title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In 1982, he had nine albums simultaneously on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, all of which were original works and not compilations. In 1987–88, Williams was named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association. In 1987, 1988, and 1989, he won the same award from the Academy of Country Music. The pinnacle album of his acceptance and popularity was "Born to Boogie".


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: During the 1980s, Williams Jr. became a country music superstar known for catchy anthems and hard-edged, rock-influenced country. During the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s, Williams' songs constantly flew into the number one or number two spots, with songs such as "Family Tradition", "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound", "Old Habits", "Ain't Misbehavin, "Born to Boogie", and "My Name Is Bocephus".


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: The hit single "Wild Streak" (1987) was co-written by Houston native Terri Sharp, for which Williams and Sharp both earned gold records.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In 1988, he released a Southern pride song, "If the South Woulda Won". The reference is to a notional Southern victory in the Civil War.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: His 1989 hit "There's a Tear in My Beer" was a duet with his father created using electronic merging technology. The song was written by his father, and had been previously recorded with Hank Williams playing the guitar as the sole instrument. The music video for the song combined existing television footage of Hank Williams performing, onto which electronic merging technology impressed the recordings of Williams, which then made it appear as if he were actually playing with his father. The video was both a critical and commercial success. It was named "Video of the Year" by both the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music. Williams would go on to win a Grammy Award in 1990 for Best Country Vocal Collaboration.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: He is well known for his hit "A Country Boy Can Survive" and as the performer of the theme song for "Monday Night Football", based on his 1984 hit "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight". In 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994, Williams' opening themes for "Monday Night Football" earned him four Emmy Awards.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In 2000, he provided the voice of Injun Joe in "Tom Sawyer". In 2001, Williams Jr. co-wrote his classic hit "A Country Boy Can Survive" after 9/11, renaming it "America Can Survive". In 2004, Williams was featured prominently on "CMT Outlaws". In 2006, he starred at the Summerfest concert.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: He has also made a cameo appearance along with Larry the Cable Guy, Kid Rock, and Charlie Daniels in Gretchen Wilson's music video for the song "All Jacked Up". He and Kid Rock also appeared in Wilson's "Redneck Woman" video. Hank also had a small part of Kid Rock's video "Only God Knows Why", and "Redneck Paradise".


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In April 2009, Williams released a new single, "Red, White & Pink-Slip Blues", which peaked at number 43 on the country charts. The song was the lead-off single to Williams' album "127 Rose Avenue". The album debuted and peaked at number 7 on the "Billboard" Top Country Albums chart. Also in July 2009, "127 Rose Avenue" was announced as his last album for Curb Records.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: As a multi-instrumentalist, Williams' repertoire of skills includes guitar, bass guitar, upright bass, steel guitar, banjo, dobro, piano, keyboards, saxophone, harmonica, fiddle, and drums. Williams began his recording career performing covers of his father's songs. Despite catering to the country music market, Williams preferred to listen to rhythm and blues. Williams also recorded singles under the name Luke the Drifter Jr. (a reference to his father's alias "Luke the Drifter"), rock and roll singles under the aliases Rockin' Randall and Bocephus (a nickname given to him by his father), and blues under the name Thunderhead Hawkins. Williams' style evolved slowly as he struggled to find his own voice and place within traditional country music, before challenging the country music establishment with a blend of traditional country, rock and blues.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: Artists who have cited Hank Williams Jr. as an influence include Delta Generators, Walker Hayes, Sam Hunt, Davin James, Shooter Jennings, Wayne Mills, The Sickstring Outlaws and Gretchen Wilson.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: On April 10, 2006, CMT honored Williams with the Johnny Cash Visionary Award, presenting it to him at the 2006 CMT Music Awards. On November 11, 2008, Williams was honored as a BMI Icon at the 56th annual BMI Country Awards. The artists and songwriters named BMI Icons have had "a unique and indelible influence on generations of music makers".


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In 2011, Williams was named one of "Seven Living Legends" of his native Shreveport, Louisiana, by Danny Fox (1954–2014) of KWKH radio. Others named were journalist Bob Griffin of KSLA and KTBS-TV, and James Burton. Two others cited, Claude King and Frank Page, both died in 2013.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In 2015, Williams was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. On August 12, 2020, Williams was selected to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: His daughter Katherine Williams-Dunning, the only one of Williams's five children not to pursue a career in music, died on June 13, 2020, in a car crash at the age of 27. His son Shelton performs as Hank Williams III; his other children Holly Williams, Hilary Williams and Sam Williams are also musicians, as is his grandson Coleman Williams (Hank III's son), who performs under the sobriquet "IV." His wife, Mary Jane died on Tuesday, March 22, 2022 Mary Jane was 58.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: Williams has been politically involved with the Republican Party. For the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, he rerecorded his song "We Are Young Country" to "This is Bush–Cheney Country". On October 15, 2008, at a rally in Virginia Beach for Republican presidential nominee John McCain, he performed "McCain–Palin Tradition", a song in support of McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin. He has contributed to federal election campaigns, mostly to Republicans, including Michele Bachmann's 2012 presidential campaign. However, he has donated to some Democrats in the past, most notably Jim Cooper and John S. Tanner.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In November 2008, Williams considered a run for the 2012 Republican nomination as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee for the seat held by GOP incumbent Bob Corker, although his publicist said regarding Williams "no announcement has been made". Williams, ultimately, did not run.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: In an October 3, 2011, interview with Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends", Williams discussed a June golf game where President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner had teamed against Vice President Joe Biden and Ohio Governor John Kasich, saying the match was "one of the biggest political mistakes ever". When asked why the golf game troubled him, Williams stated, "Come on. That'd be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu ... in the shape this country is in?" He also said that the President and Vice President were "the enemy" and compared them to "the Three Stooges". Later, anchor Gretchen Carlson said to him, "You used the name of one of the most hated people in all of the world to describe, "I think", the president." Williams replied, "Well, that is true. But I'm telling you like it is." As a result of his statements, ESPN dropped Williams' opening song from its "Monday Night Football" broadcast of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers versus the Indianapolis Colts and replaced it with the national anthem.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: Williams later said his analogy was "extreme – but it was to make a point", and "some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood ... I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me – how ludicrous that pairing was. They're polar opposites, and it made no sense. They don't see eye to eye and never will". Additionally, Williams said he has "always respected the office of the president ... Working-class people are hurting – and it doesn't seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job – it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change". ESPN later said it was "extremely disappointed" in Williams' comments, and pulled his opening from that night's broadcast.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: Three days later, ESPN announced Williams and his song would not return to "Monday Night Football", ending the use of the song that had been part of the broadcast on both ABC and ESPN since 1989. Williams expressed defiance and indifference on his website, and said he was the one who had made the decision. "After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made MY decision," he wrote. "By pulling my opening Oct 3rd, You (ESPN) stepped on the Toes of The First Amendment Freedom of Speech, so therefore Me, My Song, and All My Rowdy Friends are OUT OF HERE. It's been a great run." Williams' son, Hank Williams III, stayed neutral in the debate, telling TMZ.com that most musicians, including his father, are "not worthy" of a political discussion.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: After his song was pulled from "Monday Night Football," Williams recorded a song criticizing Obama, ESPN and "Fox & Friends", titled "Keep the Change". He released the track on iTunes and via free download at his website. The song garnered over 180,000 downloads in two days.


title: Hank Williams Jr.

text: Williams continued to make his opinions of President Obama known and during a performance at the Iowa State Fair in August 2012, he called Obama a Muslim telling the crowd, "We've got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S. and we hate him!"


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is an American military science fiction television series, and part of the "Battlestar Galactica" franchise. The show was developed by Ronald D. Moore and executive produced by Moore and David Eick as a re-imagining of the 1978 "Battlestar Galactica" television series created by Glen A. Larson. The pilot for the series first aired as a three-hour miniseries (comprising four broadcast hours in two parts) in December 2003 on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was then followed by four regular seasons, ending its run on March 20, 2009. The cast includes Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer, and Grace Park.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The series received critical acclaim at the time and since, including a Peabody Award, the Television Critics Association's Program of the Year Award, a placement inside "Time"s 100 Best TV Shows of All-Time and 19 Emmy nominations for its writing, directing, costume design, visual effects, sound mixing and sound editing, with three Emmy wins (visual effects and sound editing). In 2019, "The New York Times" placed the show on its list of "The 20 Best TV Dramas Since "The Sopranos"", a period many critics call a "golden age of television."


