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Today, the world still feels the influence of the Muslim empires. Do you like to play chess? Our modern chess game developed during the height of the Islamic age.
Europeans designed some musical instruments based on Arabic ones; for example, the rebec is an ancestor of the violin. Many of the brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names.
In Islam, it’s important to learn things and preserve knowledge, so scholars were important in the Muslim empires. They made advances in many areas, including science, math, and geography. Scholars in Baghdad and Córdoba translated many ancient scientific writings into Arabic, which helped spread that information around the Islamic world. Such translations saved the knowledge of civilizations like Greece, which would otherwise have been lost to the world.
Although men had more rights than women did, Islamic law gave women more rights than many cultures did at that time. Women could become educated, and some were scholars. Lubna of Córdoba, for example, ran the royal library in the Umayyad palace at Córdoba and was a skilled mathematician and poet.
