The dream of flying has a long premodern history. Think of the myth of Daedalus, the ancient Greek inventor who designed wings for himself, and his ill-fated son Icarus. Or think of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketches and studies of birds and flying ...
The dream of flying has a long premodern history. Think of the myth of Daedalus, the ancient Greek inventor who designed wings for himself, and his ill-fated son Icarus. Or think of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketches and studies of birds and flying devices.
It might surprise many to know that, centuries before Leonardo da Vinci depicted birds in flight and flying machines in Renaissance Italy, an intrepid polymath in the city of Córdoba, in today’s Spain, may have carried out an experiment in early human gliding flight. My book, A Bridge to the Sky, focuses on that intrepid ninth-century aeronaut, Abbas Ibn Firnas, and the Islamic civilization that provides the backdrop and context for his life and work. As a specialist in medieval Islamic architecture, art, and history during the caliphal period (c.650-1250 CE) most of my work has focused on Córdoba, the capital of early Islamic Iberia. In A Bridge to the Sky I set out to understand Ibn Firnas’ unusual experiment, to try to understand why an intellectual in a medieval Islamic context imagined and then is reported by his contemporaries to have carried out such an unusual experiment, and why this might be significant for the way we understand the past.
Like the prototypical “Renaissance Man” Leonardo, with whom he is often compared, Ibn Firnas was a person of many talents: a poet, a musician, a philosopher, and a ‘scientist’ who designed fine scientific instruments for the Umayyad dynasty who ruled Córdoba and Iberia between the 8th and 11th centuries. He carried out fascinating experiments and activities that combine science and art, including designing and creating a chamber in his home that sounds very much like the medieval version of a 3D immersive Virtual Reality experience: famously, this experience made ninth century viewers imagine they were seeing stars, lightning, and clouds, and hearing thunder.
My book introduces readers to Ibn Firnas and his flight experiment, against the backdrop of caliphal artistic and intellectual cultures. Those who play the new Assassin’s Creed Mirage video game will find a different type of introduction in the game’s setting, its characters, and the historical information contained in its Codex.
The connections between my book and the game are reflective of my work as an external historian on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which was released by Ubisoft in October 2023. The narrative setting of Mirage is Baghdad in the ninth century, and my role was to provide the Ubisoft in-house historians with detailed historical information about medieval Baghdad and Islamic art, history, and civilisation in the caliphal period.
The topics and entries represented in the game’s educational feature, known as the “History of Baghdad,” were chosen by Ubisoft’s historians, and were based on a series of thematic workshops that were very like an intensive graduate research seminar on the history and visual culture of the caliphal period. Out of those workshops, the Ubisoft team chose things they thought were important to include, focusing on art and the exact sciences (especially astronomy and engineering), all of which are central to A Bridge to the Sky.
For instance, players of Mirage can read about astrolabes, celestial globes, and other scientific instruments of the time, and see these illustrated in the Codex, much as they are in my book. In the game they’ll encounter astronomers, an astronomical observatory, and references to important treatises, including ones on astronomy, engineering, mathematics, and other exact sciences, which I write about in A Bridge to the Sky.
In A Bridge to the Sky, I write about the Banu Musa, three intellectual brothers who were ninth-century contemporaries of Ibn Firnas. Important Abbasid courtiers in Baghdad, they are especially well known for their work in engineering, thanks to their important treatise, The book of ingenious devices (Kitāb al-ḥiyal). In Mirage, players have the chance to ‘meet’ the Banu Musa, who provide Mirage’s protagonist, Basim, with ingenious tools and mechanical devices. Indeed, one of the game quests has players seeking one of the brothers, Ahmad, in the House of Wisdom, and investigating his workshop there.
I’ll leave it to players to learn if Ibn Firnas makes an appearance in the game, though I will say that players who go looking will find intriguing references to a flight experiment.
While working on a video game might be an unusual choice for a scholar, my reasons for doing so are the same ones that led me to write a Bridge to the Sky—a desire to make academic knowledge about medieval Islamic art and history widely accessible to broader audiences. In that sense my book and Assassin’s CreedMirage are quite similar. Both depict a vibrant age of scientific and artistic achievement in which caliphal intellectuals imagined, created, and experimented with art and science, and which shares many similarities with later times and places, such as Renaissance Florence, with which today we are much more familiar. My hope is that readers of A Bridge to the Sky and those who follow Basim in his adventures through Baghdad in Mirage will come away with a new appreciation for the Age of the Caliphs and a period of medieval intellectual and artistic innovation that profoundly shaped global history, including Italy in the age of Leonardo, and eventually Europe’s Scientific Revolution.
