Civilization: Is the West History? (2011) s01e02 Episode Script
Science
1
Just over three centuries ago, the fate of
Western civilisation hung in the balance.
In 1683, just outside the Austrian
capital, Vienna, two armed forces
were pitted against each other.
Muslim East
..against Christian West.
The result of this conflict would be
decisive for the West and ultimately
fatal for its enemies
in the East.
The Siege of Vienna was one of
many attacks that, throughout history,
Western civilisation has faced
from its enemies in the East.
But for most of the past 300 years,
give or take the odd temporary
setback, the West
has always won.
Why?
In this series, I'm identifying six
unique factors and calling them
the killer applications
that put the West on top.
The first was the competition between
Europe's warring little kingdoms that
propelled them ahead of
China's monolithic empire.
In this film, I'm turning to
killer app two, science, and,
in particular, the science that
helped the West to win at war.
But I'm also asking, if
we lose our scientific
pre-eminence, could the West
be consigned to history?
Without superior science, there would
be no Western superpower today.
But it wasn't always like this.
1,000 years ago, it was
the Muslim world that was at
the cutting edge of science.
Building on Greek and Indian
foundations, Muslim mathematicians
invented algebra.
Libraries like the House of Wisdom
in Baghdad had no equal in the West.
And Arab science meant
improved navigation and weaponry.
So how did the Muslim world
later come to lag so far behind
the West when it
came to science?
And how did a scientific revolution
help Western civilisation take over,
militarily as well
as academically?
To answer those questions, you
need to take a trip back in time.
Back more than 328 years, to
the last time an Islamic empire
menaced the West.
And you need to follow an Eastern
invader all the way from Istanbul
to the gates of Vienna.
It was to be the battle that
decided the fate of the West.
On one side was the Ottoman
Sultan's army, led by Grand Vizier Kara
Mustafa Kuprulu.
On the other were
the defending forces of Leopold I,
Holy Roman Emperor, and
the Habsburg ruler of Austria.
This was the turning point in
a clash of civilisation that had
begun when Islam I burst from
the Arabian Desert in the 7th century.
In July 1683, with the Ottoman
army surrounding Vienna,
the prospects for the Christian
defenders looked bleak indeed.
Bells rang out in Vienna and
all across Central Europe,
summoning the faithful
to pray for divine mercy.
You can get an idea of
the desperate yet defiant mood in
Vienna from the graffiti in
the old bell tower of the cathedral.
This says, Mohammed,
you dog, du Hund, go home.
But it wasn't the Muslim
Turks who turned tail.
To the disgust of many, the Christian
Emperor Leopold decided
that discretion was the better
part of valour and stole away.
By the middle of July, the Turkish
armies had come to within
450 paces of the city walls.
The fate of the West
hung in the balance.
It was one of those moments when
it could all have gone horribly wrong.
An Ottoman victory
seemed inevitable.
But then, fatally,
Karamustapha hesitated.
His men had marched far
beyond their natural range.
Supplies were running short.
What's more, even if Vienna fell, he
had no plan for its long-term occupation.
How long would they have to
stay there so far from home?
Would the army actually
survive the winter?
He might win the siege, but could
Karamustapha win the peace?
Karamustapha's hesitation gave
the West vital time to gather allies
and work out a military strategy
to repel the Ottoman horde.
A relief force of 60,000 men
now advanced on Vienna,
under the command of Jan
Sobieski, the King of Poland.
Sobieski was portly and past
his prime, but intent on glory.
On 12th September 1683,
the Christian army came charging down
these hills above Vienna.
As one Turkish eyewitness put it,
like a flood of black pitch coming
down the mountain, consuming
everything it touched.
At 5.30 in the afternoon,
Sobieski entered the tent of
Karamustapha,
but it was deserted.
He had fled. The siege was over.
The West was saved.
Sobieski was exultant,
telling the Pope, we came,
we saw, and God conquered.
Captured Turkish cannon were melted
down and turned into the main bell of
St Stephen's Cathedral.
The boomer, as it was known, was
emblazoned with the heads of six Turks.
For his part, Karamustapha
paid a high price for failure.
He was executed on
the orders of the Sultan.
Strangled with a silken cord.
For the Ottoman Empire,
it was the beginning of
the end, a moment of imperial
overstretch with disastrous consequences.
It was actually the first time
the Ottomans had had to accept
a peace treaty from victorious
Christian adversaries.
From that point on, from
the late 17th century until
the empire's dissolution in
the early 20th, Turkish power in
Europe was
inexorably rolled back.
At the same time, the Austrian
Empire rose to a position of splendid
predominance in Central Europe.
The raising of the Siege of
Vienna was a pivotal moment in
the rise of the West.
In the years that followed, there
was an upsurge of Western
interest in the science of
warfare and of government.
Indeed, if there was one real
difference between the West and
the East, it was the widely varying
degrees to which science was
systematically pursued and
applied in the field of power politics.
Why did the Islamic
world get it so wrong?
Why did the West
get it so right?
70 years after the Siege of
Vienna, two men came to personify
the widening gap between Western civilisation
and its biggest rival in the East.
In Istanbul, Sultan Osman III presided
over an ever-weakening Ottoman Empire.
While in Potsdam, the Prussian
king, Frederick the Great,
embarked on a programme of reforms
that would ultimately give not just
Prussia, but the entire West,
an unassailable advantage over its rivals.
Frederick the Great lived
here, just outside Berlin,
in a palace he designed himself.
He called it Sanssouci,
without a care.
But Frederick was anything but careless
when it came to running his country.
In 1752, Frederick wrote the first
of two political testaments
intended for his successor.
In it, he said, the ruler is
the first person of the state.
He's paid well in order to
maintain the dignity of the office,
but in return, he's required to work
diligently for the well-being of the state.
In other words, Frederick firmly
subordinated his own personal
gratification to the interests
of the Prussian state.
The simple design of this
modest palace, maintained by an
astonishingly small retinue
for a major European monarch,
served as an example to
the entire Prussian bureaucracy.
Following the king's example,
the office-holding class worked in
an environment of discipline, routine,
and zero tolerance for corruption.
There could scarcely be a greater
contrast than with the stultifying
atmosphere in which the heirs
of the sultan were raised here,
at the Topkapi
Palace in Istanbul.
70 years after the disastrous
defeat at the Siege of Vienna,
Sultan Osman III's life was
one of cloistered indulgence.
And this is it, the harem,
or harem, as we would say,
also known as the cage.
It was here that Osman spent his
time, stultified with sex and Turkish
delight, and wholly untutored
in the business of government.
By the time he finally became sultan
at the age of 57, he'd spent 51 of
the previous years here,
banged up with the concubines.
He'd developed such an aversion to
women by that time that he devised
a special way of keeping
them out of his way.
He wore iron-soled shoes.
At the sound of the imperial footfall,
the ladies were supposed to scuttle away.
Half a century of dodging concubines was
hardly the best preparation for government.
Here in Istanbul, this degeneration
of leadership became systemic until
it began to infect the entire
culture of government.
The school here at the Topkapi
Palace had once been considered
the best in the empire, and
it was here that talented
Christians who'd been enslaved
were trained to serve the sultan.
The result of this creaming off of
talent had been a civil service that
was meritocratic and non-hereditary at
a time when no such thing existed in Europe.
And yet, gradually,
things began to change.
Native-born Turks gained admission
to the civil service, and promotion came
to depend more on bribery
and favouritism than on merit.
Expenditure ran
ahead of tax revenue.
Inflation surged.
Corruption was rife.
Centrifugal forces
were strengthening.
And there was religious strife too
between fundamentalists and Sufi mystics.
This was a threadbare empire.
Here in the Ottoman archives in
Istanbul, you can get the impression
of a system of
government on the slide.
Now, I don't want you to get
the idea that I can actually read
Ottoman calligraphy,
because I can't.
But I can tell neat handwriting
from sloppy handwriting.
So let's take a look at this
land register from 1458,
which is meticulous,
absolutely beautiful,
almost a work of art, and
compare it with another land
register from almost
250 years later in 1694.
This one's, frankly,
a bit of a mess.
It's full of crossings out,
there are lots of smudges.
It seems to have been done in much
greater haste with much less care.
I suppose they may have been
getting more efficient, but they certainly
weren't getting more orderly.
In comparison with the decadence
of Osman III's administration,
Frederick the Great was committed
to the rational rule of Prussia.
And you can see just how
well run it was by coming here,
to the secret state archive,
where you'll find the minutes,
perfectly preserved,
of Frederick's cabinet,
page after page of royal
decisions and letters.
August 1756 was an especially
busy month for him, because that was
the month when he ordered
the invasion of neighbouring Saxony,
at the beginning of
the Seven Years' War.
Well, it was this kind of clockwork
organisation that really set
the West apart from the rest,
and it was the lack of it that
condemned the Ottoman
Empire to inexorable decline.
For Frederick, the ruler was
the servant, not the master of the state.
I can have no interests, he
declared, which are not equally
those of my people.
If the two are incompatible,
the preference should always be given
to the interest and
advantage of the country.
In other words, the state would be
strengthened, rather than undermined
by education,
culture and toleration.
And to ram the point home,
he set out to construct a whole
series of spectacular buildings.
While his private palace may have
been modest, these grand public
buildings were intended
as political statements.
One of the first edifices in what
Frederick thought of as a kind of
forum in the heart of Berlin was this
wonderful theatre, the State Opera House.
Unlike any other in Northern Europe,
it wasn't connected to a royal palace
or court, it was a completely
freestanding institution.
The aim was not royal gratification,
it was public enlightenment.
Next to the Opera House, Frederick
built a Roman Catholic cathedral.
Although he himself was agnostic,
Frederick was prepared to tolerate
religion, provided it didn't interfere
with the political life of the nation.
People in Prussia were free to pray
as they pleased, as long as their
beliefs didn't stand in the way
of scientific inquiry and
technological progress.
This was a secular state.
Power had been taken away
from the pastors and priests.
In stark contrast, the Ottomans' progress
was severely hampered by religion.
In the words of one Muslim cleric,
it is rare that someone becomes
absorbed in this foreign science
without renouncing religion and
letting go the reins
of piety within him.
Muslim scientists couldn't even
access the latest research from
Europe because their religion now
prevented them from reading printed books.
For the Ottomans,
script was sacred.
There was a religious reverence
for pen and ink, a preference for
calligraphy over printing.
Scholars' ink, it was said,
is holier than martyr's blood.
If the Scientific Revolution was
a kind of network of scholars all
over Europe, corresponding and
publishing, then the Ottoman Empire
was effectively offline.
In 1515, a decree of Selim I had
threatened with death anyone involved
in the development of printing.
This taboo lasted
into the 18th century.
This failure to reconcile science
and Islam was to prove fatal.
By rejecting the printed book and
insisting on the laborious work of
the calligrapher, the Ottomans were
cutting themselves off from Western
knowledge and
hence from progress.
In fact, the only work of science
to be translated into Ottoman in
the 17th century was a treatise
on the possible cures for syphilis,
which I suppose gives you some idea
of the priorities of the sultan's court.
In Ottoman schools, science
yielded to narrowly religious study.
Nothing illustrates better
the contrast between the cultures of
Frederick and Osman than
the fate of an observatory that was
built here in Istanbul in 1577 by
the renowned astronomer Taqyuddin.
Taqyuddin was a religious man
who taught in an Islamic school,
but he was also a scientist of
astonishing breadth and inventiveness.
Like earlier Persian philosophers,
he held rational investigation of
the natural world to be
compatible with Islamic faith.
From his observatory, as
well as from the Galata Tower,
Taqyuddin studied
the solar system.
The author of numerous treatises on
astronomy, mathematics and optics,
he also designed his own highly
accurate astronomical clocks and even
experimented with steam power.
But on 11th September 1577,
Taqyuddin made a momentous mistake.
A comet observed in the sky
over Istanbul caused panic.
Asked for an astrological opinion,
Taqyuddin predicted that it might
signal a forthcoming Ottoman
military victory over the Persians.
Unfortunately, Taqyuddin
got it wrong, and as a result,
he and his observatory
were blamed for the defeat.
An irate sultan gave in to religious
pressure, and in January 1580,
just three years after its completion,
Taqyuddin's observatory was destroyed.
The powerful Muslim clergy
had effectively snuffed out any
possibility of Ottoman scientific
advance at the very moment when
the Christian churches in Europe were
relaxing their grip on free public inquiry.
All across Europe by the late
17th century, rulers were actively
promoting science.
In 1662, the Royal Society of
London received its charter from King
Charles II, a model for
similar institutions in Paris,
Vienna and Berlin.
Among the Society's founders
was Christopher Wren, architect,
mathematician, scientist
and astronomer.
When Charles II commissioned Wren
to build this observatory at Greenwich
in 1675, it wasn't a matter of
royal prestige or personal interest.
He understood that science
was in the national interest.
What made the Royal Society
so important was that it promoted
a new kind of scientific community
which allowed ideas to be shared,
problems to be
collectively addressed.
A classic example is Isaac Newton's
theory of gravity, which he could
never have come up with without
the prior work of Royal Society
founder Robert Hooke.
Even geniuses can
benefit from teamwork.
In the West, science and enlightened
government worked in tandem,
and no monarch understood this
better than Frederick the Great,
who offered scientists cash prizes
for solutions to unsolved problems.
Yet rulers like Frederick were
interested in science for more than
purely intellectual reasons.
They saw that scientific knowledge
could be crucial to Western military power.
What began as scholarship
would end as conquest.
In the middle of the 18th century,
Frederick the Great of Prussia
personified the nexus between
science and military power.
The centre of his sphere
of operations was Potsdam.
Today, it's just another
dowdy suburb of Berlin.
In Frederick's time, however,
most of the inhabitants of
Potsdam were soldiers.
Almost all the buildings in Potsdam had
some sort of military connection or purpose.
Today, it's a bank, but in Frederick's
day, that was the guardhouse.
And this baroque beauty
was the military orphanage.
Back there is where the garrison
church used to stand,
and this is all that's
left of the riding school.
Even in this seemingly
ordinary residential street,
the houses were built with an extra
top floor for use by lodging soldiers.
The army ceased to be merely
an instrument of dynastic power.
It became an integral part of
Prussian society, with Junker
landlords as the officers
and peasants as the men.
It was once famously observed,
the Prussian monarchy is not
a country which has an army,
it's an army which has a country.
Here, society and the military
became inextricably intertwined.
If you were a landowner, you were
expected to serve as an officer.
Ordinary men took the place
of mercenaries in the ranks.
Prussia was the army,
and the army was Prussia.
A focus on drill and professionalism was
paramount in Prussia's military success.
The discipline and speed with which
the Prussian infantry could redeploy
in the midst of battle
was legendary.
This lovely contemporary map
allows you to follow the course of
the Battle of Leuten,
fought in December 1757,
when the very existence of Prussia
was threatened by a formidable
coalition of France,
Russia and Austria.
Not for the first time,
and not for the last,
the West was at war with itself.
But it was precisely this kind of
conflict that spurred innovation.
In this 1930s reconstruction, you
can see how the Prussian infantry
surprised the long Austrian
line on its southern flank.
As the Austrians were rolled back,
they tried desperately to regroup,
but they were hit first by
the Prussian cavalry and then by
Frederick's lethally
accurate artillery.
It was a devastating lesson
in the science of war.
Artillery was as crucial as mobility
and discipline to Prussia's rise.
We're fighting against more
than men, Frederick argued.
The wars we're waging from now
on will be a question of artillery duels.
At Leuten, the Prussians had
63 field guns and eight howitzers.
They had ten so-called brummer,
growlers, known as such because of
the rumbling noise
they made when fired.
Weapons like these exemplified
the application of scientific
knowledge in the realm
of military power.
Mobile, accurate artillery was
the key to a Western military
predominance that lasted
for more than 200 years.
The application of science
to artillery perfectly illustrates
the process of cumulative advance
that was happening in Europe as rival
states competed with one another
and learnt from one another.
The Scientific Revolution was
a field day for creative nerds.
In the 1740s, a self-taught
mathematician called Benjamin Robbins
applied Newtonian mechanics
to the problem of artillery,
using differential equations to
provide the first true description of
the impact of air resistance
on high-speed projectiles.
By measuring the influence of wind
and air, Robbins was able to achieve
an epoch-making improvement
in the accuracy of field guns.
It didn't take Frederick
the Great long to commission
a German translation of Robbins'
new principles of gunnery.
The translator, Leonard Euler,
couldn't resist improving on
the work by adding a comprehensive
appendix of tables determining
the velocity, range, maximum
altitude and flight time for
a projectile fired at a given muzzle
velocity and elevation angle.
The killer app of science had given
the West a truly lethal weapon.
Accurate artillery.
But this ballistics revolution was
something from which the Ottomans
were largely excluded.
Only slowly, in the course of
the 18th century, did it dawn on
the Ottomans that they had to get up
to speed with the Western revolutions
in science and in government.
And one obvious way to do that was
to start publishing and reading books,
instead of relying on the traditional
scribblings of the calligraphers.
Among the first Ottoman
printers was Ibrahim Mutafereqa,
an Ottoman official and
polymath born in Transylvania.
In 1731, Mutafereqa presented
to Sultan Muhammad I this book,
his Rational Bases for
the Politics of Nations.
And in it, he asked the question
that's haunted Muslims ever since.
Why is it, he asked, that
the Christian nations,
which used to be so weak
compared with the Muslim nations,
now dominate so many lands and
even inflict defeats on the once
victorious Ottoman armies?
Well, Mutafereqa's answer to
the question ranges pretty widely.
It covers, for example, the Dutch
and English parliamentary
systems, the Christian conquest
of the New World and the Far East.
And he also makes the point that
whereas the Ottomans ruled on
the basis of sharia law,
religious law, in Europe,
he says, the laws are
invented by reason.
The message is really clear.
The Ottoman Empire has to
get the scientific revolution
and the Enlightenment, if it's to
remain credible as a great power.
Books alone wouldn't suffice.
Military reform meant
importing Western expertise.
A French officer of Hungarian origin,
François de Tott, was brought in,
to oversee the construction of
new defences around the capital.
Boating his way along the Bosphorus,
de Tott noticed that many of
the fortifications were
quite wrongly located.
Any enemy ship would have
been completely out of range.
The Ottomans might as
well have been firing blanks.
In his memoirs, de Tott was
scathing about the Ottomans,
Calling their castles more
like the ruins of a siege
than preparations for a defense.
Determined to modernise
the Sultan's antiquated armed forces,
de Tott started a course in
mathematical science for the Navy.
He built a new foundry for
the manufacture of howitzers
and encouraged the creation
of mobile artillery units.
Even the Ottoman army had
to march to a brand new beat.
Just imagine, arriving here in
Istanbul in the mid-19th century,
you'd probably have expected to
be greeted by those terrifying drums
that put the fear of
Allah and Mohammed
in the defenders of
Vienna back in 1683.
But instead, the sound that would
have greeted your ears would have
been composed by Giuseppe Donizetti,
who'd been imported from Italy to
compose a special Italian-style
and rather operatic national anthem
for the Ottoman Empire.
The most enduring symbol of the era of
reform was built by Sultan Abdulmesid I.
A fluent French speaker, Abdulmesid
was determined to emulate
Western civilisation
in every respect.
So he moved from the cushioned
comforts of the Topkapi Palace,
the ancestral home
of the Sultans,
to a new, custom-built
westernised, seat of government,
the Dolmabahce Palace.
Built between 1843 and 1856,
the Dolmabahce Palace has no fewer
than 285 rooms, 44 halls and
one spectacular crystal staircase.
14 tonnes of gold leaf were
used to gild the palace ceilings,
from which hung a grand
total of 36 chandeliers.
The grandest room is this,
the Muay Yedi Lounge.
It has the largest one-piece carpet
in the world and a chandelier that
weighs over four tonnes.
This place is so
wildly over the top.
It's like a cross between Grand Central
Station and a stage set at the Paris Opera.
But it shows just how far
the Ottomans were prepared to go to
imitate the ways of the West.
This extraordinary clock tells
you all you need to know.
It's not just a clock, actually.
It's also a thermometer,
a barometer and a calendar.
And it was a gift from
the Khedive of Egypt to the Sultan.
It's even got a lovely
Arabic inscription on it.
May your every minute
be worth an hour
and your every hour
a hundred years.
It looks like a masterpiece
of Oriental technology,
except for one small thing.
It was made in Austria
by Wilhelm Kirsch.
As Kirsch's clock perfectly
illustrates, the mere façade of
Westernisation, no matter how
impressive, was no substitute for
a home-grown
Ottoman modernisation.
The Ottomans still
didn't really get it.
Because if they were serious
about catching up with the West,
they needed so much more
than just a Western-style palace.
They needed a new constitution,
a new alphabet, a whole new state.
And the fact that they ultimately
ended up getting all of these things
was thanks in very
large part to one man.
His name was Kemal Ataturk.
His mission was to be
Turkey's Frederick the Great.
For six centuries, the Christian West and
the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim East,
had been locked in conflict.
Now, under the rule of Kemal
Ataturk in the early 20th century,
that conflict would
finally come to an end.
For centuries, Ataturk argued,
Turks had been walking from
the East in the direction
of the West.
Now, under his leadership, they
would finally reach their destination.
Here on the banks of the Bosphorus,
East would meet West,
not just geographically,
but culturally.
Central to the Western reorientation
of Turkey was the introduction
of a secular form of government.
No longer would religion be allowed
to dominate the political arena.
There would be secular
laws for a secular state.
Ataturk's idea was that you couldn't
drag Turkey into the modern world
as long as Islam played such
a dominant role in public life.
What he wanted to do, was to
scythe religion ruthlessly away from
politics, to create
a truly secular state.
Of course, that whole notion of
the separation of church and state
was itself a very Western idea.
To give impetus to scientific
research, Ataturk created
a new Western-style
university of Istanbul.
And one of the first scientific
facilities he built was an observatory.
Whereas Taqi Uddin's observatory had
been destroyed under pressure from
the Muslim clergy in
the 16th century, now, at last,
Turkish scientists could do their
work unimpeded by religion.
Scientific advance and military power
went hand in hand in Ataturk's mind.
Science, he argued, was
the only true guide in life.
Here, at last, was a Turkish
leader who really got it.
And it was enough to transform Turkey
into the modern nation-state we know today.
What it couldn't do was to salvage
the Ottomans' most explosive legacy,
their empire in the Holy Land.
When the British commander Edmund
Allenby marched into Jerusalem on
11th December 1917, it marked
the end of Ottoman rule in the Holy Land.
The question was, who
would rule there now?
This is the Jaffa Gate which
Allenby walked through in 1917.
Now, in order to defeat
the Turks and end their 500-year
control of Jerusalem, the British
had to make promises to
the Sultan's internal enemies.
To the Arabs, they promised
independent kingdoms.
To the Jews, they
promised a national home.
It was obvious long before
the British left this place in 1948
that these two promises were
fundamentally incompatible.
Jerusalem today is the modern
equivalent of Vienna in 1683,
a fortified city on the frontier
of Western civilisation.
Founded in 1948 as a secular state
by Jews but not exclusively for Jews,
Israel is unquestionably
a Western outpost, but it's
a beleaguered one.
This is part of the security
wall that divides Jerusalem,
which Israel regards as its capital,
from the occupied West Bank.
Now, it's not exactly a popular
structure around the world,
but when you spend time in Israel,
you can see why people feel insecure.
They feel threatened by Hamas in Gaza,
by Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.
They feel threatened by Syria, by
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
by Iran, not forgetting
Saudi Arabia.
Even Turkey has turned away recently
from the secular legacy of Ataturk to
embrace Islamism and, some would
say, a neo-Ottoman foreign policy.
As a result, many people in Israel feel
as threatened as the Viennese in 1683.
They feel besieged by
an implacable religious foe.
Here too, however, they have
the killer app of modern science to
keep their enemies at bay.
As an authentically Western
society, Israel is at the cutting edge of
scientific and
technological innovation.
This company near Tel Aviv
is pioneering a new network of
electronic cars that will be able
to change batteries as easily,
if not more easily, than, you
know, fill your car with fuel.
In 2008 alone, Israeli inventors
applied to register 9,591 new patents.
The equivalent
figure for Iran was 50.
Israel has more scientists and engineers
per capita than any other country.
The lesson of history is that a small
country can overcome numerous
adversaries, provided it
has science on its side.
Think of Frederick
the Great's Prussia.
Yet today, the scientific gap between
West and East shows signs of closing.
Until now, Israel has been the sole
nuclear power in the Middle East.
But today, Iran is closing in on its
long-cherished dream of owning
the ultimate weapon
of mass destruction.
More than three centuries
after the Siege of Vienna,
the Islamic world is finally
acknowledging that there's no power
without brainpower.
From Tehran to Riyadh, to
the private Saudi-financed Muslim
girls' school I visited last year in
West London, the taboo against
educating women is receding.
The majority of these girls at
the King Fahd Academy in Acton in
West London are wearing
headscarves, as their religion requires.
This is a school that offers
an explicitly Islamic-based education.
But as you can see, that
doesn't stop them studying
the principles of biochemistry,
complete with Bunsen burners.
The key question is how far
the West today is still capable of
maintaining the scientific lead
on which, among other things,
its military superiority has
for so long been based.
Is this just another killer app that
the rest have succeeded in downloading?
Yet, as we'll see in the next episode
of Civilisation, science is only one
of the six killer applications that
set the West apart from the rest.
The Iranians may eventually be able
to copy our most lethal weaponry.
But what about our democracy?
Just over three centuries ago, the fate of
Western civilisation hung in the balance.
In 1683, just outside the Austrian
capital, Vienna, two armed forces
were pitted against each other.
Muslim East
..against Christian West.
The result of this conflict would be
decisive for the West and ultimately
fatal for its enemies
in the East.
The Siege of Vienna was one of
many attacks that, throughout history,
Western civilisation has faced
from its enemies in the East.
But for most of the past 300 years,
give or take the odd temporary
setback, the West
has always won.
Why?
In this series, I'm identifying six
unique factors and calling them
the killer applications
that put the West on top.
The first was the competition between
Europe's warring little kingdoms that
propelled them ahead of
China's monolithic empire.
In this film, I'm turning to
killer app two, science, and,
in particular, the science that
helped the West to win at war.
But I'm also asking, if
we lose our scientific
pre-eminence, could the West
be consigned to history?
Without superior science, there would
be no Western superpower today.
But it wasn't always like this.
1,000 years ago, it was
the Muslim world that was at
the cutting edge of science.
Building on Greek and Indian
foundations, Muslim mathematicians
invented algebra.
Libraries like the House of Wisdom
in Baghdad had no equal in the West.
And Arab science meant
improved navigation and weaponry.
So how did the Muslim world
later come to lag so far behind
the West when it
came to science?
And how did a scientific revolution
help Western civilisation take over,
militarily as well
as academically?
To answer those questions, you
need to take a trip back in time.
Back more than 328 years, to
the last time an Islamic empire
menaced the West.
And you need to follow an Eastern
invader all the way from Istanbul
to the gates of Vienna.
It was to be the battle that
decided the fate of the West.
On one side was the Ottoman
Sultan's army, led by Grand Vizier Kara
Mustafa Kuprulu.
On the other were
the defending forces of Leopold I,
Holy Roman Emperor, and
the Habsburg ruler of Austria.
This was the turning point in
a clash of civilisation that had
begun when Islam I burst from
the Arabian Desert in the 7th century.
In July 1683, with the Ottoman
army surrounding Vienna,
the prospects for the Christian
defenders looked bleak indeed.
Bells rang out in Vienna and
all across Central Europe,
summoning the faithful
to pray for divine mercy.
You can get an idea of
the desperate yet defiant mood in
Vienna from the graffiti in
the old bell tower of the cathedral.
This says, Mohammed,
you dog, du Hund, go home.
But it wasn't the Muslim
Turks who turned tail.
To the disgust of many, the Christian
Emperor Leopold decided
that discretion was the better
part of valour and stole away.
By the middle of July, the Turkish
armies had come to within
450 paces of the city walls.
The fate of the West
hung in the balance.
It was one of those moments when
it could all have gone horribly wrong.
An Ottoman victory
seemed inevitable.
But then, fatally,
Karamustapha hesitated.
His men had marched far
beyond their natural range.
Supplies were running short.
What's more, even if Vienna fell, he
had no plan for its long-term occupation.
How long would they have to
stay there so far from home?
Would the army actually
survive the winter?
He might win the siege, but could
Karamustapha win the peace?
Karamustapha's hesitation gave
the West vital time to gather allies
and work out a military strategy
to repel the Ottoman horde.
A relief force of 60,000 men
now advanced on Vienna,
under the command of Jan
Sobieski, the King of Poland.
Sobieski was portly and past
his prime, but intent on glory.
On 12th September 1683,
the Christian army came charging down
these hills above Vienna.
As one Turkish eyewitness put it,
like a flood of black pitch coming
down the mountain, consuming
everything it touched.
At 5.30 in the afternoon,
Sobieski entered the tent of
Karamustapha,
but it was deserted.
He had fled. The siege was over.
The West was saved.
Sobieski was exultant,
telling the Pope, we came,
we saw, and God conquered.
Captured Turkish cannon were melted
down and turned into the main bell of
St Stephen's Cathedral.
The boomer, as it was known, was
emblazoned with the heads of six Turks.
For his part, Karamustapha
paid a high price for failure.
He was executed on
the orders of the Sultan.
Strangled with a silken cord.
For the Ottoman Empire,
it was the beginning of
the end, a moment of imperial
overstretch with disastrous consequences.
It was actually the first time
the Ottomans had had to accept
a peace treaty from victorious
Christian adversaries.
From that point on, from
the late 17th century until
the empire's dissolution in
the early 20th, Turkish power in
Europe was
inexorably rolled back.
At the same time, the Austrian
Empire rose to a position of splendid
predominance in Central Europe.
The raising of the Siege of
Vienna was a pivotal moment in
the rise of the West.
In the years that followed, there
was an upsurge of Western
interest in the science of
warfare and of government.
Indeed, if there was one real
difference between the West and
the East, it was the widely varying
degrees to which science was
systematically pursued and
applied in the field of power politics.
Why did the Islamic
world get it so wrong?
Why did the West
get it so right?
70 years after the Siege of
Vienna, two men came to personify
the widening gap between Western civilisation
and its biggest rival in the East.
In Istanbul, Sultan Osman III presided
over an ever-weakening Ottoman Empire.
While in Potsdam, the Prussian
king, Frederick the Great,
embarked on a programme of reforms
that would ultimately give not just
Prussia, but the entire West,
an unassailable advantage over its rivals.
Frederick the Great lived
here, just outside Berlin,
in a palace he designed himself.
He called it Sanssouci,
without a care.
But Frederick was anything but careless
when it came to running his country.
In 1752, Frederick wrote the first
of two political testaments
intended for his successor.
In it, he said, the ruler is
the first person of the state.
He's paid well in order to
maintain the dignity of the office,
but in return, he's required to work
diligently for the well-being of the state.
In other words, Frederick firmly
subordinated his own personal
gratification to the interests
of the Prussian state.
The simple design of this
modest palace, maintained by an
astonishingly small retinue
for a major European monarch,
served as an example to
the entire Prussian bureaucracy.
Following the king's example,
the office-holding class worked in
an environment of discipline, routine,
and zero tolerance for corruption.
There could scarcely be a greater
contrast than with the stultifying
atmosphere in which the heirs
of the sultan were raised here,
at the Topkapi
Palace in Istanbul.
70 years after the disastrous
defeat at the Siege of Vienna,
Sultan Osman III's life was
one of cloistered indulgence.
And this is it, the harem,
or harem, as we would say,
also known as the cage.
It was here that Osman spent his
time, stultified with sex and Turkish
delight, and wholly untutored
in the business of government.
By the time he finally became sultan
at the age of 57, he'd spent 51 of
the previous years here,
banged up with the concubines.
He'd developed such an aversion to
women by that time that he devised
a special way of keeping
them out of his way.
He wore iron-soled shoes.
At the sound of the imperial footfall,
the ladies were supposed to scuttle away.
Half a century of dodging concubines was
hardly the best preparation for government.
Here in Istanbul, this degeneration
of leadership became systemic until
it began to infect the entire
culture of government.
The school here at the Topkapi
Palace had once been considered
the best in the empire, and
it was here that talented
Christians who'd been enslaved
were trained to serve the sultan.
The result of this creaming off of
talent had been a civil service that
was meritocratic and non-hereditary at
a time when no such thing existed in Europe.
And yet, gradually,
things began to change.
Native-born Turks gained admission
to the civil service, and promotion came
to depend more on bribery
and favouritism than on merit.
Expenditure ran
ahead of tax revenue.
Inflation surged.
Corruption was rife.
Centrifugal forces
were strengthening.
And there was religious strife too
between fundamentalists and Sufi mystics.
This was a threadbare empire.
Here in the Ottoman archives in
Istanbul, you can get the impression
of a system of
government on the slide.
Now, I don't want you to get
the idea that I can actually read
Ottoman calligraphy,
because I can't.
But I can tell neat handwriting
from sloppy handwriting.
So let's take a look at this
land register from 1458,
which is meticulous,
absolutely beautiful,
almost a work of art, and
compare it with another land
register from almost
250 years later in 1694.
This one's, frankly,
a bit of a mess.
It's full of crossings out,
there are lots of smudges.
It seems to have been done in much
greater haste with much less care.
I suppose they may have been
getting more efficient, but they certainly
weren't getting more orderly.
In comparison with the decadence
of Osman III's administration,
Frederick the Great was committed
to the rational rule of Prussia.
And you can see just how
well run it was by coming here,
to the secret state archive,
where you'll find the minutes,
perfectly preserved,
of Frederick's cabinet,
page after page of royal
decisions and letters.
August 1756 was an especially
busy month for him, because that was
the month when he ordered
the invasion of neighbouring Saxony,
at the beginning of
the Seven Years' War.
Well, it was this kind of clockwork
organisation that really set
the West apart from the rest,
and it was the lack of it that
condemned the Ottoman
Empire to inexorable decline.
For Frederick, the ruler was
the servant, not the master of the state.
I can have no interests, he
declared, which are not equally
those of my people.
If the two are incompatible,
the preference should always be given
to the interest and
advantage of the country.
In other words, the state would be
strengthened, rather than undermined
by education,
culture and toleration.
And to ram the point home,
he set out to construct a whole
series of spectacular buildings.
While his private palace may have
been modest, these grand public
buildings were intended
as political statements.
One of the first edifices in what
Frederick thought of as a kind of
forum in the heart of Berlin was this
wonderful theatre, the State Opera House.
Unlike any other in Northern Europe,
it wasn't connected to a royal palace
or court, it was a completely
freestanding institution.
The aim was not royal gratification,
it was public enlightenment.
Next to the Opera House, Frederick
built a Roman Catholic cathedral.
Although he himself was agnostic,
Frederick was prepared to tolerate
religion, provided it didn't interfere
with the political life of the nation.
People in Prussia were free to pray
as they pleased, as long as their
beliefs didn't stand in the way
of scientific inquiry and
technological progress.
This was a secular state.
Power had been taken away
from the pastors and priests.
In stark contrast, the Ottomans' progress
was severely hampered by religion.
In the words of one Muslim cleric,
it is rare that someone becomes
absorbed in this foreign science
without renouncing religion and
letting go the reins
of piety within him.
Muslim scientists couldn't even
access the latest research from
Europe because their religion now
prevented them from reading printed books.
For the Ottomans,
script was sacred.
There was a religious reverence
for pen and ink, a preference for
calligraphy over printing.
Scholars' ink, it was said,
is holier than martyr's blood.
If the Scientific Revolution was
a kind of network of scholars all
over Europe, corresponding and
publishing, then the Ottoman Empire
was effectively offline.
In 1515, a decree of Selim I had
threatened with death anyone involved
in the development of printing.
This taboo lasted
into the 18th century.
This failure to reconcile science
and Islam was to prove fatal.
By rejecting the printed book and
insisting on the laborious work of
the calligrapher, the Ottomans were
cutting themselves off from Western
knowledge and
hence from progress.
In fact, the only work of science
to be translated into Ottoman in
the 17th century was a treatise
on the possible cures for syphilis,
which I suppose gives you some idea
of the priorities of the sultan's court.
In Ottoman schools, science
yielded to narrowly religious study.
Nothing illustrates better
the contrast between the cultures of
Frederick and Osman than
the fate of an observatory that was
built here in Istanbul in 1577 by
the renowned astronomer Taqyuddin.
Taqyuddin was a religious man
who taught in an Islamic school,
but he was also a scientist of
astonishing breadth and inventiveness.
Like earlier Persian philosophers,
he held rational investigation of
the natural world to be
compatible with Islamic faith.
From his observatory, as
well as from the Galata Tower,
Taqyuddin studied
the solar system.
The author of numerous treatises on
astronomy, mathematics and optics,
he also designed his own highly
accurate astronomical clocks and even
experimented with steam power.
But on 11th September 1577,
Taqyuddin made a momentous mistake.
A comet observed in the sky
over Istanbul caused panic.
Asked for an astrological opinion,
Taqyuddin predicted that it might
signal a forthcoming Ottoman
military victory over the Persians.
Unfortunately, Taqyuddin
got it wrong, and as a result,
he and his observatory
were blamed for the defeat.
An irate sultan gave in to religious
pressure, and in January 1580,
just three years after its completion,
Taqyuddin's observatory was destroyed.
The powerful Muslim clergy
had effectively snuffed out any
possibility of Ottoman scientific
advance at the very moment when
the Christian churches in Europe were
relaxing their grip on free public inquiry.
All across Europe by the late
17th century, rulers were actively
promoting science.
In 1662, the Royal Society of
London received its charter from King
Charles II, a model for
similar institutions in Paris,
Vienna and Berlin.
Among the Society's founders
was Christopher Wren, architect,
mathematician, scientist
and astronomer.
When Charles II commissioned Wren
to build this observatory at Greenwich
in 1675, it wasn't a matter of
royal prestige or personal interest.
He understood that science
was in the national interest.
