The Wonder of Islam The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

CRICKETS CHIRRUP

OWL HOOTS

This is a series about the Dark Ages, when civilisation was

said to have stopped and ignorance flooded the world.

I've been trying to convince you that it didn't happen,

that the Dark Ages were a fine era for art.

But in this film, I am going further.

The art we'll be looking at in this film is some of the most

sophisticated ever made.

If any art challenges the myth of the Dark Ages,

it's the art of Islam.

EXPLOSION

HORSE WHINNIES

This is Cordoba in Spain.

That's the great Mosque of Cordoba up there.

And this handy little Dark Age gadget is an astrolabe.

Some people call this the first computer and what this thing

does is calculate exactly where you are, by using the stars.

Islamic stargazers perfected the astrolabe in the Dark Ages to

work out the direction of Mecca, so they always knew which way to pray.

It filled their art with cosmic patterns.

Later on, I will be showing you how to use one of these, I hope,

but first we need to travel back in time to

the beginnings of Islam, to the first fascinating creations

of Islamic art and architecture.

So right now, we're here in Cordoba, Spain.

To go back to the beginnings of Islamic art,

we need to go right across the Mediterranean to here.

Jerusalem -

the heart of the religious Dark Ages.

What huge dramas have been enacted here.

What important art has been created?

Most of it's gone unfortunately, but not all of it.

Some of it has survived,

notably that magnificent golden dome on the horizon -

the Dome of the Rock.

It's one of the most significant buildings ever put up,

a piece of architecture that changed history.

You couldn't really ask for a more dramatic location, could you?

If you think it looks good from up here on the Mount of Olives,

just wait until we get closer.

Mohammed died in 632 AD

and for the first 50 years or so after his death,

Islam was preoccupied with conquest.

The speed at which the Islamic empire expanded was remarkable.

In just a few decades, it went from nothing to gigantic.

It was the most dramatic, most aggressive

and fastest feat of empire building the world has seen.

This is the Islamic empire, just 100 years after Mohammed's death.

Up here, the whole of Spain, all of North Africa,

the entire Middle East, as far across as the borders of India.

But all this astonishingly successful conquest, didn't leave

much time for art.

Almost nothing survives from the first years of Islam.

Clearly, art was not a priority.

And then, out of nothing, as if by magic,

this appears - the Dome of the Rock.

Nothing in Islamic art prepares us for this.

It's just suddenly there.

A definitive Islamic creation, seemingly conjured out of thin air.

It's like a flying saucer or something,

that's landed out of nowhere and something you sense immediately,

even from this distance, is the powerful geometry of it,

that air of mathematical clarity

and that's something that continues in Islamic architecture.

As you can see, it's an octagon, it's got eight sides.

Octagons have a special symbolic presence, because they combine

the geometry of a circle with the geometry of a square.

I'll show you. If I draw a circle here...

And then... two intersecting squares...

..here...

..and here...

The shape they form, the shape in the middle...

That's the octagon.

The octagon is a surprisingly popular Dark Age shape with

powerful, sacred meanings.

If the Earth is a square and heaven is a perfect circle,

the octagon is a symbolic bridge between the two.

All the proportions of the Dome of the Rock are meaningful.

So these walls here... the walls of the octagon...

each of those is about 20 metres long.

And the Dome in the middle, the height of that's

again about 20 metres and the diameter of it's also 20 metres.

All these proportions have been carefully calculated,

have a purpose.

It's as if the entire building has been shaped by a divine mathematics.

And those divine mathematics have given it a sacred meaning.

This location, Temple Mount, is the holiest spot in Jerusalem.

This is where King Solomon built the first Jewish temple,

the one destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and then Herod, the infamous

King Herod, built the second temple here as well.

Herod's temple was made entirely from white marble and was

so huge, it covered 67 acres of the sacred location.

So grand, so pompous

and to my eyes, so inelegant!

So the Dome of the Rock sits on layer upon layer

of crucial religious history

and when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 AD

and claimed this site for Islam, they took possession

of what is probably the most loaded religious spot on Earth.

And that's just the outside!

For me, this mysterious interior is one of the most atmospheric

achievements of the Dark Ages.

There's something so haunting about the way the light works in here,

the shimmer of the mosaics,

the whispers of the calligraphy.

Basically, it's a circular shrine.

It's not a mosque,

it's a place of pilgrimage that has been built around a sacred site.

The site it's all been built around is the site of this holy rock here.

The Jews believe this is the rock on which Abraham prepared to

sacrifice his son, Isaac.

And the Ark of the Covenant is thought to lie hidden

somewhere underneath, as well.

-SPEAKING SOFTLY:

-Islam has a different tradition.

Islam believes this is the holy rock

from which the prophet Mohammed set off on his great night journey

to heaven.

The angel Gabriel came to visit Mohammed at Mecca

and brought him here to Jerusalem.

From this rock, the prophet ascended to heaven and there,

in paradise, he met God and God instructed him

on the Muslim duty of prayer.

So this holy rock, like the architecture around it,

is a point of contact between man and God

and that's the religious message of the whole building.

If you saw the first film in this series,

you'll recognise this shape, because we've seen it before.

This type of encircling architecture, built over a precious

site, something we found in the round churches at Byzantium.

Remember, San Vitale in Ravenna

and Santa Costanza in Rome.

The Muslim Caliph Abd al-Malik who built the Dome of the Rock was

deliberately taking on the architecture of the Christians.

This round shape, the proportions, none of it was an accident.

Abd al-Malik also added an explicit inscription, which runs all the

way round, which gives the date on which the dome was finished -

691 AD. It also includes a stern message to the Christians.

"O, you people of the Book", it says, meaning the Bible.

"Jesus is only a messenger of God.

"God is only one God."

It's a deliberate challenge to the Christians. Jesus is just a prophet.

There's only one God and Gods don't have sons.

This entire building is taking on Christianity.

Look at that!

Floor to ceiling is covered in the most exquisite mosaics.

Gold and green... there's a palm tree

and these beautiful jewelled crowns.

And all the pieces of the mosaic are set at different angles,

so they reflect the light differently at different times

of day and all this, all these glorious mosaics,

were intended to the evoke a vision of paradise.

"When you look there in paradise", says the Koran,

"you will see delights that cannot be imagined.

"Fruits of every kind

"and all that you ask for."

At a stroke, Islam had invented for itself

an unmistakable new architecture.

And at the centre of this new architecture,

was a vision of paradise.

The Islamic paradise is a green and verdant alternative to

the harsh desert landscape in which Islam was born.

These are lands where water is precious and so is hope.

Just a few years after the Dome of the Rock was finished,

the Umayyad Caliphs in Damascus gave the world another wonderful Islamic

structure - the Damascus Mosque.

I think it's one of the most exciting buildings

I've ever been in.

And look what's on the walls.

Inside the fabulous Damascus Mosque,

the Umayyad Caliphs set out actually to describe paradise.

And to surround the Islamic pilgrim with delightful

and irresistible visions of it.

It's one of Islam's most dramatic artistic moments.

These are the joys that await us in heaven.

These are the beautiful cities in which we'll live

and this is the water,

the cool and endless water, that we'll drink.

Those magnificent images of paradise in the Great Mosque

at Damascus are like images of a wonderful oasis in the desert,

water, palm trees, flowers -

everything that's so hard to find out here

and the Islamic paradise promises so many pleasures in the next life

to the true believer - all you can drink, all you can eat

and all you can dream of.

This is Qusayr Amra.

It's one of the desert palaces which the Umayyad rulers of Damascus

built out here to get away from the city -

its heat and its pressures.

No-one's certain which of the Umayyad princes chose this

distant desert location.

Was it the Caliph Al-Walid the First or Al-Walid the Second?

What is sure is why they chose this particular spot.

Qusayr Amra is built in a wadi -

the Wadi Al Battum - and wadis are desert valleys that fill up

seasonally with water.

So when it rains in the desert, the precious water floods through

the wadi and fertilises it.

Round the back of the building, over here, the various

contraptions for channelling this water through the palace,

because, believe it or not, what you have before you here is a bathhouse!

Qusayr Amra is a bathing establishment in the desert -

one of the earliest surviving secular buildings of Islam.

The reason we've driven all this way across the desert to find it is

because this fabulous bath house in the sands has something

remarkable inside it, something you'd never expect to find here.

Floor to ceiling Islamic frescoes.

A troupe of acrobats gives a busy performance

and there's a bear strumming a lute.

There's so much going on in here.

And a group of statuesque female dancers,

show off their figures and their beauty.

The dancing girls are particularly surprising.

We're just not used to Islamic imagery as abandoned as this,

but it's important to remember this is just

as old and just as traditional as everything else we've seen.

This, too, is a precious Islamic heritage.

A negative way to understand Qusayr Amra's remarkable frescoes

is to see them as signs of moral relaxation.

Away from Damascus, deep in the desert, a wayward Umayyad prince

is indulging an appetite for wine and music and women.

But I don't think that is what it's about.

If we go back to the many descriptions of paradise in the

Koran, there are constant references to the pleasures available there.

Rivers of wine served in crystal cups, beautiful flowers,

beautiful jewels and beautiful girls.

"For the righteous", says the Koran, "there shall be gardens

"and vineyards and high-bosomed virgins for companions,

"dark eyed and bashful, as fair as corals and rubies."

Inside here is the caldarium - the hot room.

In here the Umayyad prince would soak himself in hot water,

heated up by all those gubbins we saw outside and as he lay

here in his bath, the Umayyad prince would stare up at the Dome

where he'd see something wondrous -

an evocation of the stars at night.

This is the earliest known Islamic star chart,

painted onto the dome at Qusayr Amra.

Around the edge are the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

And in the middle,

frescoed representations of the constellations.

The Great Bear,

the Little bear.

What a thing to find in an eighth century bathhouse,

a fabulous image of the heavens at night above your head.

It's as if someone has taken the roof off the dome

and looked out into the sky at night in the desert,

full of twinkling stars.

What a beautiful idea.

It takes a bit of getting to Qusayr Amra

but I wanted to make it clear right from the start that Islamic art,

with its beginnings in the Dark Ages,

has this sensuous dimension to it,

a relationship to pleasure that you just don't find in other art.

Scattered across this great Syrian Desert are the remains

of fantastical Umayyad palaces,

filled once with beautiful mosaics

and marvellous colonnades.

What tangible sensuousness you find here in this first Islamic art.

These eighth century desert palaces must once have been filled

with the accoutrements of pleasure -

vases, hangings, plates and cups,

almost all of which have disappeared.

But in 1986, here in Jordan,

they dug up this.

It's an eighth century Islamic brazier

and it gives us a tiny hint

of what life was like in the Qusayr Amra bathhouse.

The brazier was used to heat up the prince's room

and for burning incense.

Originally there were wheels on it and it could be wheeled around

from room to room to fill them with sweet smells.

It's made of iron and bronze

and at the front here, as you can see, there are these arches

a little bit like the ones in Qusayr Amra,

and inside the arches are scenes of lovemaking and couples canoodling,

and it's all so atmospheric and so beautifully done.

Look at these eagles at the bottom,

the way they've been shaped, their wings, their feathers.

This is metalwork of the highest quality.

At the four corners, four cuddly nudes prepared to release

a small bird into the incense-filled air above them.

And there's a floaty feeling to this marvellous metalwork.

What a beautiful thing.

And the figurative sculptures you see here,

the female figures are, again, very surprising

because this is an is aspect of Islamic art that was there at the start,

that is very traditional, but which modern Islam often forgets.

The beautiful brazier was an object of private delectation.

It had no religious purpose.

But it's important to remember that sensuality played a role

in the art of these times.

In the beginning, this was Islamic art too,

and this,

and this.

When joy was called for, Islamic art inspired great joy.

And when sobriety was more appropriate,

it achieved great sobriety.

This is the finest early mosque in Cairo,

the mosque of ibn Tulun.

I like everything about it,

but most of all I admire its architectural seriousness.

The way you know, as soon as you step in here,

that this is a space devoted to important understandings.

Ahmed ibn Tulun who founded this mosque in 879 AD

was the son of a Turkish slave, who became governor of Egypt.

Originally the mosque stood at the centre of a new city

that ibn Tulun also founded, the city of Al-Qatta'i.

But Al-Qatta'i was destroyed in the 10th century.

This is all that's left of it.

They say ibn Tulun chose this site

because this is where Noah's Ark came to rest.

There was certainly water here,

that domed creation in the centre is the ablutions fountain,

where all Muslims must wash themselves before prayers.

All mosques, not just this one,

are based on the very first mosque

which was the prophet's own house in Medina.

It was a typical mud brick dwelling, with a courtyard,

and in that courtyard the prophet's followers would gather

to hear him speak.

So, all these great courtyards of Islam,

all of them, are descended directly from the prophet's own courtyard.

Their evocative sparseness is an echo of their origins.

Their sun-baked simplicity has been there from the start.

