Islamic Civilization Part 2

Knowledge as Devotion

What we want to cover in this segment or this session is the idea of knowledge as devotion. So Islamic civilization looked at knowledge not just as the transmission of information, but knowledge as an act of devotion. As you can see here, this is a recreation, early city of Baghdad, and a map below it.

It became one of the major hubs of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge, and within a few decades it became one of the world's largest and richest cities as well, connected China, India, Africa, Europe. By the 10th century, it had 36 public libraries, hundreds of booksellers, and thousands of people. So this metropolitan or metropolis of unprecedented size became a symbol of Islam's power and sophistication, but it was not possible without the knowledge that it was based on.

So one of the early anecdotes that said about this city was that as the city was being built, and in order to encourage people to come to the city, the Khalifa had tasked one of the scholars of Hadith to move to Baghdad and to essentially set up shop in the main mosque at the center of the city. And he said, I want you to go there and I want you to narrate to the people the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, and through you, the city will be built. So now you had a scholar of high caliber.

I believe the scholar, if I recall correctly, was Abu Dawood al-Sijistani, who comes there. He's considered one of the foremost scholars in the science of Hadith and in Islamic sciences in general. People come to seek him from far and wide.

What happens when people come from out of town? They're going to need places to stay. They're going to need food to eat. When you have places to stay and food to eat, well, then there's going to have to be industries that pop up around them to supply people, and people are going to come and take advantage of the opportunity to sell to those people as well any kind of ancillary needs that they have.

Baghdad: A Marvel of Urban Planning

So knowledge played a huge part with building early Muslim metropolitan centers. Baghdad was an interesting city built under the Abbasid caliphate, and it was considered to be a marvel of urban planning and advanced infrastructure. So not only did it have schools and libraries and mosques, but it had an extensive network of public bathhouses, a water supply, paved streets, numerous hospitals, and there were around a hundred medical facilities between full-scale hospitals and clinics.

The canals that were built through the city diverted the water from the Tigris and the Euphrates, which not only supplied the city with water, but also served as internal transportation. So some authors say Baghdad at that time felt a little bit like Venice. People would be on small boats.

It thus became an economic hub of the world, and caravan routes essentially moved to bring their goods through Baghdad, connecting the major economies of the world. So you had, as we mentioned, China, India, Africa, as far away as Spain. The city's commercial life was highly organized and was state-regulated, and essentially districts were formed for every type of trade or every type of business.

So you had money changers, cloth merchants, blacksmiths, and everything in between that allowed the city to support what was already a thriving intellectual center. This gave rise to a state-sponsored translation movement, because now you had people that were not only from the Arab populations that were there or had moved there. They were not only from the Persian populations that were in the area.

They were not only from the Turkic populations that were in the area or surrounding, the Kurdish populations. They were not just Jews or Christians or Zoroastrians or Muslims, but they were of all stripes, and even Buddhists coming from Central Asia would travel to the city. And so this presented an opportunity to not only bring everybody together, but to also benefit from this convergence of cultures and civilizational knowledge.

The Translation Movement

So what happened was that there was a translation movement that started, and so they were now translating works from Greek, from Persian, from Sanskrit, and other languages into the Arabic language. So the Arabic language became the lingua franca of that time, which is such an odd thing to say because it means the French language. But essentially it becomes the normal language of scientific and intellectual literary thought of the time, convergent point for people that were writing and wanting to transmit knowledge.

Now this gave way to something called Bayt al-Hikmah, and as you can see this very realistic recreation from Minecraft of Bayt al-Hikmah, historic recreation. But the Abbasids, they created this thriving intellectual center, and they had this deliberate policy that any book that was brought to the city, that it would have to go to Bayt al-Hikmah first. It would have to go to the House of Wisdom first, be copied, and then sent for translation, and then that book would be returned to the person who brought it.

And then they would be given their choice of a book that they wanted to copy and take elsewhere. So it became this not just trap for information, but a nexus point for the sharing of that information. So under the leadership of al-Ma'mun, who was the Khalifa at that time, the city rose to become the center of world learning at the heart of the Arab Golden Age.

