This is some text from, this is some text from the historian Philip Hittie. And he wrote, during all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian Peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture, and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the 9th to the 12th century, there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religious, astronomical, and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue. And we also have a frame, a point of view from Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy who wrote, our use of the phrase the Dark Ages to cover the period from 699 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China, this period includes the time of the Tang Dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished.