Lyrics
I- THINKER'S SLUMBER
With the weakening of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the fifth century, Western Europe slipped rapidly into what is now known as the Dark Ages, from which it would not emerge for a thousand years.
Jim Al-Khalili - The House Of Wisdom
Scornful dogma
Withering era
Silence in sight
Treasures of cognition
Have ceased to be
Destructive minds
Turning life to ashes
Relentlessly
Despotic hands on recollection
Restraining man from recollection
II. WANDERING TIMES
Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing; knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance.
ibid
Wandering times
Crawling thoughts abandoned at dusk
Thinker's dream
Lost in doubts
Streams of lore
concealing in drought
Wandering times
Scripted thoughts emerging at dawn
Scholars' dream
Starts to blink
Streams of lore
submerging with ink
Glimpse of light in sight
Dazzling minds are turning the page
on darker times
III. WITHIN THE ROUNDED WALLS
Like the city of Alexandria, founded a thousand years earlier by Alexander the Great, Baghdad grew from nothing to become the world's largest city just fifty years after the first brick was laid. And just like Alexandria, it became a centre for culture, scholarship and enlightenment that attracted the world's greatest minds.
ibid
Nightfall unfurls its sky
Whispers of waves... mesmerised
Nightfall's canvas unfolds
Frame in time, the stars have told
Mighty circle of stone
Standing strong, on the sands, alone
Rounded walls
Once foreseen
Standing tall
To the thinker's realm
all roads shall lead
IV. PEARLS OF TRANSLATION
(...) the success of a spectacularly massive translation movement - a process that lasted for two centuries - during which much of the wisdom of the earlier civilisations of the Greeks, Persians and Indians was translated into Arabic (...) The translation movement owes its beginnings to the appeal of Persian culture (...) along with the development of paper-making technology they have learned from the Chinese. But once it began, this obsession with translating ancient texts sparked the beginning of a golden age of scientific progress (...) By the mid-ninth century it had evolved into a new tradition of original scientific and philosophical scholarship that further fuelled the demand for more translations, both in quantity and quality.