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From the 7th century onwards, men and women of different faiths and cultures built on knowledge from ancient civilisations making breakthroughs that have left their mark on our world. The heyday of Baghdad was 1,200 years ago when it was the thriving capital of the Muslim civilisation. For about 500 years the city boasted the cream of intellectuals and culture, a reputation gained during the reigns of some of its most famous Caliphs (Al-Rashid, Al-Ma’mun, Al-Mu’tadhid and Al-Muktafi).
Extraordinary Women of the Golden Age
These baths increased public hygiene and served as a way for the religious to perform ablutions as prescribed by Islam. Moreover, entry fees were usually so low that almost everyone could afford them.[39] In the center of the city lay the mosque, as well as headquarters for guards. The circular design of the city was a direct reflection of the traditional Persian Sasanian urban design. The Sasanian city of Gur in Fars, built 500 years before Baghdad, is nearly identical in its general circular design, radiating avenues, and the government buildings and temples at the center of the city. This style of urban planning contrasted with Ancient Greek and Roman urban planning, in which cities are designed as squares or rectangles with streets intersecting each other at right angles.
Suggested Books
Further, it was also linked to astronomical observations and other major experimental endeavors. From a built-up area of about 4 square miles (10 square km) at the beginning of the 20th century, Baghdad has expanded into a bustling metropolis with suburbs spreading north and south along the river and east and west onto the surrounding plains. Baghdad remained under Ottoman control until World War I, when on 11 March 1917 it was captured by British forces.
Character of the city
Some scholars, like the Banu Musa brothers, were famous for sponsoring translation works too and seeking to obtain precious ancient manuscripts. Here, teachers and students worked together to translate Greek, Persian, Syriac and Indian manuscripts. They studied the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Brahmagupta and many others. Then, they began building on and testing the knowledge of the greatest ancient scholars, resulting in the development of the scientific method of observation and experimentation.
Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi was also another historical figure that worked at the House of Wisdom. Al-Kindi is the most famous for being the first person to introduce Aristotle’s philosophy to the Arabic people. He fused Aristotle’s philosophy with Islamic theology which created an intellectual platform for philosophers and theologians to debate over 400 years. A fellow expert on Aristotle was an East African descent named Abu Uthman al-Jahith who was born in Basra around 776 but he spent most of his life in Baghdad. Al-Ma’mun employed al-Jahith as a personal tutor for his children, but he had to dismiss him because al-Jahith was “Goggled-Eyed”, i.e., he had wide, staring eyes which made him frightening to look at. He wrote Book of Animals, which discusses the way animals adapt to their surroundings, similarly to Aristotle’s History of Animals.
Al-Jahiz and the Book of Animals
Baghdad was a very prosperous and rich city, which allowed Al-Ma’mun to spare no expenses to purchase more works, including those from other countries. This recognition about who was the original founder of the center can become confusing and further details explaining the order of events might assist in this understanding. Al-Rashid was the one who gathered most of the different books, manuscripts and objects coming from his father and grandfather, and started the collection.
The Golden Age of Islam: Glimpses of Scientific Discovery and Invention (Khwarazm – Baghdad – Kufa) - Bibliotheca Alexandrina
The Golden Age of Islam: Glimpses of Scientific Discovery and Invention (Khwarazm – Baghdad – Kufa).
Posted: Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Its scholars were engaged in translating and preserving a vast array of scientific and philosophical texts. Despite its decline under caliph al-Mutawakkil, who moved away from the rationalist approach of his predecessors, the House of Wisdom remains a symbol of the golden age of Arab and Islamic learning. The House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, was a prominent Abbasid-era public academy and intellectual center in Baghdad, pivotal during the Islamic Golden Age.
Cures from the East
Al-Rashid's library, the direct predecessor to the House of Wisdom, was also known as Bayt al-Hikma or, as the historian Al-Qifti called it, Khizanat Kutub al-Hikma (Arabic for "Storehouse of the Books of Wisdom"). Its location, on the Tigris River about 330 miles (530 km) from the headwaters of the Persian Gulf, is in the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Baghdad is Iraq’s largest city and one of the most populous urban agglomerations of the Middle East. The city was founded in 762 as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs, and for the next 500 years it was the most significant cultural centre of Arab and Islamic civilization and one of the greatest cities of the world. A provincial capital under the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad regained prominence only when it became the capital of Iraq in 1920; over the next half century, the city grew prodigiously and took on all the characteristics of a modern metropolis. The existence of the House of Wisdom is presently disputed, as is its form and function.
The end of the center of knowledge
Bayt al-Hikmah served as an arm of the caliphal bureaucracy and appears to have been modeled on an earlier Sasanian practice. Persians in the early Islamic era, writing in Arabic, indicated that buyūt al-ḥikmah (literally “houses of wisdom”) followed in the fashion of Sasanian nobility. Middle Persian literature also refers directly to the storage of books pertaining to Zoroastrian religion, Sasanian dynastic history, and scientific knowledge for medical and administrative purposes. The storage space was called a ganj (“treasury”), a term equivalent to the Arabic khizānah.
This mass availability of paper enabled Muslims to commit vast amounts of translations and original research to paper; as a result, libraries and bookstores became a common sight in Baghdad, and soon spread to other Muslim cities. There were rivalry and competitions between these three libraries in obtaining the most magnificent books and manuscripts as well as in attracting the best scholars to work there. Such competitions were very beneficial to the advancement of scientific research and publications in the Islamic World. Some records stated that, in order to encourage translators and scholars to add works in Arabic to the library, al-Ma’mun would pay them the equivalent weight of each complete book in gold. Undoubtedly, much knowledge about the past would have been lost if not for the continuous works of translation conducted in the House of Wisdom.
As one of the world’s biggest and richest cities at the time, Baghdad had wealth that went far beyond money. For more than two centuries, it was home to the House of Wisdom, an academy of knowledge that attracted brains from far and wide. From mathematics and astronomy to zoology, the academy was a major centre of research, thought and debate in Muslim Civilisation. The House of Wisdom included a society of scientists and academics, a translation department, and a library that preserved the knowledge acquired by the Abbasids over the centuries.[18] Research and study of alchemy, which was later used to form the structure of modern chemistry, was also conducted there.
And while some people may seem content with the story as it stands, our view is that there exist countless mysteries, scientific anomalies and surprising artifacts that have yet to be discovered and explained. Compared to its surroundings, Baghdad was a major center for the spreading knowledge in the areas of Arts, Science and Philosophy. This created a path to facilitate the sharing of ideas and wealth necessary in order to invest in the continuous expansion of this institution. On February 13, 1258, the Mongols entered the city of the caliphs, starting a full week of pillage and destruction. Bagdad was long a thriving town along the National Old Trails Road and the famous Route 66.
During debate, scholars would discuss their fundamental Islamic beliefs and doctrines in an open intellectual atmosphere. Furthermore, he would often organize groups of sages from the Bayt al-Hikma into major research projects to satisfy his own intellectual needs. For example, he commissioned the mapping of the world, the confirmation of data from the Almagest and the deduction of the real size of the Earth (see section on the main activities of the House).
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