Arabia 3D Page #3

By weaving together many ideas, Islamic

scholars came up with algebra.

The foundation of science was strengthened

when Ibn al-Haytham came along.

His theories of gravity and momentum

preceded lsaac Newton's work

by 700 years.

In over 200 books, he

revolutionized physics and optics.

Ibn al-Haytham built the

world's first camera obscura.

He was the first to explain

how the eye sees.

And his pioneering work in optics led

to telescopes and cameras like mine.

Lbn al-Haytham

conducted experiments

to find out how things

really work.

He has been called the father

of the scientific method.

In the world's

first universities,

hundreds of scholars explored

the boundaries of science.

After Jabir ibn Haiyan

cooked up chemistry,

Abu Rayhan Muhammad

ibn Ahmad al-Biruni

calculated the circumference of

the Earth with great precision.

These innovative scholars

were the catalyst

that ignited the European

Renaissance centuries later.

There has never been anything quite

like this Golden Age of lslam,

which lit up three continents for 800 years

and changed our understanding of the world.

But invading armies and dwindling

trade chipped away at the empire

and led to the slow decline

of the Golden Age.

When the empire collapsed,

Arabia lapsed into an age

of stagnant isolation.

Well into the early 1900s, Arabia was

a patchwork of quarreling tribes,

but one man changed all that.

His name was

Abdul Aziz ibn Saud.

With a skillful blend

of force and diplomacy,

Abdul Aziz united all

the towns and tribal lands

and created the kingdom

of Saudi Arabia,

named for his own family.

In the 1930s, when the new king invited

the Americans to explore for oil,

they found the largest deposits on

Earth, 25% of the world's reserves.

After only 13 years as king,

Abdul Aziz met with President

Franklin D. Roosevelt

and formed an alliance

that endures to this day.

...Saudi Arabia to a

conference with President Roosevelt.

The Saudi Arabian king

and American president

discuss mutual problems of trade

and relations with Saudi Arabia.

Near Riyadh, I visited the king's

ancestral village as it was being restored.

I felt the weight of history

in this mud palace.

But in the 50 years that King

Abdul Aziz has been gone,

a lot of things have changed.

Nearby, in our

capital of Riyadh,

the old ways are getting increasingly

comfortable with the new.

The discovery of oil changed

not just Arabia's economy,

but the economic balance

of the entire world.

Today, oil is our frankincense.

And it gives us a chance to make

education our first priority,

much like it was centuries ago.

Recently, King Abdullah started a

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