His House of Wisdom, where Christian and foreign translators rendered Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, and Hindu classics into Arabic, helped laid the foundations of modern mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and literature. So Arabic became the language of science, much like Latin later became the similar language in medieval Europe, and they weren't just translating the books. So what you would find is that if there was a work of philosophy that was in Sanskrit and a further work of philosophy that was in Greek, well now they were contrasting and comparing what those books said.

If there was a book of mathematics or astronomy from disparate areas, you now had authors that were so familiar with all of these works that they started to conjoin them and improve upon them and write their own works and come up with their own theories as well. So this essentially allowed the translation movement to become so important. Anyone who can translate a book, it's said, would also find a very high-paying job.

So this was another factor in society becoming more literate in that people said, well, if I learn another language, if I learn how to read and write, if I learn how to become a scribe, then I can actually have a job doing that and I like it, so I'm going to make sure that I do that. There was patronage from the state, there was also patronage from wealthy merchants who wanted to learn more about the sciences and the arts to be able to translate that. So you had city libraries full of books of many different languages, the core main language being the Arabic language, essentially congealing the accumulated knowledge of human history up to that point for the people of the era.

Comparative Analysis and Knowledge Creation

This is also a point in time, as I mentioned, that people were able to start to make direct comparisons between the works that were found in different areas and in different languages. So if you had Greek mathematics and Indian mathematics, well, now you had people that were comparing and testing the theorems between the two and finding those that were most effective. So mastery of Arabic became an essential for any intellectual as it was not just the language of the Quran, but was also the language of the imperial administration and it was also the median of all pertinent scholarly works that were written in that area.

So what this allowed, and think about this, what this allowed was a scholar in Cordoba, Spain, to be able to read the same text that was being read by a scholar in Baghdad, to be able to read the same text that was being read by a scholar in Tashkent in Uzbekistan, that was being read by the same scholar in Aceh, Indonesia, for example. So you now had all of these works of all different sciences that were accessible to a huge swath of humankind. We mentioned the issue about systemization, right? So there was a systemization of the scientific method, of Aristotelian methods, of knowledge acquisition, and so they were not just transmitting the knowledge, but they were also creating it.

Al-Khwarizmi: The Father of Algebra

Perhaps one of the more famous people to be known for the creation of knowledge was Al-Khwarizmi. So the translation movement of this time was not just intellectual curiosity, but it was fueled by economics, it was fueled by competition for status, it was fueled by the desire to be an actively gainfully employed member of society. So this process of Arabization saw very highly educated people of Greek and Persian persuasions learning the Arabic language, becoming masterful in it, and then going on to serve society in greater capacity.

So when they translated these books of medicine, engineering, and mathematics, it was not only a way to have a job, but also to show their own expertise, and like we said, it created that single reservoir of knowledge that was accessible across linguistic, and cultural, and geographical areas. And this brings to mind, or brings us to the point of talking about whose picture is here on the slide. Al-Khwarizmi, and this picture is from a commemorative stamp by the Soviet Union, right? So they would actually make commemorative stamps of people from the lands that were part of the Soviet Union, and they made one about Al-Khwarizmi.

He lived in the 9th century, he was a mathematician, he was Persian, his name was Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi. So his seminal work dealt with linear and quadratic equations, and it gave the world the science of الجبر (al-jabr). Al-jabr, which means completion or restoration, eventually became algebra, which all of you love so much, and I can see it in your faces.

So why was algebra so important? Because algebra essentially became the shorthand for scientific and mathematic language, whereas previously people were using Euclidean geometry, which has a lot of steps to get to drawing something as simple as a triangle, because everything is based upon the premise of drawing a circle or a line, and from there being able to state the postulates and the assumptions, and come up with an eventual calculation. What algebra did was essentially say, there are certain things that are known and certain things that are unknown, and we're not going to continue to run through those things that are known, instead we're going to treat those as constants and then figure for the unknown. So his work became extremely influential, and his systematic step-by-step problem-solving methods gave us another word that we have in the English language.

Does anyone know what word that is? Algorithm. Yes. Algorithm is an adulteration of his own name. Al-Khwarizmi. Al-Khwarizmi. So the Khwa became a Go, and the sounds became slightly adulterated to now become, well, what are you doing? You know, in Arabic, I'm doing calculations.

So we gain the word algorithm, algorithmic thinking, and this logical process from this scholar, Musa, or Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi. Another thing that came up at this time was the power of Hindu-Arabic numerals. The popularization of this new system of calculation drew on ideas that came from India.