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: "Battlestar Galactica" is set in a distant star system, where a civilization of humans lives on a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. In the past, the Colonies had been at war with an android race of their own creation, known as the Cylons. With the unwitting help of a human scientist named Gaius Baltar, the Cylons launch a sudden sneak attack on the Colonies, laying waste to the planets and devastating their populations. Out of a population of several billion, there are about 50,000 human survivors; most were aboard civilian space ships that were not near the initial attacks. Of all the Colonial Fleet, the Battlestar "Galactica" appears to be the only military capital ship that survived the attack. Under the leadership of Colonial Fleet officer Commander William "Bill" Adama (Olmos) and President Laura Roslin (McDonnell), the "Galactica" and its crew take up the task of leading the small fugitive fleet of survivors into space in search of a fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The series was followed by the prequel spin-off TV series "Caprica", which aired for one season in 2010. Another spin-off, "", was released in November 2012 as a web series of ten 10-minute episodes and aired on February 10, 2013, on Syfy as a televised movie.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: "Battlestar Galactica" continued from the 2003 miniseries to chronicle the journey of the last surviving humans from the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, after their nuclear annihilation by the Cylons. The survivors are led by President Laura Roslin and Commander William Adama in a ragtag fleet of ships with the Battlestar "Galactica", an old but powerful warship, as its command ship. Pursued by Cylons intent on wiping out the remnants of the human race, the survivors travel across the galaxy looking for the fabled and long-lost "thirteenth" colony: Earth. Unlike most space opera series, "Battlestar Galactica" has no humanoid aliens (the antagonists are man-made Cylon androids), the primary armaments used by both military forces utilize bullets, rail guns, and missiles instead of lasers, and the series intentionally avoids technobabble. Instead, most of the stories deal with the apocalyptic fallout of the destruction of the Twelve Colonies upon the survivors, and the moral choices they must make as they deal with the decline of the human race and their war with the Cylons. Stories also portray the concept of perpetuated cycles of hate and violence driving the human-Cylon conflict, and religion, with the implication of a "God" whose possibly angelic agents appear to certain main characters (most notably Gaius Baltar).


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Over the course of the show's four seasons, the war between the Colonials and the Cylons takes many twists and turns. Despite the animosity on both sides, the humans and a faction of the Cylons eventually form an uneasy alliance, in the wake of the Cylon Civil War. The Cylon leader, a Cylon-humanoid "Number One" named John Cavil, precipitated the schism in the Cylon ranks. Cavil deceives the other models by obsessively hiding the identities and origins of the remaining five humanoid Cylon models, the "Final Five", who, known only to him, are a more ancient type of Cylon, created by a previous iteration of human civilization. Other plotlines involve the mysterious destiny of Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, who is the subject of a prophecy claiming that she is the "Harbinger of Death" who will "lead them all [humanity] to its end", as well as the redemption of Gaius Baltar through the Cylons' monotheistic religion, after he becomes a pariah within the fleet.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: In the final episodes, an inexplicably resurrected Kara Thrace leads the surviving humans and their Cylon allies to a new planet, which Adama names "Earth". The first group of survivors settle in ancient Africa. The "real" Earth that the Colonials had searched for during their years in space was revealed in an earlier episode to have been originally inhabited thousands of years before by a previous form of humanoid Cylons; the "Final Five" were the last of these Cylons. Ironically, these humanoid Cylons had created their own Centurion robotic slaves, who waged a nuclear attack against their masters, devastating the planet and making it uninhabitable. The new Earth is found to be inhabited by early humans, who are genetically compatible with the humans from the "Galactica" and the rest of the fleet, but who possess only the most rudimentary civilization.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The surviving humans and humanoid Cylons settle on the new planet Earth; they discard all technology, destroying the fleet by flying it into the Sun, in an attempt to break the human-Cylon cycle of conflict and begin anew with the tribal humans already present on the new Earth. The surviving Cylon Centurions are given possession of the remaining Cylon Basestar, and proceed to jump away from Earth. In the final scenes, modern-day Earth humans are shown to be descendants of the colonists, their humanoid Cylon allies, and the early humans.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: At the end of the series finale, an angelic Baltar and Cylon Number Six are walking down a sidewalk in modern-day New York City. They are unseen and unheard by the people around them. As the two walk, they notice technologically advanced robots, computers, and other cybernetic devices, and they talk about the technological advancements the humans have made since the Colonials and Humanoid Cylons first arrived on this Earth, over 150,000 years earlier. Cylon Number Six and Baltar have an exchange over one of the ongoing themes from the series: "All of this has happened before. But the question remains, does all of this have to happen again?" Consequently, the revelation that "Battlestar Galactica" takes place in our collective prehistoric past means that unlike most space opera science fiction stories, the series is a fictional tale of ancient history rather than future history, and serves as a fictional tale of origin for modern humanity.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: "Time" described "Battlestar Galactica" as "a gripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with monotheistic religious fundamentalists (here genocidal cyborgs called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal". The show attempted to maintain its realism by referring to familiar elements of contemporary history – Laura Roslin's swearing in on Colonial One directly "cited the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson after the Kennedy assassination" – and the developing political situation since the September 11, 2001 attacks. Many people have drawn parallels between the Cylons and Al Qaeda" and according to "The Guardian" ""Battlestar Galactica" is the only award-winning drama that dares tackle the war on terror". The show has also tackled issues regarding terrorist sleeper cells with stories involving the reality and fear of Cylon suicide attacks, Cylon Number 5 (Aaron Doral) in the episode called Litmus, sneaks aboard the Galactica and blows himself up in the middle of the corridor and sleeper agent Lt. Sharon "Boomer" Valerii activates after destroying a Cylon basestar and shooting Commander Adama at the end of season 1. (Note that Sharon, as with some of the other human-form Cylons, had no idea that she was a Cylon.) Similar themes are revisited in season 3 (Episode 3.1, "Occupation") with a far different perspective: the humans, rather than the Cylons, are the suicide bombers. It has been suggested that these plotlines extensively "hinted at war-on-terrorism overtones." After 9/11, the original series' "broad premise – the human military's struggles in the wake of a massive terrorist attack – suddenly gained resonance" and let the show tackle issues like suicide bombings, torture ("evoking the darker side of the war on terror") and "civil liberties crackdowns".


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Executive producer Ronald D. Moore points out that the Cylons and Al Qaeda are not necessarily intended to be allegorical: "They have aspects of Al Qaeda and they have aspects of the Catholic Church and they have aspects of America." On the other hand, abortion is illegal throughout the fleet, because the survival of what remains of humanity is at stake. In contrast, with the New Caprica storyline the show's humans have been discussed as an allegory not for an America under attack but for an occupied people mounting an insurgency and turning to suicide bombings as a tactic. There is a consensus that with "its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America's three-year occupation of Iraq" as the "cameras record Cylon occupation raids on unsuspecting human civilians with the night-vision green familiar to any TV news viewer. The reasoning of the Cylons is horrifically familiar, they would prefer not to be brutal but they won't accept the failure of a glorious mission." According to "Slate" "If this sounds like Iraq, it should", and "In unmistakable terms, "Battlestar Galactica" is telling viewers that insurgency (like, say, the one in Iraq) might have some moral flaws, such as the whole suicide bombing thing, but is ultimately virtuous and worthy of support." The "really audacious stroke of this season was showing us a story about a suicide bomber from the point of view of the bomber and his comrades... because the cause of this terrorist was unquestioningly our own. We sympathize with the insurgents wholeheartedly." If the Cylon occupying force is an allegory of the Coalition Forces in Iraq, then some of the other references are equally controversial; the "scene of the shiny, terrifying Cylon centurions (a servant class of robots that actually look like robots) marching down the main road of New Caprica while the devastated colonists looked on was the Nazis marching into Paris."


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Although David Eick has said the production staff "don't need to say 'OK, let's do the episode where we're gonna do the Abu Ghraib scandal'" and points out that events depicted on New Caprica "are as much a story rooted in political tales like the Vichy France or Vietnam" rather than current events, he acknowledges that they "do gravitate in those directions when it comes to the storytelling".


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The opening theme is a new-age-inflected version of the Gayatri Mantra, a Hindu hymn dedicated to the solar deity Savitr.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Bear McCreary was the primary composer for the television series, having assisted Richard Gibbs on the 3-hour miniseries. When the show was picked up, Gibbs opted not to devote full-time to the regular series' production and McCreary became the composer. He scored over 70 episodes. Six "Battlestar Galactica" soundtrack albums have been released to great critical acclaim - one for the miniseries, one for each of the four seasons, and one combining music from the inter-season "" and post-finale prequel "". The "Chicago Tribune's" Maureen Ryan hailed the music as "sensational" and "innovative", Joanna Weiss of "The Boston Globe" praised McCreary as a "visionary composer" who did much to create "the rich atmosphere of "Battlestar"", Alan Sepinwall, then of "The Star-Ledger" described McCreary's work on the show as "transcendent" and "Variety" said ""Galactica" offers some of the most innovative music on TV today."


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The music of "Battlestar Galactica" displays a wide variety of influences and intentionally tries to avoid the "usual" style of a science fiction score. For some of the series' more important episodes, McCreary was granted a full orchestra. Character themes and leitmotifs gradually took on importance, despite being avoided earlier. A variety of instruments have been used. One season 4 episode employed: Chinese membrane flute, Indian bansuri flute, duduk (Armenian woodwind), erhu (Chinese violin), yaylı tambur (a Turkish lute), dumbek (Middle Eastern drum), Japanese taiko drums and four brass players, 30 string players and a 12-voice choir.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: There have been several live concerts featuring the music of "Battlestar Galactica". In April 2008, more than 1,000 fans attended two sold-out shows at L.A.'s Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, with some fans flying in from as far as England and Australia. A ballet based on McCreary's scores for "Galactica" premiered on March 7, 2009, for a 13-week run. Entitled "Prelude to War", it was performed by the dancers of the Theaterhagen in Hagen, Germany with choreography by Ricardo Fernando, and the Hagen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernhard Steiner.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The first season originally premiered in the United Kingdom, on October 18, 2004, on Sky1. The first season was co-commissioned by Sky Television and Sci-Fi Channel. Season 1 began airing in North America three months later, on January 14, 2005, in the United States, and January 15 in Canada. The first episode aired in the U.S. became one of the highest-rated programs ever on Sci-Fi, with 3.1 million viewers. Subsequent episodes proved equally successful. The first episode of the season was later made available for viewing in its entirety, and without charge from the Sci-Fi website. Moore also sought to address the "Internet Generation" by posting podcast commentaries on individual episodes on the official Sci-Fi website.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Following the success of the 13-episode first season, the Sci-Fi Channel ordered a 20-episode second season on February 23, 2005. The season premiered in the United States on the Sci-Fi Channel on July 15, 2005, with the UK, Ireland, and Canadian premiere in January 2006. In fall 2005, airing of the second season halted, as it was part of Sci-Fi Channel's standard airing schedule normally used for its "Stargate" series, which was to split a 20-episode season into two parts (a "winter season" and a "summer season") to avoid heavy competition with major networks that follow a spring/fall schedule. The second half of season 2 ("Season 2.5") began airing on January 6, 2006, after a three-month hiatus.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The Sci-Fi Channel ordered a 20-episode third season on November 16, 2005, with production beginning in April 2006 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The season premiered in the United States on October 6, 2006, in Canada the following day, and in the UK on January 9, 2007; with the first two episodes being shown together. The broadcast schedule for season 3 did not include a long hiatus in the middle of the season, as with season 2. The Sci-Fi Channel moved the series to Sundays on January 21, 2007, the first time the show had changed nights since it began airing. Season 3 was broadcast in high-definition on Sky 1 HD in the UK and Ireland, starting on January 9, 2007, and in the U.S. on Universal HD, starting on January 27, 2007.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The Sci-Fi Channel confirmed on May 31, 2007, that "Battlestar Galactica" had been renewed for a fourth season of 22 episodes, which producers David Eick and Ronald D. Moore later announced to be the series' last. Preceding this was the airing of the "" TV movie (comprising two of the ordered broadcast hours), while the remaining season of 20 episodes was split into two halves, due to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. The first half comprised episodes 3 to 10, while the second half comprised episodes 11 to 22. The series finale aired on March 20, 2009.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The first two slots of season 4's 22-episode order were taken up by the two-hour TV movie "Razor", which was broadcast as an unbroken extended episode detailing the chronicles of the Battlestar "Pegasus". It premiered November 24, 2007 in the U.S. and December 18, 2007, in the UK, with a limited U.S. theatrical engagement in major cities, and an extended version was released on DVD the following week. "Razor" had Michelle Forbes reprise her role as Helena Cain, and co-starred Australian actress Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, who played Kendra Shaw.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The first half of season 4 (dubbed "Season 4.0" in its DVD release) consisted of ten episodes, and premiered April 4, 2008. The Canadian cable channel Space aired season 4 on the same dates. In the UK, Sky1 began airing season 4 on April 15, showing the first two episodes on that date, placing the UK four days behind the U.S. airing. The first part of season 4 began broadcast on Universal HD on August 30, 2008. In Australia, the first half of season 4 began screening on Ten HD on September 4, 2008, beginning with "Razor". Linking both halves of season 4 together was a set of ten webisodes, which played a similar role to that which "" played between seasons 2 and 3. "" was released during the weeks leading up to the premiere of episode 13, starting on December 12, 2008, and ending on January 12, 2009. The second half of season 4 (dubbed "Season 4.5", and marketed in the UK as "the Final Season") consisted of ten episodes, and began airing on January 16, 2009. The season (and series) finale was split into two episodes in the U.S., with the normal-length first part airing on March 13, and the second, with a runtime (including advertisements) of two hours and eleven minutes, airing March 20.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: In Australia, the second half of season 4 premiered on the Australian Sci-Fi Channel on Foxtel January 31, and continued on a weekly basis with each of the remaining episodes of the series airing about six hours after the U.S. broadcast, until the final episode on March 21.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: On April 27, 2006, the Sci Fi Channel announced that a prequel spin-off of "BSG" was in development. "Caprica" takes place more than 50 years before the main series, before the original Cylon War, and chronicles the Adama family and Caprican society as well as shows the advancement of technology leading to the Cylon revolt. On March 18, 2008, Ronald Moore, the head writer, confirmed that "Caprica" would in fact be produced beginning with a two-hour backdoor pilot. On December 2, 2008, SCI FI announced that it had approved the full series. The first season, composed of 20 episodes including the pilot, premiered on January 22, 2010. An uncut version of the pilot was released on DVD on April 21, 2009, prior to the series' broadcast debut.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: On July 24, 2009, Edward James Olmos suggested that "The Plan" would not be the last "BSG" movie, saying that he had written a script involving the "Galactica" characters in which a crisis occurs at some point after their arrival on Earth.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: On March 15, 2010, Syfy executive Mark Stern said that Syfy was working with Ronald D. Moore to develop a second spinoff of "Battlestar Galactica", which would "mark a return to the franchise's space-opera roots" and "not necessarily be a traditional series." On July 27, 2010, it was revealed that the series would be called "", featuring William Adama during the First Cylon War, and written by Michael Taylor. The series was distributed as a 10-episode online series on Machinima.com starting November 9, 2012, and aired as a televised movie on February 10, 2013, on Syfy.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The miniseries was released in region 2 on March 1, 2004, and in region 1 on December 28, 2004, and included deleted scenes, audio commentary, and a behind-the-scenes documentary. The first season was released to DVD on March 28, 2005, and September 20, 2005, in region 2 and region 1 respectively and included deleted scenes. The region 1 set also included featurettes, and a tongue-in-cheek promotional special filmed for the Sci Fi Channel in addition to the miniseries. However, it does not contain the special features that were included on the miniseries stand alone DVD release.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The second season was released in its entirety in a single volume in regions 2 and 4, but issued in two separate volumes (dubbed "Season 2.0" and "Season 2.5") in the region 1, which corresponded with the mid-season break in the broadcast schedule. Each region 1 volume contains half of the season, along with deleted scenes and podcasts that were previously available on the official website. "Season 2.5" also contains an extended version of "Pegasus", the last episode of the first half of the season. The region 2 DVDs include the extended version of "Pegasus", as well as the commentaries and deleted scenes from the region 1 "2.0" release, but do not contain any of the commentaries and deleted scenes from the "2.5" release (other than the extended "Pegasus" episode), nor the original, shorter version of "Pegasus" included on the region 1 "2.0" release. The Canadian DVD release of "Season 2.0" was delayed until April 25, 2006, as the episodes had only begun airing in January 2006.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The third season was released in region 1 on March 18, 2008, in region 2 on September 3, 2007, and in region 4 on November 20, 2007. The region 2 and 4 DVDs do not contain any extras but region 2's box set comes with a 45-minute recap of the previous two seasons (consisting of clips of the seasons strung together with a voice-over). The fourth season, like season 2, was released in two parts. In regions 1, 2 and 4, the television movie "" is included in "Season 4.0" (as it is technically a part of the season despite it being released separately at an earlier date). In region 1, however, both the extended and shortened versions of "Razor" are included in the "4.0" box set.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: On August 14, 2007, Universal Studios Home Entertainment announced that the miniseries and season 1 would be released on December 4, 2007, in region 1, on the now discontinued high definition disc format HD DVD. The technical specifications include 1080p/VC-1 transfers of the miniseries and each episode is in widescreen aspect ratio, plus Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Digital-Plus 5.1 surround audio options. Each individual season has also subsequently been released on Blu-ray Disc.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The complete series set was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on July 28, 2009, in limited edition packaging and with a Cylon Centurion figurine in certain territories. It was re-released on April 6, 2010, in new packaging, with the Region 1 re-release now including "" TV movie (this was not included in the Region 2 release).


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Throughout its run, the series earned critical acclaim from "Time", "National Review", "Rolling Stone", "Newsday", "The New York Times", "The New Yorker", the "San Francisco Chronicle", the "Chicago Tribune", and "Entertainment Weekly".


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Diane Werts of "Newsday" wrote: "You can look at this saga any way you want—as political drama, religious debate, psychological suspenser, sci-fi adventure, deep metaphor or just plain fun—and it's scintillating from every angle." Robert Bianco of "USA Today" commented: "Driven by violence and rage, "Galactica" is perhaps the darkest space opera American TV has ever produced. In "Galactica" future, humans are on the run, and if external enemies don't get us, internal divisions will... You'll understand them [the characters], their conflicts and their desires, because they're recognizable humans in all their glorious complexity. And that's what makes "Galactica" a great TV series." Peter Suderman of "National Review" stated that the series is "arguably the most potent, dramatically vibrant series on television. ...[I]t packs the power of a gut punch on screen. For that, much credit is due to the immensely compelling cast of characters... "Battlestar Galactica" burns with a combustive mixture of political turmoil and human drama that is as achingly real and relevant as anything on television. Jeff Jensen of "Entertainment Weekly" wrote that the show "has distinguished itself as one of television's very best dramas — on a par with "24", "The Wire", and "Lost" — because it so utterly transcends both its genre and its source material. ...[The] series' sophisticated stories have also attracted a distinctively new breed of fan, one who's not necessarily a sci-fi buff." Moreover, in 2012, "Entertainment Weekly" listed the show at #7 in the "25 Best Cult TV Shows from the Past 25 Years," saying that producer Moore "expanded the show's central premise into an addictive post-9/11 parable and one of the most critically acclaimed series of the decade." The article credited Starbuck and Number Six as "geek and feminist icons," adding, "best of all, the show introduced this peerless profanity into the national lexicon: "Frak"!"


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Mary McNamara of the "Los Angeles Times" praised the show's ability to "anchor fantasy with vivid and recognizable human psychology" and declares that the series is "not just a cult hit but a significant piece of television." Maureen Ryan of the "Chicago Tribune" described it as a "sprawling, enthralling tale of human survival" that is "full of political allegories and fascinating, multifaceted characters." She finds, "Like "Deadwood", "Battlestar Galactica" is interested in exploring how a society on the edge decides to govern itself. What rights and actions are sacrosanct, which are outlawed, when most of the human race is eliminated? ... Thanks to a stellar cast and brave writing, "Battlestar" soars." Throughout its run, the series has often surprised reviewers with its many twists and turns. Ryan comments: "There's nothing like a good "Battlestar" plot twist to make your head spin, but the 'holy cow' moments aren't the main point (though they're one heck of a tasty side dish). The show and its twists and turns are grounded in deep curiosity about human nature, and how contradictory and confounding it can be."


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Matt Soergel of "The Florida Times-Union" stated: "Its propulsive and complex storytelling is matched by, at best, just a handful of theatrical movies a year." Tim Goodman of the "San Francisco Chronicle" opines, ""Battlestar Galactica" transcends the sci-fi genre; it competes, creatively, on the same level as any other top-tier drama." Mark Perigard of the "Boston Herald" stated: "A drama this gripping comes 'round rarely." James Poniewozik of "Time" magazine named it one of the 100 best TV shows of all time. "Time" also wrote in the spring of 2005 that the new show was one of the six best drama programs on television. It would proclaim the program the best show on television in December of the same year. Television Without Pity described "Battlestar Galactica" as "one of the finest, most beautifully written, expertly acted shows on television." Alan Sepinwall, then of "The Star-Ledger" wrote: "[W]hat makes "Galactica" so gripping is its emphasis on character over hardware. The explosions and the killer robots are cool, but they don't stack up to seeing drawn people - brought to life by a great writing staff led by producer Ron Moore and an astonishing cast led by Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell - grapple with these life-or-death, genocide-level decisions." Joshua Alston of "Newsweek" declares that the show "captures better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world" and "always finds ways to challenge the audience's beliefs." It has also been named the best science fiction series by IGN.com and Boston.com. The series placed #59 on "Entertainment Weekly" "New TV Classics" list. "Empire" ranked it #6 on its list of the 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2021, "Empire" reranked it as #14 in a list of the Top 100 Best TV Shows. They explain it was a reboot "done right" with interesting character story arcs. In 2013 "TV Guide" included it in its list of The 60 Greatest Dramas of All Time and ranked it as the #3 sci-fi show and the #57 best series of all time. Also in 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it 38th on their list of the 101 Best-Written TV Series of All Time.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The series also draws praise for having many strong and complex female characters. The "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" Melanie McFarland notes, "[Starbuck], played with a tomboyish swagger by Katee Sackhoff, is fast becoming the latest in a long line of feminist television icons."


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The series has also received favorable reviews from other writers. Stephen King wrote, "This is a beautifully written show, driven by character rather than effects...but the effects are damn good. And there's not a better acting troupe at work on television." Joss Whedon commented: "I think it's so passionate, textured, complex, subversive and challenging that it dwarfs everything on TV."


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Some fans of the original 1970s series opposed the re-imagined series since the time it premiered, due to what was perceived as its darker, more confused tone. In a May 2004 article from "Dreamwatch" magazine titled "Starbuck: Lost in Castration", Dirk Benedict, who portrayed Lieutenant Starbuck in the original series, harshly criticized the re-imagined series, citing its dark tone and supposed moral relativism. Benedict devoted the greatest part of the article to criticizing the producers' decision to turn Starbuck into a female character, tying it in to what he perceived as a general anti-masculinity agenda.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Other critics, even those who wrote rave reviews about the first two seasons of the series, felt that a major drop in quality occurred in the third season, continuing into the fourth and final season. In particular, the controversial series finale drew heavy criticism, largely due to the view that it failed to explain many of the main plotlines which had been teased throughout the series' run. Charlie Jane Anders of io9.com wrote:


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Anders later included the series in her list of "10 Once-Great TV Shows (And The Exact Moments They Started to Suck)", saying:


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: In a "Commentary" article on the prevalence of Bush Derangement Syndrome in popular culture, Jonah Goldberg analyzed the show's "radically bizarre and nonsensical turn of events ... that led inexorably to its self-destruction":


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Fantasy author George R.R. Martin expressed his dissatisfaction with how the writers handled the ending of the TV series, commenting:


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: Josh Tyler of Television Blend concluded that the series finale made no real attempt to resolve any of the plotlines or mysteries set up during the earlier run of the show.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: On March 17, 2009, the United Nations hosted a "Battlestar Galactica" retrospective including a discussion with Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick on human rights, terrorism, children and armed conflict, and reconciliation between civilians and faiths. The Discussion was moderated by actress Whoopi Goldberg and also included Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict; Craig Mokhiber of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Robert C. Orr, Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning; and Famatta Rose Osode, from the Permanent Mission of Liberia to the UN.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: "Battlestar Galactica" was the basis for a special session at the 2009 World Science Festival. The session included presentations from Mary McDonnell and Michael Hogan, as well as scientists Hod Lipson and Kevin Warwick.


title: Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)

text: The Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle organised a special exhibition on the series with props of three planes and guest speakers starting October 23, 2010.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The AFC Champions League (abbreviated as ACL) is an annual continental club football competition organised by the Asian Football Confederation, and contested by Asia's top-division football clubs. It is the most prestigious club competition in Asian football, played by the national league champions (and, for some nations, one or more runners-up) of their national associations.


title: AFC Champions League

text: Introduced in 1967 as the Asian Champion Club Tournament, the competition rebranded and took on its current name in 2002 as a result of the merger between the Asian Club Championship, the Asian Cup Winners' Cup and the Asian Super Cup.


title: AFC Champions League

text: A total of 40 clubs compete in the round-robin group stage of the competition. Clubs from Asia's strongest national leagues receive automatic berths, with clubs from lower-ranked nations eligible to qualify via the qualifying playoffs, and they are also eligible to participate in the AFC Cup. The winner of the AFC Champions League qualifies for the FIFA Club World Cup.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The most successful club in the competition is Al-Hilal with a total of four titles. They are also the reigning champions after winning their fourth title in 2021.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The competition started as the Asian Champion Club Tournament, a tournament for the champions of AFC nations, and had a variety of different formats, with the inaugural tournament staged as a straight knock-out format and the following three editions consisting of a group stage.


title: AFC Champions League

text: While Israeli clubs dominated the first four editions of the competition, this was partly due to the refusal of Arab clubs to play them:


title: AFC Champions League

text: After the 1972 edition had to be cancelled by the AFC for various reasons, including two Arab clubs being excluded for refusing to commit to playing against Israeli club Maccabi Netanya, the AFC suspended the competition for 14 years, while Israel would be expelled from the AFC in 1974.


title: AFC Champions League

text: In 1990, the Asian Football Confederation introduced the Asian Cup Winners' Cup, a tournament for the cup winners of each AFC nation, while the 1995 season saw the introduction of the Asian Super Cup, with the winners of the Asian Club Championship and Asian Cup Winners' Cup playing against each other.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The 2002–03 season saw the Asian Club Championship, Asian Cup Winners' Cup and Asian Super Cup combine to become the AFC Champions League. League champions and cup winners would qualify for the qualifying playoffs with the best eight clubs from East Asia and the eight best clubs from West Asia progressing to the group stage. The first winners under the AFC Champions League name were Al-Ain, defeating BEC Tero Sasana 2–1 on aggregate. In 2004, 29 clubs from fourteen countries participated and the tournament schedule was changed to March–November.


title: AFC Champions League

text: In the group stage, the 28 clubs were divided into seven groups of four on a regional basis, separating East Asian and West Asian clubs to reduce travel costs, and the groups were played on a home and away basis. The seven group winners along with the defending champions qualified to the quarter-finals. The quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals were played as a two-legged format, with away goals, extra time, and penalties used as tie-breakers.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The 2005 season saw Syrian clubs join the competition, thus increasing the number of participating countries to 15, and two years later, following their transfer into the AFC in 2006, Australian clubs were also included in the tournament. However, many blamed the low prize money at that time and expensive travel cost as some of the reasons. The Champions League was expanded to 32 clubs in 2009 with direct entry to the top ten Asian leagues. Each country received up to 4 slots, though no more than one-third of the number of teams in that country's top division, rounded downwards, depending on the strength of their league, professional league structure, marketability, financial status, as well as other criteria set by the AFC Pro-League Committee. The assessment criteria and ranking for participating associations are revised by AFC every two years.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The old format saw the eight group winners and eight runners-up qualify to the Round of 16, in which group winners played host to the runners-up in two-legged series, matched regionally, with away goals, extra time, and penalties used as tie-breakers. The regional restriction continues all the way until the final, although clubs from the same country couldn't face each other in the quarterfinals unless that country has three or more representatives in the quarterfinals. Since 2013, the final has also been held as a two-legged series, on a home and away basis.


title: AFC Champions League

text: In 2021, the group stage was expanded from 32 to 40 teams, with both the West and East Regions having five groups of four teams. The slot allocation for the top six member associations in each region remained unchanged. The 10 group winners and top 3 runners-up per region are now seeded based on a combination table for the Round of 16, with the games still matched regionally until the Final.


title: AFC Champions League

text: On 25 February 2022, it was announced that the AFC Champions League will go back to an inter-year (autumn to spring) schedule starting with the 2023–24 season. This will be the first time Asia's premier club competition will be played in between years since 2002–03. In addition, the existing "3+1" rule for foreign players during matches (3 foreign players and 1 Asian foreigner) will be expanded to be "5+1" (5 foreign players and 1 Asian foreigner).


title: AFC Champions League

text: By 2021, the various problems with the Iranian sides were attracting media attention; international Arabic and English-language media reported the violation of women's rights in the stadiums of Iranian sides.


title: AFC Champions League

text: On top of that, Iranian women were banned from football stadiums for about 40 years, by the Iranian government. In 2019, Iranian women were first allowed to watch football at stadiums, but not during ACL games. Before that, FIFA had pressured Iran to let women into the stadiums; Iran relented, but capped the number of women to watch the 2018 final. In 2021, the AFC investigated the matter, in the hope of allowing unrestricted attendance whenever Iranian clubs are involved.


title: AFC Champions League

text: As of the 2021 edition of the tournament, the AFC Champions League has commenced with a double round-robin group stage of 40 teams, which is preceded by qualifying matches for teams that do not receive direct entry to the competition proper. Teams are also split into east and west zones to progress separately in the tournament.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The number of teams that each association enters into the AFC Champions League is determined annually through criteria as set by the AFC Competitions Committee. The criteria, which is a modified version of the UEFA coefficient, measures such thing as marketability and stadia to determine the specific number of berths that an association receives. The higher an association's ranking as determined by the criteria, the more teams represent the association in the Champions League, and the fewer qualification rounds the association's teams must compete in.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The tournament proper begins with a group stage of 40 teams, divided into ten groups. Seeding is used whilst making the draw for this stage, with teams from the same country not being drawn into groups together. The group stage is divided into two zones; the first zone is the five East Asian groups and the other zone is the five West Asian groups. Each team meets the others in its group home and away in a round-robin format. The winning team and the runners-up from each group then progress to the next round.


title: AFC Champions League

text: For this stage, the winning team from one group plays against the runners-up from another group from their zone of the group stage. The tournament uses the away goals rule: if the aggregate score of the two games is tied after 180 minutes, then the team who scored more goals at their opponent's stadium advances. If still tied the clubs play extra time, where the away goals rule is no longer applied. If still tied after extra time, the tie shall be decided by a penalty shootout. East and West zones continue to be kept part until the final.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The group stage and Round of 16 matches are played through the first half of the year (February–May), whilst the knock-out stage thereafter is played during the second half of the year (August–November). The knock-out ties are played in a two-legged format, including the final.


title: AFC Champions League

text: Teams from only 19 AFC countries have reached the group stage of the AFC Champions League. The allocation of teams by member countries is listed below; asterisks represent occasions where at least one team was eliminated in qualification prior to the group stage. 32 AFC countries have had teams participate in qualification, and countries that have never had teams reach the group stage are not shown.


title: AFC Champions League

text: Like the FIFA World Cup, the AFC Champions League is sponsored by a group of multinational corporations, in contrast to the single main sponsor typically found in national top-flight leagues.


title: AFC Champions League

text: The current license holder for the AFC Champions League video game is Konami with the Pro Evolution Soccer series. The license also includes the competing teams.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.


title: Henri Matisse

text: The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasised flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.


title: Henri Matisse

text: His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in Northern France on New Year's Eve in 1869, the oldest son of a wealthy grain merchant. He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887, he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by modern artists, such as Édouard Manet, and by Japanese art. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired; as an art student he made copies of four of Chardin's paintings in the Louvre.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1896, Matisse, an unknown art student at the time, visited the Australian painter John Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Vincent van Gogh—who had been a friend of Russell—and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse's style changed completely; abandoning his earth-coloured palette for bright colours. He later said Russell was his teacher, and that Russell had explained colour theory to him. The same year, Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state.With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898, he married Amélie Noellie Parayre; the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, and Jules Flandrin. Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by Van Gogh, and Cézanne's "Three Bathers". In Cézanne's sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Many of Matisse's paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signac's essay, "".


title: Henri Matisse

text: In May 1902, Amélie's parents became ensnared in a major financial scandal, the Humbert Affair. Her mother (who was the Humbert family's housekeeper) and father became scapegoats in the scandal, and her family was menaced by angry mobs of fraud victims. According to art historian Hilary Spurling, "their public exposure, followed by the arrest of his father-in-law, left Matisse as the sole breadwinner for an extended family of seven." During 1902 to 1903, Matisse adopted a style of painting that was comparatively somber and concerned with form, a change possibly intended to produce saleable works during this time of material hardship. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, completing "The Slave" in 1903.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910. The movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Matisse and André Derain. Matisse's first solo exhibition was at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1904, without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. In that year, he painted the most important of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, "Luxe, Calme et Volupté". In 1905, he travelled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure. His paintings of this period are characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines, using pointillism in a less rigorous way than before.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse and a group of artists now known as "Fauves" exhibited together in a room at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The paintings expressed emotion with wild, often dissonant colours, without regard for the subject's natural colours. Matisse showed "Open Window" and "Woman with the Hat" at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles commented on a lone sculpture surrounded by an "orgy of pure tones" as "Donatello chez les fauves" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in "Gil Blas", a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. The exhibition garnered harsh criticism—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", said the critic Camille Mauclair—but also some favourable attention. When the painting that was singled out for special condemnation, Matisse's "Woman with a Hat", was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, the embattled artist's morale improved considerably.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse was recognised as a leader of the Fauves, along with André Derain; the two were friendly rivals, each with his own followers. Other members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) was the movement's inspirational teacher. As a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he pushed his students to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1907, Guillaume Apollinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in "La Falange", wrote, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." But Matisse's work of the time also encountered vehement criticism, and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His painting "Nu bleu" (1907) was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913.


title: Henri Matisse

text: The decline of the Fauvist movement after 1906 did not affect the career of Matisse; many of his finest works were created between 1906 and 1917, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in, with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. He continued to absorb new influences. He travelled to Algeria in 1906 studying African art and Primitivism. After viewing a large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, he spent two months in Spain studying Moorish art. He visited Morocco in 1912 and again in 1913 and while painting in Tangier he made several changes to his work, including his use of black as a colour. The effect on Matisse's art was a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, as in "L'Atelier Rouge" (1911).


