Book excerpt: Western scholars have ignored the contributions of the Golden Age of medieval Islamic civilization prior to the rise of colleges and universities in the West. In Higher Education in Islam, Charles Stanton describes the tremendous debt that western civilization owes to that astonishingly brilliant period of medieval Islam, when the arts and sciences, philosophy and theology, and literature in general reached the pinnacle of their development. In an engaging, lucid style, Stanton provides an excellent synthesis of current research on this important era of Islamic cultural, religious and intellectual matters.