Hindu-Arabic Numerals: A Mathematical Revolution

The revolutionary concept of zero as a number, which did not exist in some societies. Right? Drawing from this idea that there is a null number for zero, and also drawing on the Babylonian concept of there being place value, Muslim scholars combined these, systematized them, and then spread what we call Hindu-Arabic numerals. Right? So the numbers that we use in the English language nowadays, these are called Arabic numerals.

And the Arab world, for the most part, barring West Africa, uses what they call Hindi numerals, right? Which are slightly similar, but shaped a little bit different. What this created was an elegant and efficient system that was a dramatic improvement over what? Imagine doing math with Roman numerals. Sounds like torture.

Right? It's like you dropped the L. You dropped the C. There should be two M's in this equation. What are you talking about? Right? So this efficient and elegant system, it was a dramatic improvement over the clumsy Roman numerals that was there. It improved upon the other counting systems that were in the area.

And it essentially became the basis for everything from bookkeeping to advanced sciences, because it was just vastly more practical. And that became the foundation for modern mathematics. So the modern and scientific technological world that we have today goes back to these very simple advancements.

So without efficient positional notation that was made possible by zero, the systematic logic of algebra and the procedural thinking that's embedded in algorithms, all of the complex calculations that we have for engineering, for physics, for modern finance, for computer science would all be inconceivable. But by synthesizing, refining, and popularizing these tools, scholars of the Islamic world provided the mathematical language that would make the later European scientific revolution possible. So I think it's very important here to touch on an important point.

Building Upon Previous Civilizations

And that is, in the history of man, in interacting with the natural world, we are not supersessionist and separate from each other. But every culture and society, if they would know what's best for them, will build upon the advancements of the societies that preceded them and that are around them. And so what we found was because of the cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and geographical diversity of the Muslim civilization at that time, the unifying factor between all of them was this dedication to the Islamic ideal.

All of these other things about whether I'm better because I'm a Persian, or an African, or an Asian, or a European, or whatever else, were immaterial. The idea was, how can I take this knowledge and make it better and make it useful for mankind? And that is to say that, yes, the later European scientific revolution was only possible because of the advancements that we're talking about. But these advancements were only possible because of what? Because of not denouncing the previous cultures that came before the Islamic civilization by saying, OK, we don't agree with the polytheism of the Hindus, but we're going to take the zero.

We're going to use the zero from them. We don't agree with XYZ from Far East Asia and China, but we're going to use the counting methods of the abacus. So using what is beneficial and good for all mankind, leaving off those things that weren't, is the norm.

And so it's important for Muslims as well to realize that the civilization that we're talking about also stood on the shoulders of others. Other people came and stood on the shoulders of the Islamic civilization. And we'll talk at the last session a little bit about civilizational decline and the reasons for that that I think will tie in with what we're saying now.

Astronomical Achievements

This era saw a level of astronomy and precision and innovation in the areas of astronomy that was unprecedented. Islamic astronomers around the world made systematic observations. They built observatories, which was considered a new type of scientific institution, and they corrected and improved upon the detailed scientific observations of the Greeks and the Indians that had reached them.

So in 1079, in an astonishing feat, without computers, Omar Khayyam will calculate the length of the year to be 365.24 days. This is recorded as something which had not been done previously. So Omar Khayyam was a Persian astronomer.

He was off by one millionth of a point in calculating the number of days. And the reasons why this was important was evident in that you had both the Islamic calendar, as we said, based upon the hijrah. You still had the maintenance of regional cultural calendars like the Persian calendar and the Egyptian calendar and others.

And then, of course, you needed this level of calculation and specificity in calculating prayer times, in determining the beginning and the end of Ramadan, in planning for the pilgrimage and when that might be. So what did they do? They took all this data, they created star catalogs, they improved astronomical instruments that had come before and passed that knowledge on to generations after. There was also a great medical synthesis at this time.

Medical Synthesis and Ibn Sina

There was a great medical synthesis at this time. So the staple of medical knowledge at that time was Galen's medical guide. Galen was an ancient Greek doctor.