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse had a long association with the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin. He created one of his major works "La Danse" specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission, the other painting being "Music," 1910. An earlier version of "La Danse" (1909) is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Around April 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso, who was 11 years his junior. The two became lifelong friends as well as rivals and are often compared. One key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lifes, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realised interiors. Matisse and Picasso were first brought together at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein with her partner Alice B. Toklas. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Americans in Paris—Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein, and Michael's wife Sarah—were important collectors and supporters of Matisse's paintings. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two American friends from Baltimore, the Cone sisters Claribel and Etta, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their paintings and drawings. The Cone collection is now exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art.


title: Henri Matisse

text: While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among the paintings on the walls at 27 rue de Fleurus. Where the works of Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso dominated Leo and Gertrude Stein's collection, Sarah Stein's collection particularly emphasised Matisse.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Contemporaries of Leo and Gertrude Stein, Matisse and Picasso became part of their social circle and routinely joined the gatherings that took place on Saturday evenings at 27 rue de Fleurus. Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, remarking:


title: Henri Matisse

text: More and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintings—and the Cézannes: Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Among Pablo Picasso's acquaintances who also frequented the Saturday evenings were Fernande Olivier (Picasso's mistress), Georges Braque, André Derain, the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin (Apollinaire's mistress and an artist in her own right), and Henri Rousseau.


title: Henri Matisse

text: His friends organized and financed the "Académie Matisse" in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1907 until 1911. The initiative for the academy came from the Steins and the Dômiers, with the involvement of Hans Purrmann, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Sarah Stein.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse spent seven months in Morocco from 1912 to 1913, producing about 24 paintings and numerous drawings. His frequent orientalist topics of later paintings, such as odalisques, can be traced to this period. Goldfish in aquariums also became a frequently recurring theme in Matisse's art following his trip to Morocco.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1917, Matisse relocated to Cimiez on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice. His work of the decade or so following this relocation shows a relaxation and softening of his approach. This "return to order" is characteristic of much post-World War I art, and can be compared with the neoclassicism of Picasso and Stravinsky as well as the return to traditionalism of Derain.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse's orientalist odalisque paintings are characteristic of the period; while this work was popular, some contemporary critics found it shallow and decorative.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In the late 1920s, Matisse once again engaged in active collaborations with other artists. He worked with not only Frenchmen, Dutch, Germans, and Spaniards, but also a few Americans and recent American immigrants.


title: Henri Matisse

text: After 1930, a new vigor and bolder simplification appeared in his work. American art collector Albert C. Barnes convinced Matisse to produce a large mural for the Barnes Foundation, "The Dance II", which was completed in 1932; the Foundation owns several dozen other Matisse paintings. This move toward simplification and a foreshadowing of the cut-out technique is also evident in his painting "Large Reclining Nude" (1935). Matisse worked on this painting for several months and documented the progress with a series of 22 photographs, which he sent to Etta Cone.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse's wife Amélie, who suspected that he was having an affair with her young Russian emigre companion, Lydia Delectorskaya, ended their 41-year marriage in July 1939, dividing their possessions equally between them. Delectorskaya attempted suicide by shooting herself in the chest; remarkably, she survived with no serious after-effects, and returned to Matisse and worked with him for the rest of his life, running his household, paying the bills, typing his correspondence, keeping meticulous records, assisting in the studio, and coordinating his business affairs.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse was visiting Paris when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940, but managed to make his way back to Nice. His son, Pierre, by then a gallery owner in New York, begged him to flee while he could. Matisse was about to depart for Brazil to escape the occupation of France but changed his mind and remained in Nice, in Vichy France. "It seemed to me as if I would be deserting," he wrote Pierre in September 1940. "If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?". Although he was never a member of the resistance, it became a point of pride to the occupied French that one of their most acclaimed artists chose to stay, though of course, being non-Jewish, he had that option.


title: Henri Matisse

text: While the Nazis occupied France from 1940 to 1944, they were more lenient in their attacks on "degenerate art" in Paris than they were in the German-speaking nations under their military dictatorship. Matisse was allowed to exhibit along with other former Fauves and Cubists whom Hitler had initially claimed to despise, though without any Jewish artists, all of whose works had been purged from all French museums and galleries; any French artists exhibiting in France had to sign an oath assuring their "Aryan" status—including Matisse. He also worked as a graphic artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over one hundred original lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. The surgery, while successful, resulted in serious complications from which he nearly died. Being bedridden for three months resulted in his developing a new art form using paper and scissors.


title: Henri Matisse

text: That same year, a nursing student named Monique Bourgeois responded to an advertisement placed by Matisse for a nurse. A platonic friendship developed between Matisse and Bourgeois. He discovered that she was an amateur artist and taught her about perspective. After Bourgeois left the position to join a convent in 1944, Matisse sometimes contacted her to request that she model for him. Bourgeois became a Dominican nun in 1946, and Matisse painted a chapel in Vence, a small town he moved to in 1943, in her honor.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse remained for the most part isolated in southern France throughout the war but his family was intimately involved with the French resistance. His son Pierre, the art dealer in New York, helped the Jewish and anti-Nazi French artists he represented to escape occupied France and enter the United States. In 1942, Pierre held an exhibition in New York, "Artists in Exile," which was to become legendary. Matisse's estranged wife, Amélie, was a typist for the French Underground and jailed for six months. Matisse was shocked when he heard that his daughter Marguerite, who had been active in the Résistance during the war, was tortured (almost to death) by the Gestapo in a Rennes prison and sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Marguerite managed to escape from the train to Ravensbrück, which was halted during an Allied air raid; she survived in the woods in the chaos of the closing days of the war until rescued by fellow resisters. Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Diagnosed with abdominal cancer in 1941, Matisse underwent surgery that left him reliant on a wheelchair and often bedbound. Painting and sculpture had become physical challenges, so he turned to a new type of medium. With the help of his assistants, he began creating cut paper collages, or decoupage. He would cut sheets of paper, pre-painted with gouache by his assistants, into shapes of varying colours and sizes, and arrange them to form lively compositions. Initially, these pieces were modest in size, but eventually transformed into murals or room-sized works. The result was a distinct and dimensional complexity—an art form that was not quite painting, but not quite sculpture. He called the last fourteen years of his life “une seconde vie,” meaning his second life. When talking about his work, Matisse mentioned that, while his mobility was limited, he could wander through gardens in the form of his artwork.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Although the paper cut-out was Matisse's major medium in the final decade of his life, his first recorded use of the technique was in 1919 during the design of decor for the "Le chant du rossignol", an opera composed by Igor Stravinsky. Albert C. Barnes arranged for cardboard templates to be made of the unusual dimensions of the walls onto which Matisse, in his studio in Nice, fixed the composition of painted paper shapes. Another group of cut-outs were made between 1937 and 1938, while Matisse was working on the stage sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. However, it was only after his operation that, bedridden, Matisse began to develop the cut-out technique as its own form, rather than its prior utilitarian origin.


