Book Review: Lost Enlightenment

From Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, by S. Frederick Starr:

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"This was truly an Age of Enlightenment, several centuries of cultural flowering during which Central Asia was the intellectual hub of the world. India, China, the Middle East, and Europe all boasted rich traditions in the realm of ideas, but during the four or five centuries around AD 1000 it was Central Asia, the one world region that touched all these other centers, that surged to the fore. It bridged time as well as geography, in the process becoming the great link between antiquity and the modern world. To a far greater extent than today’s Europeans, Chinese, Indians, or Middle Easterners realize, they are all the heirs of the remarkable cultural and intellectual effervescence in Central Asia that peaked in the era of Ibn Sina and Biruni."

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Grade: A-

Book Review: "Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, by S. Frederick Starr

Ever since childhood, I've been fascinated by travel stories like Marco Polo's, so much so that I've wanted to visit Central Asia myself. In 1977, I got close, visiting Afghanistan and Iran, but because the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara were part of the Soviet Union, I didn't go that far north. Today, the USSR is history and Uzbekistan is welcoming tourists. Ellen and I took advantage of this window of opportunity to visit. This history by S. Frederick Starr tells us why it was a good decision.

Where is Central Asia? In brief, it's the 'stans — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and, depending on where you draw the boundaries, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and even Azerbaijan. Those are today's states. Historically, the borders were drawn many different ways over time to provide homes for the classic empires of the Sogdia and Bactrians; the nomadic confederations of the Xiongnu and Turkik and Uyghur Khaganates; the Medieval Islamic Samanid and Khwarazmian Empires; and the Mongol and Timurid Empires. The borders and capitals of these kingdoms were ever changing. The Mongol Empire was the largest, stretching from Japan to Eastern Europe.

Starr's history is comprehensive. Its emphasis is on the five hundred years or so when Central Asia was the intellectual hub of the world in the fields of mathematics, geography, astronomy, astrology, chemisty, geology, architecture, literature, and religion (Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all arose or evolved here). Starr lists so many great thinkers from Central Asia who I never heard of that it's impossible to keep them straight. He also warns us that "our judgments of individual thinkers and scientists will be deeply distorted by the fact that a mere fraction of their known writing has come down to us. Whole bodies of works by scientists and thinkers who were considered stars of the intellectual world have been lost or are known only through an occasional quotation buried in the works of others."

Starr spends much time explaining why Central Asia became home to an Enlightenment in the arts and sciences in an age when Europe was still a backwater. Much of his explanation lies with Central Asia's location as the crossroads of the world, drawing knowledge from China, India, and Persia.

Harder to explain is why did Central Asia's leadership ebb away? Among contributing factors is the obvious one of the killing of the population and destruction of infrastructure during the Mongol invasions. On the heels of that came the devastation of the Black Death. Cities that were relatively spared by Genghis Khan were wiped out a century later by plague. But decline was underway before either the Mongols or the plague did their damage.

The discovery of sea routes between Europe and south and east Asia is often mentioned as a cause of decline in south Asia, but Starr dismisses this on the grounds that decline was well along a least a century before Vasco de Gama sailed from Portugal around Africa to India.

Perhaps the biggest reason, in Starr's account, is the growing influence of Islam and its dominance over all other intellectual fields. Starr says, "Strife within the community of Islam, the umma, the struggle of Sunni versus Shiite, was more than anything else responsible for the closing of the Muslim mind in Central Asia...The extension of the Sharia body of law into every area of civil and religious life turned regional states into theocracies in spite of themselves; they used their full power to enforce conformity with Islamic law, which became the sole arbiter of the claims of science, philosophy, and logic." Agree or disagree, Starr examines other theses for readers to consider as well. History is rarely simple.