From Mecca to Bukhara
1Islam began in the Arabian city of Mecca in the early 600s. Muslims believe that, starting about 610, God sent revelations to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, and that these revelations form the Quran. In 622 Muhammad and his followers moved to Medina, a journey called the hijra. By his death in 632, much of Arabia had joined the Muslim community.
2Under the caliphs who led Muslims after Muhammad, Arab armies won Syria, Egypt and Persia within about twenty years. In the early 700s they pushed into Central Asia and took Bukhara and Samarkand, rich oasis cities on the Silk Road. At first, many people there kept their old religions. Over the next two centuries, through marriage, trade and the work of teachers, more and more of them became Muslims.
3In the 800s and 900s, the Samanids, a Persian Muslim family, ruled much of Central Asia from Bukhara. Caravans stopped there with silk, paper, glass, horses and furs. Caravanserais, walled inns built about a day's journey apart, sheltered traders and their animals along the roads. Bukhara's rulers paid scholars and poets and gathered a great royal library. Scholars across the Muslim world wrote in Arabic, so a doctor in Bukhara could read books written in Baghdad or Cairo.
4Muslim scholars translated Greek, Persian and Indian books and built on them. Numerals that came from India, including a sign for zero, spread through the Muslim world. Large cities had hospitals where doctors treated patients and trained students. Ibn Sina, born near Bukhara about 980, became one of the most famous of these scholars. His first language was Persian, but he wrote most of his books in Arabic. His Canon of Medicine, finished about 1025, joined Greek and Arabic medical knowledge with his own observations. It was translated into Latin in the 1100s, and European universities taught from it until the 1600s.