9/11, London, Paris, Brussels, we all share the memories of these terrorist（恐怖分子） attacks. Do you remember what you felt when you first heard the news or later when you saw someone of Arab（阿拉伯人(的)） descent（血统）, a hijabi woman next to you in the subway, or an Arab man standing（站立） in your queue in the airport? I remember what I felt. I was angry and afraid. I saw Islam（伊斯兰教） as a violent religion and I blamed（责备） it all on angry Arabs. That all changed when I went to visit the Umayyad Mosque（清真寺） in Damascus.

  It is a very old and very beautiful mosque, but it is what I saw inside the mosque that made me feel falling off my horse. In the courtyard, children were playing and families were picnicking. Inside the mosque, some people were listening to a preacher where others were just taking a nap. It was so quiet, so peaceful. There was no violence（ 暴力） there. Actually, there was no violence anywhere, wherever（无论在哪里） I went.

  So I started to wonder, how could I have been so wrong? How could I have been so prejudiced about an entire（全部的） culture? This event changed my life. The next year, I went to visit Jordan and in 2011, I went to live in Cairo for five years. I wanted to live in the Arab world and understand Islamic civilization（文明）. And as I'm a historian（历史学家） and a philosopher（哲学家）, I took a deep dive（跳水（的动作）） into history and philosophy（哲学）.

  Me as well as most Europeans think that we have invented everything, from mathematics to ice cream. But what I learned in Cairo was actually making these beliefs crack（爆裂）. What I learned was that our real history looks very differently. Let me give you an example. The Renaissance（复兴）. We all know that the Renaissance is the foundation（基础） of modern Europe.

  It is the time when Roman（罗马的） and Greek knowledge was put back under light after having been forgotten in the dark Middle Ages. It was in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries that Renaissance ideas like the solar（太阳的） system mathematics or philosophy（哲学） were indeed invented and spread all over Europe. And of course, these ideas are quintessentially European. But are they really so? Take mathematics. Important inventions like telephone, the heart rate monitor（班长） or the diesel（柴油机） engine would never have been possible without algebra.

  Well, lucky for us, algebra was invented by Al-Khwarizmi, a Persian（波斯人[语]） scientist in the 9th century using Indian numbers. These numbers were then arabized and became our numbers. Algebra became the basis of all our mathematics. And without algebra, no artificial（人工的） intelligence or cell（细胞） phones. Let's take medicine. The hospital was invented in Baghdad in the 9th century.

  And Avicenna, another Persian thinker（思想家） of the 10th century, wrote books about medicine that would have been used in Europe for medical education until 1650. In philosophy, the battle between science and religion, a battle that is still ongoing（不间断的） in Europe today, was actually started by Al-Farabi, again a Muslim philosopher living in the 9th and 10th century. He said that religious truth is for the masses while scientific truth is for the philosophers. All of this was happening during the Islamic Golden Age.