Editor’s Note: The following is an adapted transcript of a lecture delivered by S. Frederick Starr at Yale University on November 6, 2025. Dr. Starr, a distinguished historian and author of “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane,” reflects on his Yale education and draws on decades of scholarship to examine a crucial but often overlooked aspect of Islamic intellectual history: what wasn’t translated during Islam’s Golden Age of translation, and why that matters for understanding contemporary Muslim societies and their approaches to governance, law, and civil society. The full text is appearing in The Middle East Forum in November; we are publishing this Yale lecture with acknowledgment of the forthcoming MEF publication.
It is a great pleasure to return to Yale. I recall my first day here in 1958. I arrived late, and my roommate in Bingham Hall was already fast asleep. After changing into my pajamas, I lay down on my bed. As my head hit the pillow, I heard out of the darkness: “Shahbakhair!” When I asked the unknown voice what that meant, he said it means “Goodnight” in Farsi. In other words, my first word at Yale was in a language key to my subject today.
A classics major back then was “take-no-hostages” serious, including a semester-long course on Greek vase painting. Can you imagine? By mid-year I was deep in classical archaeology and signed on to dig at Gordion in Turkey, where Alexander cut the Gordian knot. In January I got a postcard from Rodney Young in Philadelphia, the director. It included a concise PS: “Learn Turkish.” The Law School was buzzing with talk of new constitutions and laws worldwide and had a special aura for us undergraduates. I was among several who were allowed to sit in on Professor Bickel’s landmark course on constitutional law.
The Known Story
The story of early Muslim history is by now well-known: the conquest of Persia, then the brutal struggle to subdue Central Asia, and finally the foundation in 762 of the new circular city of Baghdad based on Central Asian models. Shortly thereafter, the Abbasid Caliph Mansur came to realize that little or no information on the larger world was available in Arabic, then a language of nomads. He therefore established a library at Baghdad and set about filling it with translated works that embodied the world’s knowledge. It was an admirable effort at cultural catch-up by a people intent on development.
All this is well known. Less well known is that the first big thrust of translation was not from Greek but from Sanskrit. Curiously, this initial effort was led by members of a dynasty of former Buddhist rulers from Balkh in what is now Afghanistan—the Barmaks. It was thanks to them that what we wrongly call Arabic numerals were brought from India to the West, along with the nearly unfathomable concept of zero, not to mention diverse literary forms, including the kind of stories that led to the Thousand and One Nights. But even before the Barmak family lost power and its members were murdered, the focus had shifted to classical Greek.
Why Greek? For one thing, Baghdad now ruled millions of Greeks, and their realm adjoined Byzantium. Also, the Persians whom the Arabs had conquered, and who now dominated the Baghdad intelligentsia, had interacted with the Greeks since ancient times and knew and admired their culture. However, the number of Muslim politicians and clerics who knew Greek could be counted on one hand. Translations were essential. It was a stroke of good luck that Syrian Christians, who were now under Muslim rule, knew both Greek and Latin in addition to their native Syriac. Syrian Christians jumped at the opportunity to provide translations of ancient Greek texts, even traveling to Constantinople in search of manuscripts, secure in the knowledge that Mansur would pay a king’s ransom for their translations.
The Flood of Translations
And so there followed a flood of translations of classical Greek works into Arabic. At the top of the list were medical treatises, including works by Dioscorides, the Greco-Roman expert Eratosthenes, and especially Galen. Astronomy figured large in the list of translated classics, including works by Ptolemy, Strabo, and Archimedes. For logic, physics, metaphysics, and fields as diverse as linguistics and geology, they turned to Aristotle, who in due course became established as THE thinker in the Muslim world.
While many authors were translated, the works of Aristotle led the pack. It was above all this student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great from the fourth century BC who sparked the Muslim intellectual renaissance a millennium ago.
The resulting intellectual renaissance was truly spectacular. Great figures like Biruni, who measured the earth more precisely than any European down to the seventeenth century; Ibn al-Haytham, who invented the field of optics; Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), who not only defined the field of medicine for six centuries but was often cited by St. Thomas Aquinas for his views on logic and theology; and al-Khwarizmi, who reinvented the field of algebra and whom we honor every time we repeat the term “algorithm,” which is a corruption of his name. All of these geniuses were far in advance of their Christian contemporaries down to the Renaissance.