The walls that encircle you here

are like the walls of the prophet's own courtyard.

Their task is to keep the outside world at bay,

and here at ibn Tulun,

there's actually two sets of walls, a kind of double glazing

that separates you from the hustle and bustle out there.

I like these playful crenulations arranged along the top as well.

They look like paper cut-outs,

something my daughter might have made.

To protect his followers from the sun

the prophet built a simple shelter at the end of his courtyard

with a roof made out of palm branches and leaves.

That simple shelter was the inspiration for these great arcades

which still protect the prophet's followers from the sun.

The shelters in his courtyard were also used

as somewhere to meet and discuss community affairs.

And that marvellous communal atmosphere

of a space with many purposes is something else that survives

to this day in the Islamic mosque.

The largest covered space was the prayer hall, which

was basically the prophet's own house at the end of the courtyard.

Every prayer hall today is a continuation of this marvellous Islamic sense.

Underneath all this mighty religious architecture

you can still feel the humble presence

of the prophet's own dwelling.

These prayer halls are so welcoming,

they have a sense of the living room about them.

A home from home.

Most mosques are square or rectangular in plan

and that's because they're all arranged in relation

to this wall here, which is called the Qibla wall.

The Qibla wall indicates the direction of Mecca.

In Arabic the word Qibla means direction.

And in Mohammed's house a simple spear stuck in the ground

would mark the way to pray.

The centre of the Qibla wall is marked by the mihrab

which is always the most ornate part of the wall.

Usually a niche.

These niches were probably inspired by the culminating niches

of Byzantine churches, Christian architecture.

To the right of the mihrab is the minbar or pulpit

and this is based, once again, on the prophet's own house.

They say that when Mohammed had gathered

so many followers he could no longer be heard by everyone

he stepped up onto some blocks of wood

and those are the origins of the minbar.

How fascinating that all the great mosques of Islam

inherited their wonderful clarity, their simplicity and their

underlying sacred geometry from the humble house of the prophet.

Look at all that wonderful stucco work around the arches,

all that repetition and variety,

this is art used in a different way,

not to illustrate something but to create a visual rhythm.

Christian churches are full of pictures that tell you stories

but there are no pictures in these great Islamic interiors.

The decoration here communicates in other ways.

There's a sense of endlessness to it.

It develops in all directions.

And it makes you feel part of something that's bigger than you.

So there are no pictures.

Instead, all the way round runs this Koranic inscription,

carved into wood.

You know I said this mosque was built on the site

when Noah's Ark was said to have come to rest,

another story they tell here is that this Koranic inscription

is carved on the actual wood from Noah's Ark.

At the mosque of ibn Tulun

the Koranic inscription runs for two kilometres around the building,

that's 1/15th of the entire Koran written up on these walls.

This is the Word of God in its most sacred and purest form.

The power of the word is one of the great

creative obsessions of the Dark Ages.

And in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,

the most beguiling of the first Korans,

the so-called Blue Koran,

turns the words of God into such glorious art.

Don't know if you remember the building of the Aswan Dam

in the 1960s? It was rather controversial,

the president of Egypt, President Nasser,

joined up with the Russians to build a dam across the Nile,

and various archaeological sites were lost forever,

or had to be moved to new locations, stone-by-stone.

All sorts of ecological disasters were predicted for the dam.

Most of which haven't happened.

The conquest of water

was another of Islam's great achievements in the Dark Ages.

In Cairo, the Nile would overflow its banks every summer

and the agriculture of the entire Nile Delta

depended on the success of this fertile flooding.

Thick black silt, rich with nutrients,

would be deposited across the flood plain,

ensuring a splendid harvest.

That was in the good years.

In the bad years, the levels were either too low,

which meant disaster,

or too high, which also meant disaster.

The Aswan Dam was built to control that process,

so, you might wonder, what did they do before?

In Islamic times they used this - the celebrated Nilometer

of Rhoda Island on the Nile.

Opened for business in 861 AD,

it's one of the oldest Islamic monuments in Egypt.

And what dramatic evidence it offers of the aquatic brilliance

of Islam's engineers.

What this thing does is measure the height of the Nile flood.

It's basically a big well,

sunk some ten metres under the level of the river.

In the middle is an octagonal marble column,

a kind of giant ruler which, as you can see,

is marked off at different heights.

The measurements are in cubits and one cubit is about half a metre,

so around 16 cubits is the perfect flood.

Fertile, controllable.

Below 16 cubits there's not enough water, so famine conditions ahead,

and higher up, once we get past 19 cubits,

that's really bad, a catastrophic flood.

Islamic authorities in Cairo used the great Nilometer

to calculate their annual tax demands.

The perfect flood meant perfect profits ahead.

Thus, this brilliant piece of design

was an early Islamic alternative to the pocket calculator.

Before they'd built the Aswan Dam,

these tunnels here led off into the Nile at three different levels.

So if they weren't closed off now, I would be under water.

Look at those pointed arches above the tunnels.

That's pure Gothic, 400 years early.

The Nilometer was designed by the famed Persian astronomer

Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani,

better known to us by his Latin name, Alfraganus.

Alfraganus's most famous achievement as an astronomer

was calculating the diameter of the Earth.

Copernicus was said to have used his results.

There's even a crater on the moon named after him,

the Alfraganus Crater.

But it isn't just science that created this,

and it isn't just commerce either.

All the way round,

there are also these beautiful Koranic inscriptions,

in a lovely Kufic script.

"Thou seest the Earth barren and lifeless...",

it says, at the 17 cubit mark.

"..But when we pour rain on it, it is stirred to life".

At the Nilometer in Cairo, science, commerce and faith

have combined in a uniquely Islamic fashion

to create a technological wonder.

This entire series is about how the Dark Ages weren't dark.

But sometimes, I should just shut up

and let you see the proof for yourselves,

because it couldn't be more obvious.

CALL TO PRAYER

This is Kairouan in Tunisia.

Once, this was a city of enormous power,

the most important Islamic outpost in North Africa.

Now, it's a marvellous place to visit

for any true student of the Dark Ages.

Kairouan, they say, was founded by the great Arab warrior,

Sidi Uqba ibn Nafi, who conquered these parts for Islam

just 50 years after the death of the Prophet.

When Sidi Uqba got here, this was all desert.

But something made him pause and look down at his feet.

When Sidi looked down,

he saw a miraculous spring of fresh water bubbling up,

and in that water, a golden cup

which he had lost many years before at the holy spring in Mecca.

The underground waters seemed to have carried it here.

So it was clearly a sign.

And on this holy spot, Sidi Uqba founded Kairouan.

At the centre of the new city, he built a new mosque,

the oldest such mosque in North Africa.

From the outside, there's not much sign of it.

Islam isn't a religion that flaunts itself in the streets.

But when you get inside into the great courtyard

of the Sidi Uqba Mosque, what a powerful sight awaits you.

Another practical use for these great mosque courtyards,

particularly here in Kairouan, where it is so dry,

is for collecting water.

When it rains, all the water is channelled down here to the centre.

See these decorative openings? They actually have a practical purpose.

When the water flows through them,

all these arabesques filter out the impurities, the dust, the feathers.

Then the water, pure and clean,

is saved below in two giant cisterns,

so all of Kairouan can make use of it.

Because it was built from nothing,

Kairouan is a particularly pure Islamic city.

There are few cases here

of the Romans or the Vandals or the Byzantines.

In Kairouan, Islam started from scratch.

Except here, in the courtyard of the mosque. Look at this column.

Look at the top. What is that, Corinthian?

And next to it, Venetian? Over here, Roman, perhaps.

Could even be Egyptian, who knows? Of the 414 columns

arranged around this great courtyard of the mosque in Kairouan,

no two are the same.

Every column is different.

That's because they were all taken

from other people's temples and palaces and city halls.

This entire mosque was built from bits and pieces

of other ancient buildings.

In the old days,

it was actually forbidden to count the columns in here.

Anyone caught doing it was blinded.

If you look closely,

you find some really surprising things about this courtyard.

For example, up here, there's a Christian cross.

So this column must have come from a Byzantine church.

But through some miracle of architectural power,

despite all this busy borrowing,

the end result is an unmistakable sense of Islamic unity.

This space could have come from nowhere else.

This is unmistakably...

an Islamic space.

There are many remarkable things about the Kairouan Mosque.

But particularly remarkable, I think,

is the proof that is offered here

that architecture is an art form of spaces, not of details.

Of courtyards, not of capitals.

See the tower here?

It's got these slabs of stone at the base,

with Latin inscriptions on them.

See this one here, it's upside down.

So these must have come from a Roman building.

