麻豆约拍

Writer and broadcaster Francis Spufford presents two programmes looking at Baghdad in its golden age - the period of the Abbasid Caliphs in the eighth and ninth centuries.

At this time, Baghdad was an enormous city, home to hundreds of thousands of people. It was also the capital of an empire that ruled half the known world - yet it was new, built from nothing.

The religion that ruled the city was new too - Islam was only 150 years old, still developing and still at work to the ways human beings would live out the message the Prophet brought from God.

In this series, Francis Spufford explores the legacies which Baghadad at its high point gave to the world of today by looking at some of its most characteristic words.

Programme one looks at what the memory of Baghdad means to Muslims in particular. It focuses on the caliph (literally, the succesor to the Prophet), the souk (the market, or downtown) and on fiqh (understanding and jurisprudence).