The year 2020 posed myriad challenges for everyone and now that we have reached the mid-way point of 2021, it is clear that, although the crises are not yet fully averted, the year thus far has already boasted some encouraging events.
Politics
In January, the 46th president was inaugurated into office and since then, President Joe Biden and his administration have signed a multitude of historic executive orders, such as re-joining the Paris Climate Agreement and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
Read more about the global responsibilities for environmental protection and how global conferences, conventions, and treaties, like the Paris Climate Agreement contribute.
Afghanistan has seen longstanding conflict that featured at various points most of the world’s major powers. Afghanistan and the fate of its people has been inextricably linked to the US military presence for many years, thus the impending withdrawal of US troops by September this year has sparked conflicting opinions on what the impact of this will be on the nation.
Read more on the significance of US military presence and the recent withdrawal on this complicated nation.
Chapter 10: “Peace or More War?” from Afghanistan: What Everyone Needs to Know®
COVID-19 vaccines: looking forward from the pandemic
One of the most encouraging events of the year thus far is the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out! The approved vaccines began to be administered to millions of adults worldwide and the effort is well underway to vaccinate the global population to tackle the virus which devastated the world over in 2020.
Despite the challenges of increasing vaccine hesitancy among the public, vaccines remain one of society’s most important and influential tools for promoting public health and tackling the pandemic. Successful vaccination programmes and high vaccine uptake gives hope to the reopening of pre-pandemic society.
Read more about how we might look forward from the pandemic, thanks to the vaccines.
Chapter nine: “On the Horizon” in Vaccines: What Everyone Needs to Know®
While we celebrate the success of the vaccines, we can reflect on the impact the trauma of the pandemic has had on us thus far. It is important to give trauma survivors an opportunity to emotionally process the event and to look forward from it.
Learn more about the impact of the pandemic and different ways we may need to support others in our recovery from the effects of the pandemic in the chapters below.
As we begin to pour effort into key issues beyond the pandemic, climate change is an issue of focus, demonstrated by the recent G7 summit in Cornwall, UK. This saw government officials from around the world meeting to bring some focus back on how we can all approach the mitigation of climate change on our earth.
Read more about the impact of climate change on our world and understand why discussions such as these are so important.
Many people have scrutinised the decision to hold the games from an ethical standpoint and questioned whether it was safe to allow athletes or spectators to travel to Japan from around the world and risk spread of the COVID-19 virus. Though the games are currently held with no spectators at any event, there are still concerns about the safety of the games in a nation that’s reportedly trailing behind other nations in its vaccination efforts.
In the long history of America’s influence on the politics of innovation in Europe, the case of the planned football Super League stands out. This is not because of the project as such, but simply because, of all the variety of responses Europe has produced when faced with the latest American novelty, none has provoked enthusiasm and rejection—above all rejection—with such extraordinary intensity, unity, and speed.
The Super League scheme is well known to have precedents going back decades in a long line of efforts to “modernise” the organisation of football up and down the Old World. What is not recognised is how closely the vision—once taken over by American entrepreneurs—found its place in a grand historical catalogue of initiatives, corporations, movements, personalities which could emanate from any corner of America, and would set out to make their mark on the world outside the US, and Europe in particular, whether the rest of the world liked it or not. Embrace, adapt, or reject it, the great new challenge might be called Hollywood or the Marshall Plan, rock ‘n’ roll or hip-hop, Über, Google, Netflix, or even the Black Lives Matter movement; in every case America’s disruptive innovations would end up providing a mainspring of change in Europe all through the 20th century and down to the present. The European Super League (ESL) proposals, and the reactions they aroused, demonstrate that this dynamic of asymmetric cultural confrontation is as active as ever.
On every such occasion cultural protectionisms are invented, diplomatic deals drawn up, international laws proposed, opinion makers and intellectuals mobilised and inevitably—sooner or later—the politicians become involved: the patterns repeat themselves over and over again. In the case of the ESL it was only when the American owners of Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, and AC Milan backed by the billions of J.P.Morgan, took up the original idea of the owner of Real Madrid, Florentino Perez, that the challenge emerged on the scale and of the profile of a typical American entrepreneurial threat to an established European order. And as ever, the Europeans immediately split: six English, three key Italian, and three Spanish teams instantly signed up. The French and the Germans steered clear.