What made the Royal Society
so important was that it promoted
a new kind of scientific community
which allowed ideas to be shared,
problems to be
collectively addressed.
A classic example is Isaac Newton's
theory of gravity, which he could
never have come up with without
the prior work of Royal Society
founder Robert Hooke.
Even geniuses can
benefit from teamwork.
In the West, science and enlightened
government worked in tandem,
and no monarch understood this
better than Frederick the Great,
who offered scientists cash prizes
for solutions to unsolved problems.
Yet rulers like Frederick were
interested in science for more than
purely intellectual reasons.
They saw that scientific knowledge
could be crucial to Western military power.
What began as scholarship
would end as conquest.
In the middle of the 18th century,
Frederick the Great of Prussia
personified the nexus between
science and military power.
The centre of his sphere
of operations was Potsdam.
Today, it's just another
dowdy suburb of Berlin.
In Frederick's time, however,
most of the inhabitants of
Potsdam were soldiers.
Almost all the buildings in Potsdam had
some sort of military connection or purpose.
Today, it's a bank, but in Frederick's
day, that was the guardhouse.
And this baroque beauty
was the military orphanage.
Back there is where the garrison
church used to stand,
and this is all that's
left of the riding school.
Even in this seemingly
ordinary residential street,
the houses were built with an extra
top floor for use by lodging soldiers.
The army ceased to be merely
an instrument of dynastic power.
It became an integral part of
Prussian society, with Junker
landlords as the officers
and peasants as the men.
It was once famously observed,
the Prussian monarchy is not
a country which has an army,
it's an army which has a country.
Here, society and the military
became inextricably intertwined.
If you were a landowner, you were
expected to serve as an officer.
Ordinary men took the place
of mercenaries in the ranks.
Prussia was the army,
and the army was Prussia.
A focus on drill and professionalism was
paramount in Prussia's military success.
The discipline and speed with which
the Prussian infantry could redeploy
in the midst of battle
was legendary.
This lovely contemporary map
allows you to follow the course of
the Battle of Leuten,
fought in December 1757,
when the very existence of Prussia
was threatened by a formidable
coalition of France,
Russia and Austria.
Not for the first time,
and not for the last,
the West was at war with itself.
But it was precisely this kind of
conflict that spurred innovation.
In this 1930s reconstruction, you
can see how the Prussian infantry
surprised the long Austrian
line on its southern flank.
As the Austrians were rolled back,
they tried desperately to regroup,
but they were hit first by
the Prussian cavalry and then by
Frederick's lethally
accurate artillery.
It was a devastating lesson
in the science of war.
Artillery was as crucial as mobility
and discipline to Prussia's rise.
We're fighting against more
than men, Frederick argued.
The wars we're waging from now
on will be a question of artillery duels.
At Leuten, the Prussians had
63 field guns and eight howitzers.
They had ten so-called brummer,
growlers, known as such because of
the rumbling noise
they made when fired.
Weapons like these exemplified
the application of scientific
knowledge in the realm
of military power.
Mobile, accurate artillery was
the key to a Western military
predominance that lasted
for more than 200 years.
The application of science
to artillery perfectly illustrates
the process of cumulative advance
that was happening in Europe as rival
states competed with one another
and learnt from one another.
The Scientific Revolution was
a field day for creative nerds.
In the 1740s, a self-taught
mathematician called Benjamin Robbins
applied Newtonian mechanics
to the problem of artillery,
using differential equations to
provide the first true description of
the impact of air resistance
on high-speed projectiles.
By measuring the influence of wind
and air, Robbins was able to achieve
an epoch-making improvement
in the accuracy of field guns.
It didn't take Frederick
the Great long to commission
a German translation of Robbins'
new principles of gunnery.
The translator, Leonard Euler,
couldn't resist improving on
the work by adding a comprehensive
appendix of tables determining
the velocity, range, maximum
altitude and flight time for
a projectile fired at a given muzzle
velocity and elevation angle.
The killer app of science had given
the West a truly lethal weapon.
Accurate artillery.
But this ballistics revolution was
something from which the Ottomans
were largely excluded.
Only slowly, in the course of
the 18th century, did it dawn on
the Ottomans that they had to get up
to speed with the Western revolutions
in science and in government.
And one obvious way to do that was
to start publishing and reading books,
instead of relying on the traditional
scribblings of the calligraphers.
Among the first Ottoman
printers was Ibrahim Mutafereqa,
an Ottoman official and
polymath born in Transylvania.
In 1731, Mutafereqa presented
to Sultan Muhammad I this book,
his Rational Bases for
the Politics of Nations.
And in it, he asked the question
that's haunted Muslims ever since.
Why is it, he asked, that
the Christian nations,
which used to be so weak
compared with the Muslim nations,
now dominate so many lands and
even inflict defeats on the once
victorious Ottoman armies?
Well, Mutafereqa's answer to
the question ranges pretty widely.
It covers, for example, the Dutch
and English parliamentary
systems, the Christian conquest
of the New World and the Far East.
And he also makes the point that
whereas the Ottomans ruled on
the basis of sharia law,
religious law, in Europe,
he says, the laws are
invented by reason.
The message is really clear.
The Ottoman Empire has to
get the scientific revolution
and the Enlightenment, if it's to
remain credible as a great power.
Books alone wouldn't suffice.
Military reform meant
importing Western expertise.
A French officer of Hungarian origin,
François de Tott, was brought in,
to oversee the construction of
new defences around the capital.
Boating his way along the Bosphorus,
de Tott noticed that many of
the fortifications were
quite wrongly located.
Any enemy ship would have
been completely out of range.
The Ottomans might as
well have been firing blanks.
In his memoirs, de Tott was
scathing about the Ottomans,
Calling their castles more
like the ruins of a siege
than preparations for a defense.
Determined to modernise
the Sultan's antiquated armed forces,
de Tott started a course in
mathematical science for the Navy.
He built a new foundry for
the manufacture of howitzers
and encouraged the creation
of mobile artillery units.
Even the Ottoman army had
to march to a brand new beat.
Just imagine, arriving here in
Istanbul in the mid-19th century,
you'd probably have expected to
be greeted by those terrifying drums
that put the fear of
Allah and Mohammed
in the defenders of
Vienna back in 1683.
But instead, the sound that would
have greeted your ears would have
been composed by Giuseppe Donizetti,
who'd been imported from Italy to
compose a special Italian-style
and rather operatic national anthem
for the Ottoman Empire.
The most enduring symbol of the era of
reform was built by Sultan Abdulmesid I.
