He explained the rainbow. He was twenty-two when Baghdad burned. He kept going anyway.
In the winter of 1258, the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan took Baghdad apart in thirteen days. The caliphate that had organised Muslim civilisation for five hundred years stopped existing. The libraries went into the Tigris. Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi was twenty-two years old, working as an eye doctor in Shiraz, and every institution that gave his work meaning vanished inside a fortnight.
He went back to the hospital the next morning and kept looking, very carefully, at damaged eyes.
Over the next fifty-three years he became one of the most remarkable minds of the medieval world - and the first human being in history to correctly explain how a rainbow forms. Light bends as it enters a raindrop. It reflects off the inner wall. It bends again on the way out, and the colours come apart, and red leaves at forty-two degrees and has never once left at forty-three.
He worked that out with glass spheres full of water, held up to the sun, day after day, in a country under occupation.
Where Light Breaks follows him from a childhood house in Kazerun that smelled of camphor and incense, to a freezing observatory on a mountain in Azerbaijan, to a room in Konya where a Persian poet played the same small fiddle he did, to a courtroom on a violent frontier, to a failed embassy in Cairo, to a desk in Tabriz where an old man tried to fit the entire world into one book.
Written as narrative history - scenes, conversations, people in rooms - with no prior knowledge of Islamic science or medieval philosophy required.
- Watch a boy of fourteen take his dead father's post and put a needle into a human eye
- Stand in the observatory the night the mathematics of the heavens finally gives way
- Sit with the man who chose to spend the worst century of his people's history explaining something beautiful
- Understand exactly what happens inside a raindrop, and why it has never happened differently
- Find out why the story you were told about the scientific revolution is missing several centuries
This is a book for anyone who has tried to do careful work while the ground was moving under them.
He was right, he was forgotten, and the sky has been proving him correct every rainstorm for seven hundred years.
Open it. The rest will find you.
