The House of Wisdom (11 page)

The earlier Umayyads laid the groundwork for scientific inquiry, but much of their early focus was on questions of Islamic law and the practice of medicine, a field in which they, like their successors, relied heavily on Christian physicians from Syria and Persia. The Abbasid caliphs deliberately pushed back these boundaries to make more room for the study of both philosophy and the hard sciences. 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.”
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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.”
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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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Experts affiliated with this imperial institution staffed the caliph’s observatory as well and took part in scientific experiments at his behest. But the House of Wisdom also played an important role in the cultivation of Abbasid literary works.

Large sums of public funds were dedicated to the House of Wisdom and related projects of cultural and intellectual enrichment. Even diplomacy, and on occasion its cousin war, was harnessed to the drive for greater knowledge. Abbasid delegations to the rival Byzantine court often conveyed requests for copies of valuable Greek texts, successfully securing works by Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Euclid. A copy of Ptolemy’s astronomical masterpiece, soon famous among the Arabs, and later the Latins, as the
Almagest
, was said to be one of the conditions of peace between the two superpowers. The influential ninth-century scholar and translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq provides a taste of the length to which the Arab sages would go to obtain necessary material, in this case a missing medical manuscript: “I myself searched with great zeal in quest of this book over Mesopotamia, all of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, until I came to Alexandria. I found nothing, except about half of it, in Damascus.”
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The caliphs and their official scholars were not the only ones behind this campaign. The effort became an integral feature of Abbasid society itself and was supported enthusiastically by the social and political elite, from high born princes to merchants, bankers, and military officers. Even the concubines of the caliphs were known on occasion to contract with scholars for specialized translations. A former highwayman and childhood friend of Caliph al-Mamun, the seventh Abbasid ruler, turned his own facility for astrology into vast political power and wealth; he later fathered three children, known as the Sons of Musa, all of whom did original research in astronomy, mathematics, and engineering and generously funded other scholars and translators.

Scholarship and other intellectual endeavors became an important means of social advancement, further breaking down what remained of the Arabs’ traditional hierarchy.
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They also fostered competition for patronage among scholars from different traditions, chiefly Arab and Persian, a phenomenon that ensured that high-quality scientific and literary work would be carried out for centuries.
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The most skilled translators could earn huge sums for their work—one was reputed to have been paid the weight of each completed manuscript in gold—or rise to high office on the strength of their intellectual accomplishments. Without this institutional support, the considerable talents of the diverse scholars now under Abbasid rule would never have coalesced into a powerful intellectual movement.

Over the course of 150 years, the Arabs translated all available Greek books of science and philosophy. Arabic replaced Greek as the universal language of scientific inquiry. Higher education became increasingly organized in the early ninth century, and most major Muslim cities featured some type of university. One such institution, the al-Azhar mosque complex in Cairo, has been the seat of uninterrupted instruction for more than one thousand years. Scholars traveled great distances to study with the most celebrated masters, dotted throughout the empire. Travel, and the accompanying exposure to new experiences and new ways of thinking, was an important element of a scholar’s education in a society that retained great reverence for the spoken word; other than face-to-face, how else could a learned man meet his colleagues and collect and debate their ideas?

The case of one scholar, recounted by the medieval Arab biographer Yaqut in his
Dictionary of Learned Men
, may have been a bit extreme, but it was by no means unheard of in its day. Born in Spain in 1147, this wandering intellectual later traveled to Cairo, then to Mecca, Medina, and Baghdad; from there, he set out for the cities of Persia and on to Afghanistan, before returning to Baghdad; next came Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul, followed by return visits to Mecca, Medina, and Cairo. His journeys took seventeen years and yielded a large number of scholarly books.
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Another eminent intellectual noted that the greatest danger to scholars was the occasional “nuisance of corrupt and wicked highway robbers.”
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Just such an encounter ended the life of one of the Arab world’s leading commentators on Aristotle, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, who was murdered by a criminal gang on the road outside Damascus around 950.

Still, 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 philosophy,” 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.
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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. Along the way, new scientific terminology also had to be invented, a task for which Arabic proved to be highly adept. Many of these words—
alcohol, alembic
, and
alchemy
, to take just a few examples from the beginning of the alphabet—are today a firm part of the Western lexicon. A tenth-century Arabic manuscript on arithmetic by the Persian mathematician al-Nawasi pays tribute to the precision of the language; the author says in his introduction that he first wrote the book in Persian but had to redo it in Arabic in order to convey his exact meaning. Syriac, the language of early Arab Christian scholars, likewise proved no match for the flexibility and nuance of Arabic. To the dismay of many leading churchmen, their parishioners generally used Arabic in their daily lives as well.
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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. The Arabized Christians, the Jews, and the Manichaeans of Persia, among other inhabitants of the Muslim empire, were all highly skilled at religious polemic, with many centuries of practice behind them. The neophyte Abbasids turned to Aristotle’s
Topics
for help, and soon the notion of debate and formal disputation to address religious competition was well established. This in turn helped cement religious law as a central intellectual force within Islam, a step strengthened by the creation of the first religious schools designed specifically to teach such laws and the logical and rhetorical methods for determining and defending religious rulings.
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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.

As a young boy, al-Mamun memorized the Koran at the direction of his father, the legendary Caliph Harun al-Rashid, and then recited it word for word under the watchful eye of the court’s leading religious scholar. Whenever the boy made a mistake, the caliph’s biographers tell us, the theologian raised his bowed head ever so slightly and the error was immediately corrected.
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Such memorization of long, complicated texts holds an honored place in traditional scholarship. Muslim authors of all kinds, not only theologians but scientists, poets, and philosophers as well, regularly recalled their original works from memory in public lectures, often delivered in the mosques. These were carefully written down by a star pupil, a favored disciple, or a professional scribe for final approval by the author before publication. Copyists then produced multiple authorized editions for the marketplace. This oral tradition was firmly established among the Muslims with the revelation of the Koran, which was repeated aloud among believers and only later fully transcribed and collated, after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. Recitation from memory has retained a strong hold on the Arab imagination ever since.

Certainly, memorizing the Koran seemed to stimulate al-Mamun’s intellectual faculties and his inquisitive nature. Unlike his older half brother and rival al-Amin, the future seventh caliph of the Abbasids was always a serious student, something his father had sought to ensure from the beginning. “Let no hour pass without giving him the benefit of some new piece of knowledge, but don’t let him be bored or overwhelmed. Don’t go too easy on him, and don’t allow him to enjoy being idle,” al-Rashid is reported to have ordered his son’s tutor.
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And al-Mamun, who reigned from 813 to 833, was later to be the driving force behind some of the greatest achievements of medieval Arab scholarship. Ibn al-Nadim’s tenth-century compendium of Arab thinkers says the caliph’s intellectual attributes defied enumeration. “We are too rich in famed traditions concerning him to go into detail when mentioning him,” al-Nadim reports.
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One Christian bishop praises al-Mamun’s talents after entering a theological debate against Muslim scholars, with the caliph serving as arbiter: “When the renowned philosopher converses with al-Mamun, incapacity of speech dries up his tongue.”
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A lifelong adept at science and philosophy, al-Mamun also took his astrology seriously, a view shaped by the cultural influences of the Persians in and around the court and soon augmented by translations of important Greek astrological texts. Among the Arabs, astrology long went hand in hand with the other sciences. One royal Baghdad astrologer dubbed it “the mistress of all sciences.”
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The astrologer had to study the nature of things and learn the changing states of animals, plants, and minerals according to the seasons. The expert practitioner of the art had to turn to complex trigonometric functions to capture the elusive movement of the planets. He needed to explore the mysteries of reflection and refraction to account for the projection of planetary rays that influenced events on the distant earth below. And he needed the utmost precision in instrumentation and timekeeping, preparing star tables accurate not just to minutes of degrees but to seconds and beyond.
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In other words, the successful astrologer needed to possess the profile of the emerging modern scientist.

Throughout the Middle Ages, kings, princes, caliphs, and sultans—Christians and Muslims alike—consistently sought the guidance of horoscopes and the astrologers who could tease these and other sophisticated readings from the complex motions of the celestial bodies. Few others could afford the full-time services of such rare and learned figures, or support the costly research and observations required for them to practice and refine their art. However, any insight into worldly events, such as a propitious time for war or a politically useful marriage, or simply on the fate of the dynasty, was seen as justifying the huge expense. Besides, many of the best astrologers doubled as valued physicians, personal counselors, or scientific advisers. This arrangement was also highly favorable to the early scientists, for the support of the local potentate offered a fair measure of protection against the more conservative theologians, distrustful of the scientists’ activities and wary that these “philosophers” might be tempted to trespass on God’s turf.