Today, at a time when the economies of Muslim societies have fallen far behind their Western counterparts, when the entire Arab world translates fewer foreign books than Portugal, when only one Muslim scientist has been honored with a Nobel Prize in physics, and when Islamic fundamentalists terrorize the world, despairing people worldwide find solace in the knowledge that centuries ago the Muslim world gave rise to some of the world’s great thinkers.
Many thoughtful Muslims have embraced the great flowering that took place between the eighth and eleventh centuries during what is often called Islam’s Golden Age. Recalling their societies’ remote era of intellectual effervescence, they take heart, convinced that such an intellectual and cultural renaissance might again be possible today. Many Muslim countries are dedicating huge resources to overcome what they acknowledge as a profound deficiency in the realm of knowledge.
What Wasn’t Translated
To this point, our story is about the heroic actions of Baghdad’s Muslim rulers more than a millennium ago. It is all very nice, truly impressive, yet the picture I have offered is far from complete. What, we might ask, were the most important works of ancient Greek thinkers that were not translated into Arabic? Here the plot thickens. Recent scholars praise the intellectual curiosity of the new Muslim rulers and intelligentsia of Baghdad, but they never report on what works never made it into translation and hence had no impact on the Muslim mind. This is unfortunate, for we can learn as much about the Golden Age of Islam from what was not translated as from what was.
The list of neglected works is impressive. Most prominent among them were the ancient world’s greatest thinkers on society, law, politics, and history. In other words, everything pertaining to the conduct and governance of communities, cities, states, and whole societies was excluded from the Arabs’ otherwise inquiring minds. Thus, Herodotus’ Histories, so rich in geographical details and replete with pungent accounts of the diverse cultures of the East, was never translated. Similarly, Thucydides’ brilliant analysis of the prolonged civil war between Athens and Sparta and of the internal dynamics of the contending parties also failed to find a translator.
Yet more serious is the absence of an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Politics, arguably the ancient world’s most profound analysis of the diverse ways in which political decisions are actually made, as opposed to the claims of rulers and their minions. Besides being the source of our term “politics,” this work goes beyond ethics, which Aristotle saw as pertaining only to individuals, to the rules and practices of whole communities. While Plato’s Republic proceeds from abstract first principles and remains in the clouds, Aristotle’s Politics was based on actual field research, which resulted in his collection of 158 actual civic constitutions. Studying these, Aristotle then asked “What works?” rather than “What should work?”
The list of works from Greece’s age of genius that the Arabs neglected extended beyond landmark studies of politics and law. Also rejected were the many classical texts that presented human nature as it actually is, rather than as it ought to be. First among such works were the tragedies. Not one of the hundreds of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were translated into Arabic, thus denying the Muslim world an appreciation of the very concept of tragedy in human affairs.
It is probably no surprise that Baghdad’s prudish new rulers made no effort to commission translations of the pungent and uproariously funny comedies of Aristophanes, the father of comedy. With Lysistrata and The Frogs unknown to speakers of Arabic, audiences in the Muslim world were never exposed to the Greeks’ ability to poke fun at exalted leaders like Alcibiades, respected cultural figures like Euripides, and even solemn national events like the Peloponnesian War itself. Some of the Greek comedies would doubtless have been too ribald for the staid Muslim leaders, but in not translating them they denied Muslims models of how civilized people can laugh at their rulers and at themselves.
Beyond all this, the Islamic renaissance of ca. 800-1200 showed scant interest in the intellectual achievements of ancient Rome. To be sure, there were exceptions, notably the translation of major works by the Greco-Roman physician Claudius Galen. But works like Polybius’ magnificent Histories, with their staunch defense of a balance of power both among contending social classes and among branches of the government, remained unknown to the Muslim world.