During this period, people under the Islamic civilization compiled catalogs and cross-referenced all of the medical knowledge that preceded them, as well as the medical discoveries that they were privy to in their inclusion of this vast network of people, places and things. So they integrated the knowledge of the Greeks, the knowledge of the Indians, the knowledge of the Persians, the knowledge of the Chinese, the knowledge of anyone that they had come across and they turned it into a single coherent system and it created a comprehensive foundation for medical practice in theory. And so you had perhaps the most famous physician known in the West, anyone to guess his name? Avicenna, right? Avicenna or Ibn Sina became one of the most famous medical professionals in the world and his canon or Qanun, his canon of medicine was then printed.

Well, actually what you see in front of you is a translation of the canon into part Hebrew, part Latin. So it became the most translated and after printing presses were created, printed book in the world and in many different languages. So he was able to achieve a remarkably advanced understanding of medicine and of the human body and he had a near modern day understanding of illness and medical treatment as well as a knowledge of anatomy.

So he mentions, for example, how scholars noted the circulation of blood, the function of the heart and the major organs and the treatment of those organs, which was something which was far ahead of their contemporaries in Europe at that time. So Ibn Sina was a polymath. He was a person of many languages, of many sciences.

He was a quintessential philosopher. His interests were very practical and very vast and very wide. And beyond his medical achievements, he also had achievements in the area of physics.

You can understand if somebody is going to gain advanced medical knowledge, it's not only going to be from observation, but it's going to be from studying the natural phenomenon of the world. So he had analyzed, Ibn Sina had actually written and analyzed motion mathematically in the same way that Newton was to do fruitfully six centuries later. So he preceded Newton in many of his findings by six centuries.

So this wasn't just a physician, but he was a foundational person or foundational figure in scientific thought. Something that came up at this time was the notion of building hospitals and developing them not only as areas of healing or houses of healing, but as public institutions for the care of society. So Ansari, he says, the Muslim world soon boasted the best hospitals the world had seen or was to see for centuries to come.

Revolutionary Hospital System

So they weren't just shelters for the sick, but they were areas or places of treatment. And we mentioned that Baghdad at that time had hundreds of hospitals as well. And that the rise of the hospital essentially gave rise to a society that was taking into consideration its own health.

So the methods of treatment were many times holistic. So if hospitals were generally built in elevated areas where the air was purer or farther away from city centers, and in addition to the rules of ablution and washing for prayer that Muslims were normalized for Muslims five times a day to wash for prayer, there was extra precautions taken for hygiene in these places to be able to avoid sickness. Now, building on Galen, building on Ibn Sina, a 10th century polymath by the name of Al-Razi, he came and he said, OK, we're not just going to accept Galen anymore as the norm.

We want to challenge his theory. So he challenged the ideas of the four humors as the basis of medical treatment and essentially challenging the very notion of medicine at that time. Another scholar by the name of Ibn Nafis in the 1200s described the pulmonary circulation of blood.

And Ibn Nafis's book on medicine is probably, after the canon of Ibn Sina, one of the most widespread books on in the world. Now, what's interesting is that Ibn Nafis, who was a scholar from Egypt, was not just a doctor, but he was actually a jurist of Islamic law. He was a scholar of the Shafi'i Madhhab, well known in that field as well.

So as you can see, Morgan here, he quotes Ibn Nafis. And this is actually, this picture is a picture of a hospital. It doesn't look too hospitally because we're used to like really sterile areas, right? But it's a picture of a hospital built on a small mountain and that people would walk up into very high ceilings, expansive rooms, areas for people to get fresh air from.

So he says, the blood from the right chamber of the heart must flow through the pulmonary artery to the lungs, spread through a substance, be mingled with air, pass through the pulmonary vein to reach the left chamber of the heart. So these are the observations of Ibn Nafis at that time. Another thing that we talked about in short, but we can go into a little bit more detail here, is the idea of libraries and the changing or the exchange of knowledge.

Libraries and the Exchange of Knowledge

So this intellectual explosion that was happening in the Islamic world at that time, we're talking about the Islamic world going from where? Going from Morocco and Spain in the east all the way to China, or in the west all the way to China in the east, right? Going from the boundaries of southern France and Vienna in the north to sub-Saharan Africa and over through Asia and Southeast Asia in the south. So this intellectual explosion that's happening at this time, at varying degrees, reflected with what was happening in other places of the world. Essentially, Europe was in its own dark ages at that time.

