In this video, Jonathan Lyons, scholar and intellectual historian, addresses the collective amnesia that has left many of us with the unshakeable—if deeply misguided—conviction that the world of Islam and that of the West have nothing in common. Based on Lyons’s book, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (Bloomsbury Press, 2009), which has appeared in a dozen foreign editions, this video tells the story of Adelard of Bath, a 12-century Englishman who travelled to the Muslim world and brought back many of its scientific riches.