In the 10th century, formal
Madrassah (schools) began to develop in
Baghdad with a set
curriculum and full-time teachers, many of whom were women. The entire
public, regardless of class where invited to partake, essentially establishing
free education. All in all, extremely
progressive for the time, a liberal approach to reading
and learning that would take another millenium to develop in most of the West. With this wide approach to knoweledge, public
literacy began to rise and from there
Maktabat (libraries) developed. A widening foreign
book trade emerged to fill these libraries, the most celebrated being the
Bait al-Hikmah in Baghdad (ca.
820).
1
In the 4th century B.C.
Alexander the Great conquered
Asia Minor and founded
Alexandria- thus spreading
Greek philosophy and science to that part of the world.
Under
Ptolemy, the
library of Alexandria in
Egypt was the unrivaled
epicenter of culture throughout the known world (i.e.
the Mediterranean) and that tradition
continued after 641, when
Egypt was absorbed into the
Arab Empire. Soon
Syria, Baghdad, and
Persia began to emulate (or at least incorporate)
Greek,
Syriac,
pre-Islamic
Persian and Indian
cultural values. Islamic philosophers confronted
Socrates,
Plato, and
Aristotle with zeal;
sage fellows like
Ibn Khaldun (d.
1406),
Ibn Sina (
Avicenna, d. 1037),
Ibn Rushd (known in the West as
Averroes, d. 1198- see "Averroes Search" by
Jorge Luis Borges)
al-Farabi and
al-Ghazali - all these men worked in the translation of the original texts found scattered around their new empire. It was through these
translations, later re-discovered after
the Crusades that
Western civilization was able to begin the
Renaissance.
Thomas Aquinas came to
Aristotle through the
translation of Ibn Sina (
Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (
Averroes).
The first 'universal history' (early
encyclopedias and
compendiums) was written by
al-Tabari of Baghdad (838-923) which, just to give an example of its scope
and depth, devoted an entire volume to the
methodology and means of history-making. Al-Tabari also wrote an authoritative text on the history of prophets and
kings. In particular, the speed and success of
the Arab Conquest meant that vast stores of regional
knowledge, in all manner of languages, needed to be
assimilated.
(Sound familiar?) The Arabic language soon became the
Latin of Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East- an international language of
learning and
commerce. At that time, followers of
the Qur'an felt their faith encouraged
Muslims to seek knowledge all their lives, no matter what the source and so the Arab
nations sought out the works of the
classical past—lying neglected in the libraries of
Byzantium and Egypt—and translated them into
Arabic.
2
Under the second
Abbasid caliph,
al-Mansur (754-75) this acquisition of knowledge went wild as emissaries were dispatched to the
Byzantine emperor
requesting mathematical texts and received in response a copy of
Euclid's Elements. The effort was subsequently systematized under
al-Ma'mun (813-833)
when he founded the
Bait al-Hikmah or
House of Wisdom- a vast translation
library of legendary strength where
Euclid,
Aristotle,
Galen,
Hippocrates and
Archimedes were some of the first extensive translations. The head of the library at the time
Al-Kindï(801-873) served well under this regime of work (until he fell out of political favor with the last Caliph he served, ended up having his personal library confiscated and was flogged in public). The Arab scholars tackled texts in
Greek,
Indian,
Farsi,
Syriac,
Armenian,
Hebrew and
Roman. Throughout this period the ruling Caliphs would even make the acquisition of
manuscripts part of their political
treaty and peace making,
requisitioning foreign knowledge in return for assured non-hostility. However, with the death of the philosopher
al-Farabi in 950, this golden age began to
wither. The empire fragmented over the next 300 years and
Moorish Spain was to serve as a conduit for the knowledge of the
ancient world into
medieval Europe.
Sources:
1. Badea,
The genius of Arab Civilization : Source of the Renassiance (Cambridge, MIT : 1983)
2.
The Middle East Institute: George Camp Keiser Library: 1761 N Street NW • Washington DC 20036: http://www.mideasti.org/library.
Notes:
1. Secondly only at this time to the
Dar al-Ilm in
Cairo (ca. 998) and the
University of Al-Azhar (969), which were both established long before
those in Europe.
2. This was tricky since it was difficult, linguistically, to go straight from
Greek into
Arabic. Most were first rendered in Syriac which Christian translators were
familiar and then went into into Arabic through native speakers. Christian communities in the Arab West, whose language was Syriac, tended to know Greek as
opposed to Muslims quickly learned Syriac, closer to Arabic.
3. At the very time that Baghdad fell to the
Mongol hordes in 1258, and the
Abbasid caliphate came to an end,
scribes in Europe were preserving the Muslim scientific
tradition. This is why, just as many Greek texts now survive only in Arabic dress, many Arabic scientific works only survive in Latin.