The ESL was launched in public late on Sunday 18 April. It was an announcement, said the New York Times’ soccer writer, James Montague, next day, “Made in America.” He explained:
“In American sports leagues, the norm is cartel-like structures, where owners control franchises and share revenue along the way. … But it is utterly alien to how soccer operates… promotion and relegation are in European soccer’s DNA but don’t exist in U.S. sports…Why plow money into a team when one bad season could cause you to lose your seat at the top table?”
The sale of football clubs as such in Britain goes back to the creation of the Premier League as a single commercial operation in 1992. It was a classic outcome of the free-market, top-down Americanizing views of the world which rode high in the post-Thatcher-Reagan era, and were translated into pay TV by Rupert Murdoch. By 2020, 13 Premier League Clubs, and others, were foreign-owned—the Chinese alone controlling four. Yet suddenly, with the ESL project, a tipping point was reached. The proposed League would have a permanent membership with clubs turned into free-floating brands, enjoying total control over the crucial broadcasting revenues and the market in players. A vast nationalist reaction set in with quite extraordinary ferocity and speed.
Celebrated veteran footballers, such as Gary Neville and Alan Shearer, immediately gave voice to the opposition in unmistakable terms: clubs such as theirs, they said, represented a heritage rooted in decades of local working class life and loyalty; power, pride, and dignity were at stake and could not be sold off at any price to a cabal of vulture capitalists, oligarchs, Royal sheiks, and bankers, just so that these tycoons could make even more money. Seeing a populist wave of indignation arise before their eyes, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron made clear their opposition in the Sunday night hours before the official announcement of the new League.
By Tuesday morning the political backlash had broadened to include even the governments of nations not touched by the ESL project. But it was Johnson’s Tuesday morning meeting with the chairmen and fan clubs of the 14 Premier League teams not involved in the ESL which, according to many in Europe, made the key difference. Here, Johnson spoke of a “legislative bomb” which his government was ready to drop on the project. By Tuesday night the project was dead in the water.
Later, Aleksander Čeferin, the head of football’s European governing body, UEFA, acknowledged that the proposal had arisen against a background of deep financial, pandemic-related, crisis for the whole sport. He called for “solidarity” not “self-interest,” and on 21 May announced a Convention on the Future of European Football, aimed at radically reforming the governance of the game in the whole of Europe.
Indeed, even when the American challenge fails to overwhelm its intended beneficiaries, such is its force that they cannot avoid dealing with its implications and its after-effects: sooner or later everyone adapts, willingly or otherwise. The next big cultural upheaval will have “Made in America” stamped all over it once more: it will arrive when the great streaming services—Netflix, Disney Channel and now Amazon-MGM and Warner Discovery, already threatening established cinema and television everywhere—decide to get into sport. Netflix alone, with its $17bn content budget and its typically American scale, dynamism, ubiquity, and “relentlessness” (a favourite Jeff Bezos word) could certainly “find ways to make streaming live sport a viable business,” wrote Alex Barker in the Financial Times in January; “Netflix could buy a league or just create one from scratch.” Even if that came about, after the ESL fiasco it would most certainly not feature a European league of football teams. In one very special case the soft power of tradition, loyalty, identity, and solidarity had won out spectacularly over the hard power of the billionaires and all their cash.
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco on 27 November 1940, while his parents toured the US with a Hong Kong theatre company. As a baby, he featured in Esther Eng’s Golden Gate Girl. He then went on to become a major child star in Hong Kong. As an adult, he worked in US TV and film, before gaining international fame via three Hong Kong martial arts films and one US-HK co-production, Enter the Dragon. He died from cerebral oedema on 20 July 1973, at almost exactly the moment Enter the Dragon was released around the world.
Had he lived, Lee would have been 80 on 27 November 2020. This anniversary will be marked by countless people and innumerable institutions all over the world, from China to Russia to the USA, and almost everywhere in between. This is because, in the space of a few episodes of a couple of US TV series and four martial arts films, Bruce Lee changed global popular culture forever.
This is not the place to try to detail his life or the significance of his impact. We now have an authoritative biography: Matt Polly’s Bruce Lee, A Life (2018). Numerous documentaries, such as How Bruce Lee Changed the World, have clarified the extent to which he has functioned as a muse and inspiration in all kinds of activities, from art to music, sport to political activism. Countless scholarly works have engaged with his contributions to martial arts, film fight choreography, and ethnic identity politics. I too have weighed in on many of these debates with not one but two academic monographs on the cultural significance of his interventions.