The Western Comparison
Let us acknowledge that neither Greek tragedies nor comedies found favor in medieval Western Europe or Byzantium. But ancient writings on history, law, and practical politics were well known to them through their reading of Roman authors. Thinkers in the Latin world knew full well that chroniclers and analysts like Cicero, Sallust, and Caesar wrote about pre-Christian eras, but they did not reject them on religious grounds. Through reading these Latin classics, medieval Europeans gained profound insights on the character of Political Man in all societies and the tensions between moral concerns, human ambition, and the law that exist at all places and times.
Why the Selective Translation?
So why did Baghdad and the Muslim East seek out the wisdom of ancient Greek philosophy, logic, mathematics, and medicine but remain closed to its insights on the life of societies and the workings of politics? Why did the Muslim East embrace ancient learning in some fields with such intensity that it moved far ahead of the West but remained utterly closed to ancient wisdom on society, politics, and law?
While there may have been other contributing factors, the main driver was the new Muslim rulers’ conviction that the correct approach to all questions of society, law, and politics had been revealed for all times by Allah to his prophet Muhammad and articulated in the Quran and the Hadiths, which purport to record the sayings of the prophet. Such an approach obviates both the need and the justification for politics as understood in the Greco-Roman world. While it was at least marginally compatible with Plato’s top-down and authoritarian Republic, it was flatly at odds with Aristotle’s Politics, with the endless political maneuvers and improvisations described by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, with the political tugs-of-war that infuse both Greek tragedy and comedy, with the entire corpus of Roman legislation, and with the very human political struggles that are the focus of Rome’s greatest historians. The Quran thus excluded all politics in the Western sense of the word and renders the translation of classic works on political parties and factions, political biographies, and struggles over legislation not only irrelevant but impious, a means of encouraging behavior that undermines holy writ. As such, they were banned.
As long as the Quran and Hadiths were accepted and applied literally and fully, as was overwhelmingly the case in nearly all Muslim societies down to modern times, it severely restricted the range of acceptable discourse on society, politics, and the law. This left the world of Islam bound up by ecclesiastical constraints and bereft of the concepts needed to consider competitive politics, participation by individuals and groups, and the law in the modern sense of those terms.
To be sure, a few Muslim thinkers did tread onto this territory. Among early groups who addressed these issues were the rationalistic Mutazilites, who briefly gained official patronage in the eighth century. But then the Caliph al-Mutawakkil brutally suppressed them in the name of Quranic tradition. A few later thinkers, like Farabi in the ninth century and Nasir al-Din Tusi in the thirteenth century, pursued independent lines of thought but even they ended up advancing an approach to society and governance that would have been more at home in Plato’s dictatorial utopia than in any modern society since the Renaissance. In sharp contrast to the modernity of the early Muslim world’s approach to science and medicine, the Golden Age’s bequest to later generations in the sphere of governance and society consisted mainly of the ideal of a single wise and absolute lawgiver and ruler who exercises unlimited centralized power over every aspect of the lives of the pious and docile populace.
Islamic Jurisprudence and Modern Paths
It is not that the Muslim world was deaf to concerns about the nature of society, politics, and history. It’s just that they conceived them only within the very specific confines of the Quran. Thus, Muslim jurists worried over how to apply Quranic principles to problems that had not existed in the Prophet’s day. Differences arose among them, which gave rise to the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence that still exist today among Sunni Muslims and to the separate Shia school of law. These range from the Hanbalis’ extreme literalism and rejection of speculative reasoning to the Hanafi school, which allows for a degree of juristic discretion and the acknowledgment of local customary law.
Moving beyond its schools of jurisprudence, the world of Islam divides into three mutually incompatible camps. First, there are the fundamentalists, who seek a thoroughgoing reversion to the past, as was instituted to varying degrees by the Salafists, Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Second is the full-blown secularist approach: to reject this heritage and fully secularize the state and laws, as was done by Atatürk, the Soviet rulers of Central Asia, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Shah Reza Pahlavi. And third, there are those who combine modern statism and civil law with respect for, but not subservience to, the mullahs and the demands of the faith. This approach calls for secular laws, courts, and state institutions that are respectful of the traditional faith but which do not bow to the mullahs who interpret it.
