Andalusia and machine anxiety. How new technology in Moorish Spain sparked insights that help us now

The extraordinary spread of Islam after 632 - from Central Asia to North Africa in a century - reached Europe from the eighth century, generating issues still energising to this day. Not ones of religion, though, but of technology.

Within a few generations, the devices of the new civilisation hit the Iberian peninsula: vertical axis windmills, the clocks of Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi, astrolabes.

Anxiety about machines, remaining to the present say, was born. Were we becoming uncoupled from the cosmos? How might our existence relate to our essence? Can the human mind still fit the divine mind?

But with the technology came ideas, those discussed and disputed by Al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas - all drawing on “the first teacher”: Aristotle.

Their questions about occasionalism, the eternity of the cosmos, and unified intelligence can help us now. These reflections reveal how existence flows from divine being, the momentary nature of time reflects eternity, many minds echo the one intelligence.

Their work offers us imaginative, spiritual space to refind participation with spirit and God as the millennia-long story of the machine continues.