This is actually the oldest surviving Islamic minaret.

It's got a bulky, militaristic presence,

rising up in these three squat pieces.

But like all minarets, its original purpose is glorious,

to spread the word, to share the news, to shine a light.

The minaret is one of the defining Islamic achievements

of the Dark Ages.

Islam did much that was inventive and progressive in architecture.

But in its minarets, it surpassed itself.

This word "minaret" comes from the Arabic "manarah",

which means lighthouse.

And that's its function, to be a beacon of hope,

to offer safety and protection.

And of course, the faithful were called to prayer from up there.

In the very first mosque, built by Mohammed,

the faithful were called from the rooftops.

But as cities got bigger, mosques got bigger,

you needed somewhere higher up from which to broadcast the faith.

And look what inventive shapes were found

for this conquest of the sky.

This is the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq.

Its nickname, for obvious reasons, is "the snail shell".

No-one else in the Dark Ages

built anything as airily ambitious as this.

And it wasn't just the mosques.

This extraordinary brick masterpiece in Iran

is the tomb of the Ziyarid prince, Qabus ibn Voshmgir.

It's a thousand years old,

but looks like something the Bauhaus might have come up with,

don't you think?

Inside, Qabus had himself suspended at his death

in a coffin of pure rock crystal.

What a thrilling Islamic conquest of the heavens.

Speaking of rock crystal, it's a very special substance, isn't it?

According to the Koran, when the chosen arrive in Paradise,

they will be given drinks of ginger,

served in goblets of crystal.

Crystal, or rock crystal to be more specific,

was a substance with which Islam seemed to have a special affinity.

They say it was Ahmed ibn Tulun himself

who introduced the art of carving rock crystals into Egypt.

What's certain is that it was in Egypt

that this difficult art reached perfection.

I don't know about you,

but I can't think of many substances in the world

with a presence as magical as rock crystal.

Particularly when it has passed through the hands

of the master carvers of Islam.

Only a handful of these gorgeous Islamic ewers have survived.

And that just makes them feel even more precious.

Rock crystal itself is actually very common.

It's just a type of quartz,

and quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth's crust.

You get it everywhere. Look. There's a stripe of it here.

What isn't common is pieces of quartz

so pure and perfect and transparent

that they satisfy the demands of the great crystal carvers of Islam.

No-one has ever carved rock crystal more finely than this.

What they'd do is find a perfect lump of crystal

and shape it on the outside, and then begin hollowing out the inside.

They'd hollow it further and further and further,

till in the very best Islamic art,

the walls of the crystal were only a couple of millimetres thick.

Now, that was unbelievably difficult.

The shimmering images carved into these gorgeous crystal ewers

would transport the drinker to paradise.

Hunting scenes, flowers, beautiful birds,

so crystal clear that none could resist them.

And it wasn't just Islam

that saw something magical in this rock crystal.

In Ireland, when Ireland was still pagan,

they used to put pieces of rock crystal

at the entrance of the burial chambers.

And in Egypt, they carved it into perfect spheres,

which apparently kept your hands cool when you touched it.

And of course, it was used for telling the future, and it still is.

All sorts of Dark Age societies were fascinated by rock crystal.

The Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, believed that rock crystal

was actually frozen water, trapped for aeons under the glaciers.

Even the early Christians worshipped it.

For them, rock crystal had a natural relationship with divine perfection.

So they'd put it on the outside of their reliquaries

and up in their golden crosses,

where its perfect presence seemed somehow to connect them to God.

Christian rock crystal has a different feel to it.

In Christian hands,

the light-filled paradise of Islam seemed to fill up with shadows.

With Christian rock crystal,

the Dark Ages are what you expect them to be -

Mysterious, spooky and talismanic.

The water engineers of Islam perfected their hydraulic skills

in lands where water was precious and rare.

So their relationship to it had something of the dream about it.

For Islam, water wasn't just a necessity -

it was an enticement, too.

This is Cordoba in Spain.

The Muslim armies got here in 711 AD

and conquered it from the Visigoths -

remember them from the last film?

And when Islam arrived in Spain

it could not believe how fertile this new territory was,

how full of paradisiacal waters.

This is the Guadalquivir in Andalusia,

the largest navigable river in Spain.

The name is Islamic.

It comes from al-wadi al-kabir, which means "The Great Valley".

These days the Guadalquivir River is only navigable up to Seville,

but in Islamic times you could sail all the way up here to Cordoba

and in this great city,

Islamic water architecture surpassed itself.

All along the Guadalquivir,

a cunning system of mills, dams and water wheels

channelled the energy of the waters.

The water wheels of Cordoba lifted water from the river

high up to the bank where the gardeners of Islam used it

to recreate paradise on Earth.

This isn't actually an Islamic garden -

it's an Islamic-style garden

built by the Christian kings here in Cordoba.

Unfortunately, the original Islamic garden has disappeared.

But Islam was here for 500 years

so this style of garden-making is ingrained in the culture.

What you still get here is a vivid sense

of how the Islamic garden felt.

Fountains, waterways, flowers -

these are the divine atmospheres of those magical paradisiacal mosaics

we saw in the Great Mosque at Damascus.

Except this time they're real.

To enter the mosque at Cordoba you need to pass through

another beautiful evocation of the paradise ahead -

an orange grove. So divinely harmonious.

This was obviously a very desirable location.

They say there was a Visigoth church here originally

and later, when the Muslims were finally kicked out of Spain,

a Catholic cathedral was plonked in the middle of the mosque

creating this ungainly hybrid.

It was the Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman I,

who began building the Cordoba mosque.

He actually bought the land from the Christians

and in those early days of religious tolerance,

Muslims and Christians shared the building.

The Cordoba mosque is famous for its columns.

856 of them.

"Like rows of palm trees in the oasis of Syria,"

is how someone's described them.

Columns are very laborious to make

and they use up a lot of precious stone, so they're very heavy,

and if you can avoid making them, you will.

For the Cordoba mosque,

the columns came from the Visigoth church that was there before

and also from nearby Roman temples.

But these reused Visigoth columns weren't quite tall enough

so to make the Cordoba mosque higher and more airy

the architects of Islam came up with a brilliant new idea -

the double arch.

Two arches for the price of one.

At the bottom, the horseshoe arch,

borrowed, as we saw in the last film, from the Visigoths.

Then, on top of that, a round arch, arch number two,

making the mosque taller, less solid-looking.

More see-through.

For the first time in European architecture

the aesthetics of light were shaping a building.

Do you know, Cordoba, when the Muslims were here,

had a half a million people living in it.

It was by far the largest and most prosperous city in western Europe

and all of those inhabitants had running water.

They had toilets that flushed, street lamps -

in the 10th century.

In urban planning, architecture, mathematics and water engineering,

Islamic knowledge was peerless.

And in one area it was spectacular - astronomy, the study of the stars.

90 percent of the 200 brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names.

Vega, Betelgeuse, Algol, Deneb -

they're all creations of the Dark Ages

because Arabic astronomy allowed the Dark Ages to glimpse the cosmos.

Remember those stars painted on to the roof at the palace in Qusayr Amra?

Well, that was just the beginning.

While Christian science was insisting on a backward, biblical understanding of the cosmos,

Islamic science was investigating the heavens more adventurously.

This little baby here, the astrolabe,

has been called the first computer.

It was developed to pinpoint the direction of Mecca.

Muslims needed to pray five times a day

in a specific direction at specific times.

The astrolabe could work all that out in relation to the stars

so this was the first compass as well, and the first clock.

So the way it works, the first thing you need to do

is decide on which star you want to focus on

and I'm going to choose Vega.

So I find Vega in the sky and with these sights here

I line it up until I can see Vega in the middle.

It's exactly there.

And that gives me a reading here in degrees,

degrees from the horizontal.

So I can see that Vega, right now, is 35 degrees.

So the next thing to do is to set the date, measured, of course,

in the old-fashioned way, in phases of the zodiac.

Right now we're in Gemini, so...

In fact, we're in the 15th degree of Gemini.

About there, otherwise known as the end of May.

So this is basically that in diagrammatic form

and whatever is true on here is also true out there.

So I know the date, I know where Vega is,

so, with the help of this handy Dark Age sat-nav

I can finally work out where I am.

It was Alfraganus, the multi-skilled designer of the Nilometer in Cairo

who undertook the first great Islamic exploration of the stars.

He was followed by many others.

Without Islamic science and its sensuous delight in the cosmos,

perhaps this really would have been a dark age.

With Islamic science, it was anything but.

In the next film we'll be heading north

to celebrate those fine craftsmen the Vikings

and to investigate those particularly skilled jewellers of the Dark Ages,

the Anglo-Saxons.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd