Selected excerpts from The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons, by Jonathan Lyons (Bloomsbury Press 2009). Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West. In the late 1980s, Lyons moved to Turkey where he was Reuters’ bureau chief for four and a half years. In 1998, Lyons moved to Tehran and reopened the Reuters bureau. After more than twenty years as an editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world, he is now affiliated with the Global Terrorism Research Centre and is completing his doctorate in sociology of religion, both at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. More details at: www.jonathanlyonsportfolio.com. You can order the book here.
Chapter Three
ABU JAFAR AL-MANSUR was taking no chances with his new imperial capital, for this was to be a city like no other. The second Abbasid caliph of the Muslims turned for guidance to his trusted royal astrologers, the former Zoroastrian Nawbakht and Mashallah, a Jew turned Muslim from Basra and now “the leading person for the science of judgments of the stars.” The pair consulted the heavens and declared that July 30, 762, would certainly be the most auspicious day for work to begin. Still, al-Mansur hesitated. He ordered his architects to mark the layout of the walls of his proposed city – a perfect circle, in keeping with the geometric teachings of the caliph’s beloved Euclid – on the ground, first in ashes and then again with cotton seeds soaked in naphtha. This was set ablaze to create a fiery outline of the so-called Round City, the geometric center of al-Mansur’s future metropolis.
At last, the caliph was satisfied. “By God! . . . I shall live in it my entire life, and it shall become the home of my descendants; and without a doubt, it will become the most prosperous city in the world,” declared al-Mansur, Arabic for “the victor- ious.” Abbasid coins and other official usage celebrated al-Mansur’s capital as the Madinat al-Salam, or “the city of peace,” but among the people it always retained the name of the old Persian settlement that had been on the same spot—Baghdad.
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Caliph al-Mansur’s decision to forsake Arab-dominated Damascus and base his new capital in Mesopotamia ratified fundamental changes at the heart of the Muslim world. Already, the tribal organization of traditional Arab society was giving way to a new, Islamic culture in which the individual, not the clan, was the primary social and political actor. This introduced the notion of individual, rather than group, responsibility and opened the way for the rise of the recognizably modern city, in which unrelated, ethnically diverse citizens interact with one another under accepted codes of legal and personal conduct. Al-Mansur’s ringed city of Baghdad, with its two sets of walls would represent a radical new beginning for the world of Islam. Work was completed around 765, and the city’s construction along Euclidean lines and at the direction of the most eminent astrologers seemed to promise a great future as an intellectual and scientific center. Even its basic construction techniques proclaimed the dawn of a new age. One of the project’s overseers, a jurist and the founder of the oldest of the four schools of Sunni law, Abu Hanifa, abandoned the tiresome counting of the vast quantities of individual bricks needed to build the double ring of walls. Instead, he directed his workmen to use a measuring stick to compute the volume and thus calculate large batches in one easy step. In many ways the original Round City resembled an expanded version of a classic Persian citadel, built more for reliable defense than for comfort or luxury. At the center sat the caliph’s palace, the royal mosque, and the government offices. There were no gardens, pools, or other sources of frivolous diversion. Later, a treasury and residences for al-Mansur’s sons were added. Senior military officers, close aides, and loyal partisans received grants of scarce land inside the double rings. The ninth-century historian Ahmad al-Yaqubi says that only the most trusted of the caliph’s supporters, men who could be relied upon completely in case of “menacing events,” were kept near at hand. Others were given choice land outside the city walls – just in case. The caliph’s prediction that his new city would stand unrivaled proved no empty boast. Proximity to Indian Ocean trade routes, a vibrant multiethnic culture, and safe distance from the traditional military dangers posed by the Byzantine Greeks helped establish Baghdad for centuries as the world’s most prosperous nexus of trade, commerce, and intellectual and scientific exchange.
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According to the Arab historian Said al-Andalusi, who died in 1070, much of the credit for this goes to the founder of Baghdad: “There was a surge in spirit and an awakening in intelligence. The first of this dynasty to cultivate science was the second caliph, Abu Jafar al-Mansur . . . He was—May Allah have mercy on him – in addition to his profound knowledge of logic and law very interested in philosophy and observational astronomy; he was fond of both and of the people who worked in these fields.” Another chronicler notes that the caliph directed numerous foreign translations into Arabic, including classic works of Hindu, Persian, and Greek scholars, and set the direction for future research. “Once in possession of these books, the public read and studied them avidly.” To accommodate the vast scale of work needed to translate, copy, study, and store the swelling volume of Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek texts, al-Mansur established a royal library modeled after those of the great Persian kings. Working space, administrative support, and financial assistance were also required for the small army of scholars who would take up these tasks and then build on them in creative and original ways. This was the origin of what became known in Arabic as the Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom – the collective institutional and imperial expression of early Abbasid intellectual ambition and official state policy. Over time, the House of Wisdom came to comprise a translation bureau, a library and book repository, and an academy of scholars and intellectuals from across the empire. Its overriding function, however, was the safeguarding of invaluable knowledge, a fact reflected in other terms applied at times by Arab historians to describe the project, such as the Treasury of the Books of Wisdom and simply the Treasury of Wisdom.
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The fruit of contemporary intellectual activity was centuries of uninterrupted, organized research and steady advances in mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, medicine, optics, and other pursuits, creating a remarkable body of work that can rightfully be called Arab science. The Muslims referred to this enterprise as falsafa – Arabic for the classical idea of `”natural philo- sophy,” a complete system of knowledge that encompassed both the physical sciences and metaphysics. The rise of this new scientific and philosophical tradition generated demand for more, and better, translations from the Greek and other sources; it was not, as Western tradition often has it, the translations that gave rise to Arab science and philosophy. A breakthrough in mathematics or optics, for example, would send Arab scholars back to the Greek literature, which was then translated, reworked, and frequently corrected or otherwise improved.
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Among the early achievements of the House of Wisdom was a translation of a rather uninspired work by Aristotle on the use of dialectics, chosen specifically to fortify Abbasid theologians against Muslim heretics and followers of the empire’s competing faiths. … More important translations soon followed, as did incisive commentaries and original research that enriched ancient learning and made it accessible to the contemporary world. Aristotelian ideas and their seeming antagonism to traditional religious teachings soon became central to Arab thought. At first Muslim thinkers, unlike their medieval Christian counterparts, found religious inspiration to pursue knowledge as a way to come closer to God. Tensions between the demands of faith and reason arose only later. As Christendom slumbered, the House of Wisdom emerged as the first great battleground for the conflict between the dictates of the new sciences and the medieval conception of the One God, which the Muslim Abbasids shared with the Christians and Jews. In the eyes of many theologians from all three faiths, any desire on man’s part to understand and even control his environment seemed to clash with traditional notions of God’s omnipotence. This paved the way for the same fateful struggle in Christian Europe centuries later.
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The policy of fostering scientific and philosophical activity, research, and innovation addressed the vital political, religious, and diplomatic interests of the early Abbasid state. But one industrious chronicler of medieval Arab intellectual history preferred another explanation, ascribing al-Mamun’s pas- sion for the work of the House of Wisdom to a mystical dream. According to Ibn al-Nadim, the sleeping caliph spotted a bald, light-skinned Aristotle sitting on his bed. Overcoming his initial shock at finding himself face-to-face with the great philosopher, al-Mamun asked him to define “that which is good.” Aristotle replied that reason and revelation – that is, science and religion – were both good and in the public interest, a response the caliph took as confirmation that scientific scholarship was a religious duty. “The dream,” Ibn al-Nadim concludes, “was one of the most definite reasons for the output of books.”