A fluent French speaker, Abdulmesid
was determined to emulate
Western civilisation
in every respect.
So he moved from the cushioned
comforts of the Topkapi Palace,
the ancestral home
of the Sultans,
to a new, custom-built
westernised, seat of government,
the Dolmabahce Palace.
Built between 1843 and 1856,
the Dolmabahce Palace has no fewer
than 285 rooms, 44 halls and
one spectacular crystal staircase.
14 tonnes of gold leaf were
used to gild the palace ceilings,
from which hung a grand
total of 36 chandeliers.
The grandest room is this,
the Muay Yedi Lounge.
It has the largest one-piece carpet
in the world and a chandelier that
weighs over four tonnes.
This place is so
wildly over the top.
It's like a cross between Grand Central
Station and a stage set at the Paris Opera.
But it shows just how far
the Ottomans were prepared to go to
imitate the ways of the West.
This extraordinary clock tells
you all you need to know.
It's not just a clock, actually.
It's also a thermometer,
a barometer and a calendar.
And it was a gift from
the Khedive of Egypt to the Sultan.
It's even got a lovely
Arabic inscription on it.
May your every minute
be worth an hour
and your every hour
a hundred years.
It looks like a masterpiece
of Oriental technology,
except for one small thing.
It was made in Austria
by Wilhelm Kirsch.
As Kirsch's clock perfectly
illustrates, the mere façade of
Westernisation, no matter how
impressive, was no substitute for
a home-grown
Ottoman modernisation.
The Ottomans still
didn't really get it.
Because if they were serious
about catching up with the West,
they needed so much more
than just a Western-style palace.
They needed a new constitution,
a new alphabet, a whole new state.
And the fact that they ultimately
ended up getting all of these things
was thanks in very
large part to one man.
His name was Kemal Ataturk.
His mission was to be
Turkey's Frederick the Great.
For six centuries, the Christian West and
the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim East,
had been locked in conflict.
Now, under the rule of Kemal
Ataturk in the early 20th century,
that conflict would
finally come to an end.
For centuries, Ataturk argued,
Turks had been walking from
the East in the direction
of the West.
Now, under his leadership, they
would finally reach their destination.
Here on the banks of the Bosphorus,
East would meet West,
not just geographically,
but culturally.
Central to the Western reorientation
of Turkey was the introduction
of a secular form of government.
No longer would religion be allowed
to dominate the political arena.
There would be secular
laws for a secular state.
Ataturk's idea was that you couldn't
drag Turkey into the modern world
as long as Islam played such
a dominant role in public life.
What he wanted to do, was to
scythe religion ruthlessly away from
politics, to create
a truly secular state.
Of course, that whole notion of
the separation of church and state
was itself a very Western idea.
To give impetus to scientific
research, Ataturk created
a new Western-style
university of Istanbul.
And one of the first scientific
facilities he built was an observatory.
Whereas Taqi Uddin's observatory had
been destroyed under pressure from
the Muslim clergy in
the 16th century, now, at last,
Turkish scientists could do their
work unimpeded by religion.
Scientific advance and military power
went hand in hand in Ataturk's mind.
Science, he argued, was
the only true guide in life.
Here, at last, was a Turkish
leader who really got it.
And it was enough to transform Turkey
into the modern nation-state we know today.
What it couldn't do was to salvage
the Ottomans' most explosive legacy,
their empire in the Holy Land.
When the British commander Edmund
Allenby marched into Jerusalem on
11th December 1917, it marked
the end of Ottoman rule in the Holy Land.
The question was, who
would rule there now?
This is the Jaffa Gate which
Allenby walked through in 1917.
Now, in order to defeat
the Turks and end their 500-year
control of Jerusalem, the British
had to make promises to
the Sultan's internal enemies.
To the Arabs, they promised
independent kingdoms.
To the Jews, they
promised a national home.
It was obvious long before
the British left this place in 1948
that these two promises were
fundamentally incompatible.
Jerusalem today is the modern
equivalent of Vienna in 1683,
a fortified city on the frontier
of Western civilisation.
Founded in 1948 as a secular state
by Jews but not exclusively for Jews,
Israel is unquestionably
a Western outpost, but it's
a beleaguered one.
This is part of the security
wall that divides Jerusalem,
which Israel regards as its capital,
from the occupied West Bank.
Now, it's not exactly a popular
structure around the world,
but when you spend time in Israel,
you can see why people feel insecure.
They feel threatened by Hamas in Gaza,
by Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.
They feel threatened by Syria, by
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
by Iran, not forgetting
Saudi Arabia.
Even Turkey has turned away recently
from the secular legacy of Ataturk to
embrace Islamism and, some would
say, a neo-Ottoman foreign policy.
As a result, many people in Israel feel
as threatened as the Viennese in 1683.
They feel besieged by
an implacable religious foe.
Here too, however, they have
the killer app of modern science to
keep their enemies at bay.
As an authentically Western
society, Israel is at the cutting edge of
scientific and
technological innovation.
This company near Tel Aviv
is pioneering a new network of
electronic cars that will be able
to change batteries as easily,
if not more easily, than, you
know, fill your car with fuel.
In 2008 alone, Israeli inventors
applied to register 9,591 new patents.
The equivalent
figure for Iran was 50.
Israel has more scientists and engineers
per capita than any other country.
The lesson of history is that a small
country can overcome numerous
adversaries, provided it
has science on its side.
Think of Frederick
the Great's Prussia.
Yet today, the scientific gap between
West and East shows signs of closing.
Until now, Israel has been the sole
nuclear power in the Middle East.
But today, Iran is closing in on its
long-cherished dream of owning
the ultimate weapon
of mass destruction.
More than three centuries
after the Siege of Vienna,
the Islamic world is finally
acknowledging that there's no power
without brainpower.
From Tehran to Riyadh, to
the private Saudi-financed Muslim
girls' school I visited last year in
West London, the taboo against
educating women is receding.
The majority of these girls at
the King Fahd Academy in Acton in
West London are wearing
headscarves, as their religion requires.
This is a school that offers
an explicitly Islamic-based education.
But as you can see, that
doesn't stop them studying
the principles of biochemistry,
complete with Bunsen burners.
The key question is how far
the West today is still capable of
maintaining the scientific lead
on which, among other things,
its military superiority has
for so long been based.
Is this just another killer app that
the rest have succeeded in downloading?
Yet, as we'll see in the next episode
of Civilisation, science is only one
of the six killer applications that
set the West apart from the rest.
The Iranians may eventually be able
to copy our most lethal weaponry.
But what about our democracy?