https://youtube.com/watch?v=nWb2jU-79cg&si=SvniULtDrsRkqEJ2author and Islamic history researcher Salim Khan (author of The Golden Age of Islam and many more) unpacks the extraordinary life of Ibn al-Haytham — the 10th-century polymath from Basra who challenged Aristotle and Ptolemy, invented the pinhole-camera experiment that proved the true nature of light, and wrote a seven-volume treatise on optics held in the same regard as Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
We go deep into the part of his story most people don’t know: how a failed engineering project to dam the Nile landed him under house arrest by a Fatimid caliph, how he feigned madness to survive, and how he turned over a decade of imprisonment into his most important scientific work. We also confront an uncomfortable truth — how the Latinization of Muslim scientists’ names (Ibn Sina to Avicenna, Al-Khwarizmi to Algorizmi, Al-Razi to Rhazes) quietly erased their legacy from the story most of us were taught.
This isn’t a history lecture. It’s a challenge to Muslim youth to reclaim a spirit of relentless questioning that built the Golden Age of Islam — and ask why we stopped.
author and Islamic history researcher Salim Khan (author of The Golden Age of Islam and many more) unpacks the extraordinary life of Ibn al-Haytham — the 10th-century polymath from Basra who challenged Aristotle and Ptolemy, invented the pinhole-camera experiment that proved the true nature of light, and wrote a seven-volume treatise on optics held in the same regard as Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
We go deep into the part of his story most people don’t know: how a failed engineering project to dam the Nile landed him under house arrest by a Fatimid caliph, how he feigned madness to survive, and how he turned over a decade of imprisonment into his most important scientific work. We also confront an uncomfortable truth — how the Latinization of Muslim scientists’ names (Ibn Sina to Avicenna, Al-Khwarizmi to Algorizmi, Al-Razi to Rhazes) quietly erased their legacy from the story most of us were taught.
This isn’t a history lecture. It’s a challenge to Muslim youth to reclaim a spirit of relentless questioning that built the Golden Age of Islam — and ask why we stopped.
Aal-e-Qutub Aal-e-Syed Abdullah Shah Ghazi 