Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Rumi Forum Podcast

Rumi Forum was founded in 1999 with the mission to foster interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding. The Forum aims to stimulate exchange of opinions in order to advance culture of democracy, freedom of thought, human rights and peace. For over 20 years, the Forum provides a common platform for building relationships, mutual learning and information exchange among adherents of different faiths. Our work has a particular focus on pluralism, peacemaking, interfaith dialogue, intercultural understanding, social harmony and community cohesion.

  1. All Episodes
  2. Central Asia's Golden Age: What Was It and What is Its Meaning Today? with S. Frederick Starr

Central Asia's Golden Age: What Was It and What is Its Meaning Today? with S. Frederick Starr

Nov 27, 2013

For half a millennium Central Asia was the center of the world, with a booming economy, vital urban life, and an intellectual life that bridged antiquity and the Renaissance. Because most of its scientists and thinkers wrote in Arabic it has been generally assumed that they were Arabs, and the specifically Central Asian setting of their lives and work ignored. Basing his presentation his new book, "LOST ENLIGHTENMENT: CENTRAL ASIA'S GOLDEN AGE FROM THE ARAB CONQUEST TO TAMERLANE", Frederick Starr presented the main features of this lost golden age and consider what significance, if any, it has for the present.

S. Frederick Starr is the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at SAIS. A former president of Oberlin College and the Aspen Institute, he was also founding chairman of the Kennan Institute in Washington and established the Greater New Orleans Foundation, the principal non-governmental funder of post-Katrina recovery in that city. He began his career in classical archaeology and has published 22 books. He is a trustee of the Nazarbayev University and was involved in planning four other universities in Central Asia and the Caucasus.