title: Henri Matisse

text: He moved to the hilltop of Vence, France in 1943, where he produced his first major cut-out project for his artist's book titled "Jazz". However, these cut-outs were conceived as designs for stencil prints to be looked at in the book, rather than as independent pictorial works. At this point, Matisse still thought of the cut-outs as separate from his principal art form. His new understanding of this medium unfolds with the 1946 introduction for "Jazz". After summarizing his career, Matisse refers to the possibilities the cut-out technique offers, insisting "An artist must never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success…"


title: Henri Matisse

text: The number of independently conceived cut-outs steadily increased following "Jazz", and eventually led to the creation of mural-size works, such as "Oceania the Sky" and "Oceania the Sea" of 1946. Under Matisse's direction, Lydia Delectorskaya, his studio assistant, loosely pinned the silhouettes of birds, fish, and marine vegetation directly onto the walls of the room. The two Oceania pieces, his first cut-outs of this scale, evoked a trip to Tahiti he made years before.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In May 1954, his cut out The Sheaf was exhibited at the Salon de Mai and met with success. The artwork was a commission for American collectors Mr and Mrs Brody and the cut out was then adpated to a ceramic for their house in Los Angeles. It is now located in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1948, Matisse began to prepare designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, which allowed him to expand this technique within a truly decorative context. The experience of designing the chapel windows, chasubles, and tabernacle door—all planned using the cut-out method—had the effect of consolidating the medium as his primary focus. Finishing his last painting in 1951 (and final sculpture the year before), Matisse utilized the paper cut-out as his sole medium for expression up until his death.


title: Henri Matisse

text: This project was the result of the close friendship between Matisse and Bourgeois, now Sister Jacques-Marie, despite him being an atheist. They had met again in Vence and started the collaboration, a story related in her 1992 book "Henri Matisse: La Chapelle de Vence" and in the 2003 documentary "A Model for Matisse".


title: Henri Matisse

text: In 1952, he established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, and this museum is now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France.


title: Henri Matisse

text: According to David Rockefeller, Matisse's final work was the design for a stained-glass window installed at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills near the Rockefeller estate north of New York City. "It was his final artistic creation; the maquette was on the wall of his bedroom when he died in November of 1954", Rockefeller writes. Installation was completed in 1956.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 on 3 November 1954. He is buried in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, in the Cimiez neighbourhood of Nice.


title: Henri Matisse

text: The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was "Still Life with Geraniums" (1910), exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.


title: Henri Matisse

text: His "The Plum Blossoms" (1948) was purchased on 8 September 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art by Henry Kravis and the new president of the museum, Marie-Josée Drouin. Estimated price was US$25 million. Previously, it had not been seen by the public since 1970. In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, "Reclining Nude I (Dawn)," sold for US$9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse's daughter Marguerite often aided Matisse scholars with insights about his working methods and his works. She died in 1982 while compiling a catalogue of her father's work.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Matisse's son Pierre Matisse (1900–1989) opened a modern art gallery in New York City during the 1930s. The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which was active from 1931 until 1989, represented and exhibited many European artists and a few Americans and Canadians in New York often for the first time. He exhibited Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, André Derain, Yves Tanguy, Le Corbusier, Paul Delvaux, Wifredo Lam, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Balthus, Leonora Carrington, Zao Wou Ki, Sam Francis, and Simon Hantaï, sculptors Theodore Roszak, Raymond Mason, and Reg Butler, and several other important artists, including the work of Henri Matisse.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Henri Matisse's grandson Paul Matisse is an artist and inventor living in Massachusetts. Matisse's great-granddaughter Sophie Matisse is active as an artist. Les Heritiers Matisse functions as his official Estate. The U.S. copyright representative for Les Heritiers Matisse is the Artists Rights Society.


title: Henri Matisse

text: The Musée Matisse in Nice, a municipal museum, has one of the world's largest collections of Matisse's works, tracing his artistic beginnings and his evolution through to his last works. The museum, which opened in 1963, is located in the Villa des Arènes, a seventeenth-century villa in the neighbourhood of Cimiez.


title: Henri Matisse

text: Numerous artworks by Matisse were seized by the Nazis or looted from Jewish collectors or changed hands in forced sales during the Nazi years. In the past twenty years, several artworks by Matisse have been restituted to the heirs of their pre-Third Reich owners, including "Le Mur Rose", from France's Pompidou Museum to the heirs of Henry Fuld, ""Femme Assise"," discovered in the stash of Hildebrand Gurlitt's son in Munich, "La vallée de la Stour," which had belonged to "Anna Jaffé," found in the La Chaux-de-Fonds Museum and many others.


title: Henri Matisse

text: "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" was exhibited at London's Tate Modern, from April to September 2014. The show was the largest and most extensive of the cut-outs ever mounted, including approximately 100 paper maquettes—borrowed from international public and private collections—as well as a selection of related drawings, prints, illustrated books, stained glass, and textiles. In total, the retrospective featured 130 works encompassing his practice from 1937 to 1954. The Tate Modern show was the first in its history to attract more than half a million people.


title: Henri Matisse

text: The show then traveled to New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it was on display through 10 February 2015. The newly conserved cut-out, "The Swimming Pool", which had been off view for more than 20 years prior, returned to the galleries as the centerpiece of the exhibition.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The Islamic Golden Age was a period of cultural, economic, and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 14th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's largest city by then, where Muslim scholars and polymaths from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the known world's classical knowledge into Aramaic and Arabic.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258. A few scholars date the end of the golden age around 1350 linking with the Timurid Renaissance, while several modern historians and scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries meeting with the Islamic gunpowder empires. The medieval period of Islam drew over a similar if not identical period, with one source defining it as 900–1300 CE.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The metaphor of a golden age began to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history, in the context of the western aesthetic fashion known as Orientalism. The author of a "Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine" in 1868 observed that the most beautiful mosques of Damascus were "like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying" and relics of "the golden age of Islam".


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: There is no unambiguous definition of the term, and depending on whether it is used with a focus on cultural or on military achievement, it may be taken to refer to rather disparate time spans. Thus, one 19th century author would have it extend to the duration of the caliphate, or to "six and a half centuries", while another would have it end after only a few decades of Rashidun conquests, with the death of Umar and the First Fitna.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: During the early 20th century, the term was used only occasionally and often referred to as the early military successes of the Rashidun caliphs. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that the term came to be used with any frequency, now mostly referring to the cultural flourishing of science and mathematics under the caliphates during the 9th to 11th centuries (between the establishment of organised scholarship in the House of Wisdom and the beginning of the crusades), but often extended to include part of the late 8th or the 12th to early 13th centuries. Definitions may still vary considerably. Equating the end of the golden age with the end of the caliphates is a convenient cut-off point based on a historical landmark, but it can be argued that Islamic culture had entered a gradual decline much earlier; thus, Khan (2003) identifies the proper golden age as being the two centuries between 750 and 950, arguing that the beginning loss of territories under Harun al-Rashid worsened after the death of al-Ma'mun in 833, and that the crusades in the 12th century resulted in a weakening of the Islamic empire from which it never recovered.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The various Quranic injunctions and Hadith (or actions of Muhammad), which place values on education and emphasize the importance of acquiring knowledge, played a vital role in influencing the Muslims of this age in their search for knowledge and the development of the body of science.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The Islamic Empire heavily patronized scholars. The money spent on the Translation Movement for some translations is estimated to be equivalent to about twice the annual research budget of the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council. The best scholars and notable translators, such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, had salaries that are estimated to be the equivalent of professional athletes today. The House of Wisdom was a library established in Abbasid-era Baghdad, Iraq by Caliph al-Mansur in 825 modeled after the academy of Jundishapur.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: During this period, the Muslims showed a strong interest in assimilating the scientific knowledge of the civilizations that had been conquered. Many classic works of antiquity that might otherwise have been lost were translated from Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian, and Sanskrit into Syriac and Arabic, some of which were later in turn translated into other languages like Hebrew and Latin.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Christians, especially the adherents of the Church of the East (Nestorians), contributed to Islamic civilization during the reign of the Umayyads and the Abbasids by translating works of Greek philosophers and ancient science to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic. They also excelled in many fields, in particular philosophy, science (such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Yusuf Al-Khuri, Al Himsi, Qusta ibn Luqa, Masawaiyh, Patriarch Eutychius, and Jabril ibn Bukhtishu) and theology. For a long period of time the personal physicians of the Abbasid Caliphs were often Assyrian Christians. Among the most prominent Christian families to serve as physicians to the caliphs were the Bukhtishu dynasty. Throughout the 4th to 7th centuries, Christian scholarly work in the Greek and Syriac languages was either newly translated or had been preserved since the Hellenistic period. Among the prominent centers of learning and transmission of classical wisdom were Christian colleges such as the School of Nisibis and the School of Edessa, the pagan center of learning in Harran, and the renowned hospital and medical Academy of Gondishapur, which was the intellectual, theological and scientific center of the Church of the East. Many scholars of the House of Wisdom were of Christian background and it was led by Christian physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq, with the support of Byzantine medicine. Many of the most important philosophical and scientific works of the ancient world were translated, including the work of Galen, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Archimedes.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Persians also were a notably high proportion of scientists who contributed to the Islamic Golden Age. According to Bernard Lewis: "Culturally, politically, and most remarkable of all even religiously, the Persian contribution to this new Islamic civilization is of immense importance. The work of Iranians can be seen in every field of cultural endeavor, including Arabic poetry, to which poets of Iranian origin composing their poems in Arabic made a very significant contribution."