Literacy was a very rare skill. It was largely confined to someone who needed to read the Bible, and depending upon your denomination, you may not be allowed to read the Bible. Only your priest or pastor may read it.

So books themselves were precious, they were scarce, they were locked away in monasteries or in church basements, and we contrast that to the capital of Islamic Spain, Córdoba, which had huge libraries, one which reportedly had about 500,000 volumes at the time when the largest towns in Christian Europe were more than small villages. In fact, the European elite at that time would many times send their children, their princes and princesses, to Spain to learn in the universities in Toledo and Córdoba, and then come back to Europe to teach. To the point that there are a number of very important European figures who were accused of being closeted Muslims because they came to Spain, learnt, and then came back with ideas that were a little off color.

A certain Martin Luther, who had studied in Toledo, only nailed his objections to the church on the door after he had come back after his studies. So you'll find in these books, if you want to read a fascinating book on this topic, Dr. Zulfiqar Shah has a book called Muslims and the Enlightenment, and it talks about this cultural exchange between the two. I believe it's printed by Claritas Press, C-L-A-R-I-T-A-S, right? The last name is Shah, S-H-A-H.

So there was this exchange of knowledge, and there was also this challenge of the exchange of knowledge. Now what made this possible was a revolutionary technology. Known as? Paper.

The Paper Revolution

Just the fact that you now didn't need to slaughter an animal and take its hide and process the hide and create parchment, that you could use fibers and create paper, essentially expedited the transfer of knowledge. Now you're right about the printing press, but that will come later. Papyrus is a good point.

However, it's very tedious to process, so it's not as easy to process as fibrous paper. So essentially when paper was created in the 8th century in China, it transformed society. And knowing how to create paper, and how to have essentially stationery that you could write on, became an industry in and of itself.

And it opened up literacy to classes of people that were previously inaccessible to. So what this gave way to, the proliferation of paper, the proliferation of literacy, it gave rise to the private library. So not only were people having public libraries, but there was an educated, a class of educated merchants, officials, independent scholars, who could all afford to build their own private libraries.

And so private book ownership was not just state-sponsored or state-controlled as an enterprise, as we saw with the House of Knowledge, but it was a dynamic, decentralized pursuit for anyone who wanted to learn knowledge and exchange that knowledge. So a person's personal collection of knowledge and books would become a center of learning in its own right. For example, the medieval Hadith scholar Ibn Hibban was said to have one of the largest personal libraries in Central Asia.

And the only thing that stopped his own works from spreading, as they should have, was the fact that he would force everyone to come to his library to copy the books instead of allowing them to borrow. He said if he had only allowed people to borrow his books, his books would have been more famous. But because he was very particular about not allowing his books to be borrowed, people having to come to his library, people felt that that was a bit much.

Perhaps it was. Now, what developed from there as well was a network of traveling scholars united by Arabic as their common language of learning. They moved freely from city to city, they carried books from city to city, they carried critiques from city to city, debates in religion, philosophy and mathematics, all other sciences, and they shared the new discoveries that they had.

So a scholar could study in Baghdad, debate in Cairo, and then find his works being read in Cordoba. And so there's a constant circulation of people, constant circulation of ideas, and that created a cross-continental conversation on all of the topics that were being debated. So just as you find Ibn Sina, who is a Persian scholar of medicine and physics and philosophy, his works are coming through North Africa to Spain and up into Europe.

You will find somebody like Ibn Razin al-Sarraqusti. Ibn Razin was a scholar of hadith from Sarracoza, the island in the Mediterranean, European island in the Mediterranean. You'll find his narrations being debated by the scholars of Far East Asia and Central Asia, and narrating the hadith of the Prophet through them.

So there was a broad exchange in all areas. Now, why does science flourish? Well, particularly because there was no inherent conflict seen between faith and reason. The principle goes that Islam sees that everything, that there is a a synergy between reason and revelation.

Faith and Reason: A Harmonious Relationship

That revelation agrees with sound reason, and sound reason agrees with revelation. So they're seen as intertwined aspects of a single quest for truth. The philosophers of the era were not just secularists or atheists, but they were deeply religious, deeply devout people who saw their intellectual work as a way to gain knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality.

