translated, debated, and — crucially — improved upon by Arab and Persian scholars working in Arabic, the era’s genuine lingua franca of science.
The achievements that came out of this world are still embedded in daily life:
- Mathematics: Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s work gave us the word “algorithm” and the foundational text of algebra (from al-jabr, his own term). The Hindu-Arabic numeral system — the 0 through 9 we use today — reached Europe through Arab scholarship, replacing the unwieldy Roman numeral system entirely.
- Medicine: Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna’s) Canon of Medicine remained a standard textbook in European universities for over 600 years. Al-Razi pioneered clinical observation and is credited with the first clear clinical distinction between smallpox and measles.
- Optics: Ibn al-Haytham’s work on light and vision laid groundwork that fed directly into the later European Scientific Revolution.
- Chemistry, astronomy, geography: Arab scholars built observatories, refined astrolabes, mapped the stars with a precision Europe wouldn’t match for centuries, and developed chemistry as an experimental discipline out of earlier alchemical traditions.
None of this happened in a vacuum sealed off from the rest of the world — it happened because Baghdad, like the trading cities of pre-Islamic Arabia before it, sat at a crossroads, and its rulers had both the wealth and the intellectual confidence to gather up the world’s knowledge and push it further.
Al-Andalus: Europe’s Islamic University
While Baghdad flourished in the east, a breakaway Umayyad dynasty built something equally remarkable in the west: Al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, centred on the extraordinary city of Córdoba.
By the 10th century, Córdoba under Abd al-Rahman III was arguably the largest and most sophisticated city in Europe — with paved and lit streets at a time when most European capitals were rutted and dark after sunset, public baths, libraries reputed to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes, and a level of religious and intellectual coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians that, while never a utopia, produced genuine cross-cultural collaboration. The philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote commentaries on Aristotle in Córdoba that would later reshape scholastic thought in Paris and Oxford. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides was born and trained there.
This is where the Arab intellectual inheritance decisively crossed into Europe. Translation centres in Toledo, working from Arabic texts (many of them themselves translations of Greek originals with centuries of Arab commentary added), fed directly into the revival of learning that historians call the 12th-century Renaissance — a full three hundred years before the Italian Renaissance that gets all the credit in popular history. The Great Mosque of Córdoba, with its forest of double-arched columns, remains one of the most striking buildings anywhere in the world.
Even when I was in British-controlled Gibraltar in 2024, on the southern tip of Spain, I found traces of a Muslim-era building underground, not visible at street level.
Cairo, the Mamluks, and the Art of Survival
The Fatimid Caliphate made Cairo one of the great cities of the medieval world and founded Al-Azhar, still today one of the most important centres of Islamic learning anywhere on earth. The Mamluk Sultanate that followed — remarkably, a state ruled by former slave-soldiers — became the power that actually stopped the Mongol advance at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, a battle with a fair claim to having saved the Islamic Middle East, and arguably Europe, from Mongol conquest. Mamluk Cairo became a byword for luxury craftsmanship: intricately inlaid metalwork, monumental architecture, and a thriving trade in spices and textiles that connected the Indian Ocean world to the Mediterranean.
What the World Actually Inherited
It’s worth being concrete about the transmission, because it’s often waved at vaguely rather than spelled out:
- Numbers and mathematics: the numeral system the entire world now uses, algebra, and advances in trigonometry.
- Medicine: hospital systems with specialised wards, pharmacology, and clinical texts used in Europe for centuries.
- Science: experimental method in optics and chemistry, astronomical instruments and star catalogues that fed the later work of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe.
- Philosophy: the preservation and reinterpretation of Aristotle that reignited European scholastic philosophy.
- Language: English still carries the fingerprints — algebra, algorithm, alcohol, alkali, admiral, coffee, sugar, cotton, and a long list of star names (Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse) are all Arabic in origin.
- Trade and agriculture: crops, irrigation techniques, and papermaking technology (itself relayed from China) that transformed the medieval Mediterranean economy.
The Nahda: A Second Renaissance
The story doesn’t end in the medieval period. In the 19th century, the Nahda — the Arab cultural awakening, centred on Cairo and Beirut — produced a flowering of journalism, the modern Arabic novel, translation of European scientific and political texts, and debates about modernity, nationalism, and reform that shaped the entire subsequent history of the Middle East. Figures like Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and Butrus al-Bustani did for 19th-century Arab thought something not unlike what the Baghdad translators had done a thousand years earlier — building bridges between civilisations rather than walls.
Why This History Matters
The point of laying all this out isn’t nostalgia for lost golden ages, a genre both Arab and Western writers sometimes indulge to excess. It’s that the standard Western account of civilisation — decline of Rome, dark age, sudden Renaissance — simply omits the centuries in which Arab civilisations were the primary custodians and innovators of the knowledge that would eventually re-enter Europe and help produce its own transformation. Understanding that isn’t a matter of correcting the record for its own sake; it changes how we understand where the modern world’s foundational ideas actually came from, and it’s a history worth knowing well before we get to the later, equally fascinating story of how European fraternal orders came to invent their own mythologised links to the Levant and its secret societies.