So, what more is there to say about or learn from Bruce Lee?
In my latest research. I took the decision to try to look past him, to try to displace him from centre-stage. In doing so, it became clear that before Bruce Lee, Western media certainly had some ideas about what we now call martial arts. The complex relationship between the USA and Japan led to the frequent appearance, from the 1950s, of judo, jujutsu, and karate in Hollywood films. Britain too had an understanding of the spectacular potentials of Japanese approaches to combat, as is registered in the fight scenes of influential TV shows of the 1960s, such as The Avengers.
In fact, in one respect it is possible to say that representations of East Asian martial arts were flourishing in Western media and popular culture before Bruce Lee arrived. But, in another (more subtle but profound) respect, it is entirely incorrect to say this. This is because, prior to Bruce Lee, there was no overarching or synthesizing concept of “martial arts” in the Western lexicon. People may have practiced judo, jujutsu, karate, or other activities but such practices were yet to be grouped under the organising umbrella term “martial arts.”
In fact, the first appearances of the term “martial arts” in anglophone film are tied to Bruce Lee. In 1972’s Way of the Dragon (AKA Return of the Dragon in the USA), we hear Lee proudly proclaim, “and every day I practice martial arts!” Shortly after, the movie posters for 1973’s Enter the Dragon hail it as “the first American produced martial arts spectacular.” Within the film’s dialogue, the British character, Mr Braithwaite, speaks of “a tournament of martial arts.”
Before these occurrences, “martial arts” was a rare term, used mainly by specialists as one possible translation of the Japanese term bugei—which literally means “warrior art.” But after its appearance in and around these two films, it caught on like wildfire.
It would be incorrect to say that Bruce Lee invented the term. But before he popularised it, few were using it. Indeed, it was not until after its filmic appearance that even specialist scholars such as Donn Draeger began to use the term “martial arts” as an organising term, for example in the titles of books.
It was Bruce Lee who effectively introduced the term “martial arts” into the Western lexicon. This may not seem hugely significant. But what it also means is that he sowed the seeds of a new identity: people could henceforth identify as “martial artists.” Ultimately then, although it is true that before Bruce Lee people were practicing what we now call “martial arts,” it was only after Bruce Lee—and perhaps only because of him—that the very entity “martial arts” and the identity “martial artist” came into social and cultural existence.
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and social reformer who developed theories that changed philosophical perspectives and contributed extensively to education, democracy, pragmatism, and the philosophy of logic, politics, and aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth-century.
Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859, Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879. Following his graduation Dewey taught for a few years until he concluded that teaching at primary and secondary schools did not suit him. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to study for his PhD. After teaching at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Chicago, Dewey finally settled at Columbia University.
Dewey contributed substantially to various philosophical and interdisciplinary fields throughout his life, including aesthetics. He was, along with historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, and economist Thorstein Veblen, one of the founders of The New School, a private research university in New York City founded in 1919. In 1899 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association.
The principle of aesthetic philosophy is linked with theories of beauty, and the philosophy of art. Dewey’s most well-known work on aesthetics is his book, Art as Experience (1934). This was originally a speech he delivered at the first William James Lecture at Harvard University in 1932. Art and aesthetics, Dewey suggested, are intertwined inextricably with the culture and surroundings in which they stand. Therefore, to understand art and its aesthetic value, it is necessary to look at it within life and the outside experiences in which the art exists. As aesthetic experience bears organic origins, Dewey argued in Art and Experience that aesthetic experience can be recognised in everyday experiences, events, and surroundings.
Dewey’s theory on aesthetics has been a point of reference across various disciplines, which include psychology, pragmatics, democracy, and education, as well as new media; examples of which include computer animations and virtual worlds. His work has also been an inspiration to figures such as A.C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation, an art museum and educational institution. Barnes’s ideas of art in life, and the massive art collection he eventually accumulated in Philadelphia, were somewhat inspired by Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy, and he attended a seminar by Dewey in 1918 at Columbia University. Likewise, Dewey’s philosophy on aesthetic art drew some inspiration from the collections at the Barnes Foundation.
Dewey led a successful career which established him as a great, revered figure of modern western philosophy, and his work is still relevant to this day. Dewey lived a long, fulfilling, and successful life and career until his death on 1 June 1952 from pneumonia, aged 92.
Featured Image Credit: painting by Robert Delaunay, 1912, ‘Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif)’ oil on canvas via Wikimedia Commons
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