In fact, this was not specific just to the Muslim scholars of that time. One of the greatest rabbinical scholars and greatest philosophers of the time, his name was Musa ibn Maimun, who in the West was known as Maimonides. And he was the personal physician to Salah ad-Din al-Ayubi.

And he's also one of the greatest rabbinical scholars of Judaism, all at the same time. He's a fascinating individual, and he lived in Egypt. He's the one who, when Richard the Lion-Hearted was injured, Salah ad-Din Saladin sent him to Richard the Lion-Hearted to treat him, so that he wouldn't pass away.

Right? So this phenomenon was across anyone who was in the civilization at that time. Muslim scholars particularly, though, saw this as a way of reading the text. Right? So note the quote that's here on the board from a fascinating book called Science and Civilization in Islam by Sayyid Hussain Nasr.

Viewed as a text, nature is a fabric of symbols, which must be read according to their meaning. The Quran is the counterpart of that text in human words. Its verses are called آيات (ayat), or signs, just as are the phenomenon of nature.

So there's a verse in the Quran, We will show them our signs in themselves and in the horizon until it becomes clear to them that this is the truth. So Muslims and Muslim scholars motivated by this verse, so well then there are obviously signs in ourselves, we need to learn more about ourselves psychologically, sociologically, physiologically. We need to learn more about the horizons and the observable universe.

So just as we read the Quran and we call these signs and verses, then we need to read the verses. So the study of nature essentially became a religious act. Right? So the quest to understand God's creation and discern its patterns in the material world was looked as an act of devotion.

And that led to discoveries in medicine, botany, optics, that were not seen as separate from theology, but as byproducts of this religious centric mission. So using logic and observation to understand the world, they were able to gain a deeper appreciation for the majesty and the oneness of Allah, who is considered the ultimate author of all of these phenomena. Another thing that arose at this time was because of the expansive trade networks and the wealth that was being created, you would many times have patronage that would come up.

The Waqf System: A Third Economy

So it was not just the individual endeavors of the wealthy class or the class that had access, but you would have people of wealth who noticed that there were students who had acumen and they would essentially become patrons for them because they were too poor to do so for themselves. So Ansari notes that they were rich men eager to gain merit in God's eyes. So they funded scholars and their works.

And this cultural form of patronage, or this culture of patronage, sorry, was institutionalized and became essentially a third economy. So you had a state economy, you had a private economy, and then you had a third economy, which was a charitable donated economy that was based upon what? Properties that generated revenue, but were not owned by the state nor by a single individual. And instead, the benefit of those properties was designated to causes, people, and charitable acts.

So you would have, for example, a large building that was rented out, and the rent from that building would fund all of the students that went to specific schools, or would care for the poor of that region, or would fund the hospitals. So essentially, you have this economic engine that functions separate from the state, which is why in the modern or the pre-modern period, one of the very first things that happened in the Muslim majority world, when modern nation states were instituted, was those endowments were taken over by the government and nationalized. Many of them lost, right? Because they noticed that that was a way of economic and thus intellectual freedom that those societies enjoyed.

So at that time, it created a society where the pursuit of knowledge was a collective and pious obligation, and could be done without the pressures of economic hardship by private pursuit, or economic authoritarianism by government sponsorship. So to sum up, the 8th to the 13th century, the Islamic civilization led the world in science, medicine, and mathematics. The translation movement preserved and advanced ancient knowledge and added to it with original discoveries that shaped the modern world, and knowledge was pursued as both a practical necessity as well as a religion or a religious devotion.

So this wasn't an isolated development, it was connected to the vast network of trade and cultural exchange, and so we'll see in the next section what sort of cultural exchange was there. And you can see here on the slide here, this is Astrolabe and many different iterations. Again, ancient Greek creation that was then improved upon and advanced by Muslim civilization, and then passed on to others.

So we're going to take a 10-minute break now, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the civilization of connections, and how all of these things that we talked about were interconnected. And so we'll break now for 10-15 minutes, and please feel free to enjoy the refreshments. As we said, for those of you who came late, if you look to my right, your left, the lit corridor back in the corner there is the men's bathrooms.

Ladies, your bathrooms are here on my left, which is your right, through these double doors here in the corner. And then we're going to break now and do session three. We will then break for lunch and then prayer, and then we will finish the last session after prayer.