Central Asia’s Third Way
The most systematic and thoroughgoing embrace of this third alternative—to combine modern ideas on the state, law, and civil society with respect for tradition but not control by it—are to be found in the newly sovereign states of Greater Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan but also Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim society, has also followed this course, albeit at times precariously.
The post-Soviet states had the advantage of being forced by the collapse of the USSR to reinvent their polities de novo. In this process they have benefited from three factors. First, they are all of the Hanafi school, which is relatively more open to interpretation in law. Second, they have been able to bring to the fore neglected Muslim thinkers like the tenth-century jurist Abu Mansur al-Maturidi from Samarkand, who argued that Allah created all possibilities and left human beings free to choose among them. The government of Uzbekistan has recently restored Maturidi’s tomb.
The third element is the most surprising and arguably the most important. After the collapse of the USSR, the newly sovereign governments across Central Asia turned to their lawyers to map out new constitutions and codes of law. Of course, these were all former Soviet lawyers, but they were faced with a totally new challenge: to decide on a new system of government and a legal code to accompany it. Now, for all its Marxism and its control by the Communist Party, Soviet law still bore the strong imprint of the late tsarist civil code, which was significantly modeled on German law of the Bismarck era, which proudly incorporated important principles of Roman law. True, the Soviet constitution’s guarantees of religious and other freedoms existed only on paper, but they were there nonetheless. When the post-Soviet reformers in Central Asia set out to draft new constitutions and civil codes, they embraced what we might call the “Roman” elements of Soviet and tsarist law, providing a large sphere for activity independent of the state, including private businesses. At the same time, they absorbed the Russian and Soviet view that the state should set the parameters of religious life, not the churchmen or mullahs.
Today the states of Central Asia still have what might be called state churches. But their constitutions and laws confirm the freedom of religion and, most important, consider the state as a secular institution governed by secular laws. This has opened the door to a range and depth of legal thought that goes far beyond anything taking place in such centers of Sunni orthodoxy as Al-Azhar University in Cairo or of Shiite orthodoxy as Najaf in Iraq.
What’s Still Missing
Here we should pause and, as we did with the early Muslim Golden Age, ask what was NOT incorporated into the new constitutions.
The answer is simple: juries. Not one of the new post-Soviet constitutions embraces juries as part of the new judicial system. The law is to be managed by experts who, so it is hoped, are above all social pressures and independent of politics. Why did they make this choice? Of course, we can trace it to many causes, prominent among them being that their reforms were coming from above, and not from the populace or those claiming to speak for it. But is it not also relevant that their Muslim forebears of the Golden Age systematically ignored Roman writers like Cicero whose entire writings consist mainly of cases argued before the Senate or other judicial bodies? Is it not relevant that for 1,000 years they were ignorant of Plato’s account of the death of Socrates, in which the philosopher humbly yielded to the judgment of a jury of his peers and defended his action on the most serious philosophical grounds?
Conclusion: A Call for Engagement
Today’s Central Asian reformers are picking up and reviving neglected approaches to politics and society that Islam’s Golden Age turned its back on a millennium ago. They do so as Muslim believers or at least as officials respectful of Islam. However, they insist that citizenship requires submission to civil law and that the proper role of religious faith is within society and not above society and controlling it. In doing so they are addressing fundamental issues that have vexed their predecessors back to the earliest days of Islam.
In my judgment, they are achieving positive results that are still unfolding. I remember well that half a century ago, Yale Law School buzzed with discussion of, and plans for, constitutions and laws being drafted for what were then new states in Asia and Africa. Today, much is at stake in the outcome of current debates in the Muslim world over constitutions, laws, and courts. These processes warrant similar attention and engagement by today’s experts—not just at Yale, but throughout the Western academic and policy communities.
The story of what wasn’t translated during Islam’s Golden Age is not merely a historical curiosity. It offers crucial insights into contemporary challenges facing Muslim societies as they navigate between tradition and modernity, between religious authority and civil governance. Understanding this historical lacuna helps us better appreciate both the achievements and the ongoing struggles of these societies as they work to create viable political and legal frameworks for the twenty-first century.