Within twenty years of its foundation, Baghdad was the biggest city in the world and possibly the biggest city that had ever been: it was the first city whose population topped a million. Baghdad spread beyond the rivers, so that the Tigris and Euphrates actually flowed through Baghdad, rather than beside it. The waters were diverted through a network of canals that let boats serve as the city’s buses, making it a bit like Venice, except that bridges and lanes let people navigate the city on foot or on horseback too. Baghdad might well have been the world’s busiest city as well as its biggest. Two great rivers opening onto the Indian Ocean gave it tremendous port facilities, plus it was easily accessible to land traffic from every side, so ships and caravans flowed in and out every day, bringing goods and traders from every part of the known world—China, India, Africa, Spain. Commerce was regulated by the state. Every nationality had its own neighborhood, and so did every kind of business. On one street you might find cloth merchants, on another soap dealers, on another the flower market, on yet another the fruit shops. The Street of Stationers featured over a hundred shops selling paper, a new invention recently acquired from China (whom the Abbasids met and defeated in 751 CE, in the area that is now Kazakhstan). Goldsmiths, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths; armorers and stables; money changers, straw merchants, bridge builders, and cobblers, all could be found hawking their wares in their designated quarters of mighty Baghdad. There was even a neighborhood for open-air stalls and shops selling miscellaneous goods. Ya’qubi اليعقوبي, an Arab geographer of the time, claimed that this city had six thousand streets and alleys, thirty thousand mosques, and ten thousand bathhouses.

— Destiny Disrupted

لعَينَيكِ ما يَلقى الفؤادُ وَمَا لَقي
وللحُبّ ما لم يَبقَ منّي وما بَقي

وَما كنتُ ممّنْ يَدْخُلُ العِشْقُ قلبَه
وَلكِنّ مَن يُبصِرْ جفونَكِ يَعشَق

وَأَحلى الهَوى ما شَكَّ في الوَصلِ رَبُّهُ
وَفي الهَجرِ فَهوَ الدَهرَ يُرجو وَيُتَّقي

— أبو الطيب المتنبي

والحبُّ كالذَنْبِ بالإخفاءِ يَنكَشِفُ*

By Jean-Léon Gérôme, I think

عن أبي عبدِ الله الصادق (ع) قال: قالَ رسولُ الله (ص): «مَن كانَ في قَلبِه حَبَّةٌ مِن خَردَل مِن عَصَبيّة، بَعَثَه اللهُ يومَ القيامةِ مع أعرابِ الجاهلية»

والعصبيُّ هو الذي يُعِينُ قَومَه على الظُلم ويَغضَبُ لعصبَتِه ويُحامي عنهم في الباطِل. وعُصبةُ المرءِ أقرِباؤه مِن جهةِ الأب، لأنّهم يُحيطونَ به فيَقوى بِهم. والتَعصُّب بمعنى الحمايةِ والدفاع.

by the mid-eleventh century, Muslims were hard at work on three great cultural projects, pursued respectively by scholar-theologians, philosopher-scientists, and Sufi mystics: to elaborate Islamic doctrine and law in full; to unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and to develop a technique for achieving personal union with God. Yes, the three groups overlapped somewhat, but overall they pulled in competing directions, and their intellectual disagreements had high and sometimes bloody political and financial stakes. At this juncture, one of the intellectual giants of world history was born of Persian-speaking parents in the province of Khorasan. His name was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali.

Before Ghazali came along, three intellectual movements were competing for adherents in the Islamic world. After Ghazali, two of those currents had come to an accommodation (the scholars and the sufis) and the third had been eliminated (the philosophers).

— Destiny Disrupted

Even if you disagree with Ghazali's conclusions, you gotta admit, he was a free thinker after all

The story of King Sancho illustrates how the various communities got along. In the late tenth century CE, Sancho inherited the throne of Leon, a Christian kingdom north of Spain. Sancho’s subjects soon began referring to him as Sancho the Fat, the sort of nickname a king never likes to hear his subjects using with impunity. Poor Sancho might more accurately have been called Sancho the Medically Obese, but his nobles could not take the large view. They regarded Sancho’s size as proof of an internal weakness that made him unfit to rule, so they deposed him.Sancho then heard about a Jewish physician named Hisdai ibn Shaprut who reputedly knew how to cure obesity. Hisdai was employed by the Muslim ruler in Córdoba, so Sancho headed south with his mother and retinue to seek treatments. The Muslim ruler Abdul Rahman the Third welcomed Sancho as an honored guest and had him stay at the royal palace until Hisdai had shrunk him down, whereupon Sancho returned to Leon, reclaimed his throne, and signed a treaty of friendship with Abdul Rahman. A Christian king received treatments from a Jewish physician at the court of a Muslim ruler: there you have the story of Muslim Spain in a nutshell. When Europeans talk about the Golden Age of Islam, they are often thinking of the Spanish khalifate, because this was the part of the Muslim world that Europeans knew the most about.

— Destiny Disrupted

the poet Firdausi, who was writing Shahnama شاهنامه (The Book of Kings), an epic history of the Persian nation from the beginning of time to the birth of Islam, all in rhyming couplets. In the Middle World he has a stature comparable to Dante. Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi extravagantly promised this man one piece of gold for each couplet of his finished epic. He was shocked when Firdausi finally presented him with the longest poem ever penned by a single man: The Book of Kings has over sixty thousand couplets. “Did I say gold?” the sultan frowned. “I meant to say silver. One piece of silver for each couplet.”The offended Firdausi went off in a huff and offered his poem to another king. According to legend, Sultan Mahmud later regretted his penny-pinching and sent servants with trunk loads of gold to coax the poet back, but they were knocking on the front door of the poet’s house while his corpse was being carried out the back for burial.

— Destiny Disrupted