Join this author’s event as we challenge selective narratives that have led many to believe that Islam and the West have nothing in common. Lynos aims to shed light on this misguided conviction and provide a deeper understanding of the similarities and connections between these two worlds.

Friday, May 3 | 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. | Prayer Hall | Join us in-person or watch live at mcceastbay.org/live 

Sponsored by Emir-Stein Center & MCC East Bay

This talk is based on Lyons’s book, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (Bloomsbury Press, 2009), which has appeared in a dozen foreign editions.

Jonathan Lyons, sociologist, and intellectual historian, is the author of three well-received works of narrative non-fiction, including The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (Bloomsbury Press, 2009), which has appeared in a dozen foreign editions. His academic writing includes Islam through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2012) and contributions to The Oxford Encyclopedia of  Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam and other edited volumes. His trade and academic work share a common thread: the search for the social bases of human thought and the accompanying consequences for our understanding of the world.

Lyons has a doctorate in sociology from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University. Before turning to writing full-time in 2007, Lyons served for 21 years as a foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and editor with the Reuters news agency, with postings in Moscow, Istanbul, Tehran, Washington, and Jakarta. He lives in British Columbia, Canada, with his wife, Michelle Johnson, and their dog Ziggy Stardust.

Learn more about him at https://jonathanlyons.pubsitepro.com.

About His Book, “The House of Wisdom”
For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile, Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch. There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and keeping the works of Plato and Aristotle alive. When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad’s great library, The House of Wisdom, housed four hundred thousand. Jonathan Lyons shows how much “Western” ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.

Even while their fellow citizens waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, hungry for knowledge, traveled East and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. In this brilliant, evocative book, Jonathan Lyons reveals how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.

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