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: While cultural influence used to radiate outward from Baghdad, after the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate, Arab influence decreased. Iran and Central Asia, benefiting from increased cross-cultural access to East Asia under Mongol rule, flourished and developed more distinctively from Arab influence, such as the Timurid Renaissance under the Timurid dynasty.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: With a new and easier writing system, and the introduction of paper, information was democratized to the extent that, for probably the first time in history, it became possible to make a living from only writing and selling books. The use of paper spread from China into Muslim regions in the eighth century through mass production in Samarkand and Khorasan, arriving in Al-Andalus on the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) in the 10th century. It was easier to manufacture than parchment, less likely to crack than papyrus, and could absorb ink, making it difficult to erase and ideal for keeping records. Islamic paper makers devised assembly-line methods of hand-copying manuscripts to turn out editions far larger than any available in Europe for centuries. It was from these countries that the rest of the world learned to make paper from linen.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition helped to make education a central pillar of the religion in virtually all times and places in the history of Islam. The importance of learning in the Islamic tradition is reflected in a number of hadiths attributed to Muhammad, including one that states "Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim". This injunction was seen to apply particularly to scholars, but also to some extent to the wider Muslim public, as exemplified by the dictum of al-Zarnuji, "learning is prescribed for us all". While it is impossible to calculate literacy rates in pre-modern Islamic societies, it is almost certain that they were relatively high, at least in comparison to their European counterparts.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Education would begin at a young age with study of Arabic and the Quran, either at home or in a primary school, which was often attached to a mosque. Some students would then proceed to training in tafsir (Quranic exegesis) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), which was seen as particularly important. Education focused on memorization, but also trained the more advanced students to participate as readers and writers in the tradition of commentary on the studied texts. It also involved a process of socialization of aspiring scholars, who came from virtually all social backgrounds, into the ranks of the ulema.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: For the first few centuries of Islam, educational settings were entirely informal, but beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, the ruling elites began to establish institutions of higher religious learning known as madrasas in an effort to secure support and cooperation of the ulema. Madrasas soon multiplied throughout the Islamic world, which helped to spread Islamic learning beyond urban centers and to unite diverse Islamic communities in a shared cultural project. Nonetheless, instruction remained focused on individual relationships between students and their teacher. The formal attestation of educational attainment, "ijaza", was granted by a particular scholar rather than the institution, and it placed its holder within a genealogy of scholars, which was the only recognized hierarchy in the educational system. While formal studies in madrasas were open only to men, women of prominent urban families were commonly educated in private settings and many of them received and later issued "ijazas" in hadith studies, calligraphy and poetry recitation. Working women learned religious texts and practical skills primarily from each other, though they also received some instruction together with men in mosques and private homes.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Madrasas were devoted principally to study of law, but they also offered other subjects such as theology, medicine, and mathematics. The madrasa complex usually consisted of a mosque, boarding house, and a library. It was maintained by a waqf (charitable endowment), which paid salaries of professors, stipends of students, and defrayed the costs of construction and maintenance. The madrasa was unlike a modern college in that it lacked a standardized curriculum or institutionalized system of certification.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Muslims distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy and medicine, which they called "sciences of the ancients" or "rational sciences", from Islamic religious sciences. Sciences of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam. In some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted informally from teacher to student.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The University of Al Karaouine, founded in 859 AD, is listed in "The Guinness Book Of Records" as the world's oldest degree-granting university. The Al-Azhar University was another early madrasa now recognized as a university. The madrasa is one of the relics of the Fatimid caliphate. The Fatimids traced their descent to Muhammad's daughter Fatimah and named the institution using a variant of her honorific title "Al-Zahra" (the brilliant). Organized instruction in the Al-Azhar Mosque began in 978.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Juristic thought gradually developed in study circles, where independent scholars met to learn from a local master and discuss religious topics. At first, these circles were fluid in their membership, but with time distinct regional legal schools crystallized around shared sets of methodological principles. As the boundaries of the schools became clearly delineated, the authority of their doctrinal tenets came to be vested in a master jurist from earlier times, who was henceforth identified as the school's founder. In the course of the first three centuries of Islam, all legal schools came to accept the broad outlines of classical legal theory, according to which Islamic law had to be firmly rooted in the Quran and hadith.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The classical theory of Islamic jurisprudence elaborates how scriptures should be interpreted from the standpoint of linguistics and rhetoric. It also comprises methods for establishing authenticity of hadith and for determining when the legal force of a scriptural passage is abrogated by a passage revealed at a later date. In addition to the Quran and sunnah, the classical theory of Sunni fiqh recognizes two other sources of law: juristic consensus ("ijmaʿ") and analogical reasoning ("qiyas"). It therefore studies the application and limits of analogy, as well as the value and limits of consensus, along with other methodological principles, some of which are accepted by only certain legal schools. This interpretive apparatus is brought together under the rubric of ijtihad, which refers to a jurist's exertion in an attempt to arrive at a ruling on a particular question. The theory of Twelver Shia jurisprudence parallels that of Sunni schools with some differences, such as recognition of reason ("ʿaql") as a source of law in place of "qiyas" and extension of the notion of sunnah to include traditions of the imams.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: The body of substantive Islamic law was created by independent jurists (muftis). Their legal opinions (fatwas) were taken into account by ruler-appointed judges who presided over "qāḍī's" courts, and by "maẓālim" courts, which were controlled by the ruler's council and administered criminal law.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Classical Islamic theology emerged from an early doctrinal controversy which pitted the "ahl al-hadith" movement, led by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who considered the Quran and authentic hadith to be the only acceptable authority in matters of faith, against Mu'tazilites and other theological currents, who developed theological doctrines using rationalistic methods. In 833 the caliph al-Ma'mun tried to impose Mu'tazilite theology on all religious scholars and instituted an inquisition ("mihna"), but the attempts to impose a caliphal writ in matters of religious orthodoxy ultimately failed. This controversy persisted until al-Ash'ari (874–936) found a middle ground between Mu'tazilite rationalism and Hanbalite literalism, using the rationalistic methods championed by Mu'tazilites to defend most substantive tenets maintained by "ahl al-hadith". A rival compromise between rationalism and literalism emerged from the work of al-Maturidi (d. c. 944), and, although a minority of scholars remained faithful to the early "ahl al-hadith" creed, Ash'ari and Maturidi theology came to dominate Sunni Islam from the 10th century on.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) played a major role in interpreting the works of Aristotle, whose ideas came to dominate the non-religious thought of the Christian and Muslim worlds. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, translation of philosophical texts from Arabic to Latin in Western Europe "led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world". The influence of Islamic philosophers in Europe was particularly strong in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics, though it also influenced the study of logic and ethics.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Ibn Sina argued his "Floating man" thought experiment concerning self-awareness, in which a man prevented of sense experience by being blindfolded and free falling would still be aware of his existence.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: In epistemology, Ibn Tufail wrote the novel "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan" and in response Ibn al-Nafis wrote the novel "Theologus Autodidactus". Both were concerning autodidacticism as illuminated through the life of a feral child spontaneously generated in a cave on a desert island.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī played a significant role in the development of algebra, arithmetic and Hindu-Arabic numerals. He has been described as the father or founder of algebra.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Another Persian mathematician, Omar Khayyam, is credited with identifying the foundations of Analytic geometry. Omar Khayyam found the general geometric solution of the cubic equation. His book "Treatise on Demonstrations of Problems of Algebra" (1070), which laid down the principles of algebra, is part of the body of Persian mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Yet another Persian mathematician, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Tūsī, found algebraic and numerical solutions to various cases of cubic equations. He also developed the concept of a function.


title: Islamic Golden Age

text: Islamic art makes use of geometric patterns and symmetries in many of its art forms, notably in girih tilings. These are formed using a set of five tile shapes, namely a regular decagon, an elongated hexagon, a bow tie, a rhombus, and a regular pentagon. All the sides of these tiles have the same length; and all their angles are multiples of 36° (π/5 radians), offering fivefold and tenfold symmetries. The tiles are decorated with strapwork lines (girih), generally more visible than the tile boundaries. In 2007, the physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt argued that girih from the 15th century resembled quasicrystalline Penrose tilings. Elaborate geometric zellige tilework is a distinctive element in Moroccan architecture. Muqarnas vaults are three-dimensional but were designed in two dimensions with drawings of geometrical cells.