Muslims were the first intellectuals ever in a position to make direct comparisons between, say, Greek and Indian mathematics, or Greek and Indian medicine, or Persian and Chinese cosmologies, or the metaphysics of various cultures. They set to work exploring how these ancient ideas fit in with each other and with the Islamic revelations, how spirituality related to reason, and how heaven and earth could be drawn into a single schema that explained the entire universe. One such schema, for example, described the universe as emanating from pure Being in a series of waves that descended to the material facts of immediate daily life.

— Destiny Disrupted

The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence – for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. – But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

But will our philosophy not thus become a tragedy? Will truth not become inimical to life, to the better man? A question seems to lie heavily on our tongue and yet refuses to be uttered: whether one could consciously reside in untruth? or, if one were obliged to, whether death would not be preferable? For there is no longer any 'ought'; for morality, insofar as it was an 'ought', has been just as much annihilated by our mode of thinking as has religion. Knowledge can allow as motives only pleasure and pain, utility and injury: but how will these motives come to terms with the sense for truth?

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human

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*