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.13
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.14 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.15 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.16 Skilled craftsmen, merchants, and other worldly folk rushed in to meet the demands of the city elite. Baghdad then spread along the banks of the Tigris River, its rapid growth and unimaginable wealth fueled by the long reach of its economic muscle, military might, and imperial power. Syrian glassware, Indian dyes and spices, silks and other luxury goods from China and Persia, gold from Africa, and slaves from Central Asia all passed through its markets and enriched its traders.
Nothing survives today of early Abbasid Baghdad, but chronicles, archaeological evidence, and extant examples from the period elsewhere have provided enough hints of the sumptuous lifestyles and domestic surroundings of the rich and powerful. In a tradition that remains throughout much of the Middle East today, the buildings were generally nondescript on the outside, the pedestrian exteriors providing no real indiction of the riches couched within. Internal walls, however, were often covered in stucco that could be worked into rich patterns and designs, festooned with fine textiles and imported wood veneer, or decorated with gold leaf and the rich blue tones of lapis lazuli. Floors were fashioned from ceramic tiles or marble, or decorated with mosaics. Pitchers and goblets were made of glass, while utensils, at least in the case of the caliph, were shaped from gold or silver.17
Al-Yaqubi, writing about one hundred years after al-Mansur, offers a breathless description of life in the City of Peace the caliph left behind: “I mention Baghdad first of all because it is the heart of Iraq, and, with no equal on earth either in the Orient or the Occident, it is the most extensive city in area, in importance, in prosperity, in abundance of water, and in healthful climate …”18 Warming to his subject, he meticulously enumerates the residents’ many noble attributes: “No one is better educated than their scholars, better informed than their authorities in tradition, more solid in their syntax than their grammarians, more supple than their singers, more certain than their Koran readers, more expert than their physicians, more competent than their calligraphers, more clear than their logicians, more zealous than their ascetics, better jurists than their magistrates, more eloquent than their preachers …”
Al-Yaqubi is less impressed with the morals of some of the capital’s more colorful residents, bemoaning that never were “voluptuaries” more dissolute.19 And in fact tales of pleasure, drunken revels, and conspicuous consumption in general among the city’s upper crust captured the attention of the literary class. Al-Shabushti’s The Book of Convents, for example, provides a guided tour of Baghdad’s best taverns, many based in local Christian religious establishments. Other writers cataloged the ornate modes of dress, ostentatious furnishings, and other points of style among the well-to-do, while erotic poetry flourished.
Ensconced behind the double brick walls and fortified gates of his new city on the western banks of the Tigris, the energetic al-Mansur set out to turn his disparate dominions into a scientific superpower and to secure the future of the Abbasids by associating their new state with the great classical traditions that had come before them. But first, he had to acknowledge the rising power and influence of the Persians, who played a large role in the success of the rebellion against the Umayyads. According to one account, the caliph publicly celebrated these ardent backers as “the mainstay of our dynasty.”20 Basing his capital in the Persian-speaking heartland, not far from the former imperial capitals of Ctesiphon and Babylon, was a good start. The caliph also invoked key elements of Zoroastrian imperial culture, including its elaborate protocol and heavy reliance on astrology. This affinity for Persian astrology was particularly important, for it suggested that the Abbasids were the ordained heirs to the great Iranian legacy and that their rise was sanctioned by the heavens.21 And it helped tie astrology to the other emerging scientific disciplines, a tradition the West later found irresistible.
Finally, al-Mansur sought to link the triumphs of classical wisdom, especially those of the Greeks, to the achievements of the ancient Persians. According to the Abbasid ideologues, Alexander’s defeat of Darius III and his conquest of Persia in the fourth century B.C. had seen the wholesale transfer of Iranian learning westward, where it provided the kernel of later Greek advances.22 Whatever its merits, this Abbasid tradition proved remarkably long-lived. Six hundred years later, the great Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun issued a similar verdict: “Among the Persians, intellectual sciences played a large and important role, since the Persian dynasties were powerful and ruled without interruption. The intellectual sciences are said to have come to the Greeks from the Persians, when Alexander killed Darius and gained control of the Achaemenid Empire. At that time, he appropriated the books and sciences of the Persians.”23
Al-Mansur’s young court was virtually surrounded by established centers of Christian, Persian, and pagan learning, but he had to go looking for one important element of what might be called Abbasid intellectual policy. At the caliph’s invitation, an Indian scholarly delegation skilled in the movements of the stars arrived in Baghdad bearing Hindu scientific texts, an important jumping-off point for early Arab astronomy and mathematics. The Hindu sages understood how to solve equations based on the trigonometric sine function and had devised ingenious ways to predict eclipses. The caliph ordered an official translation of the Hindu material into Arabic, part of an increasingly organized effort to absorb Persian and Indian knowledge. This same approach, accompanied by much original research, would soon be applied with great effect to the third important strand of ancient learning, that of the Greeks.
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.”24 Another chronicler notes that the cali
ph 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.”25
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.26 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.”27
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.28 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.29 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.30 Another eminent intellectual noted that the greatest danger to scholars was the occasional “nuisance of corrupt and wicked highway robbers.”31 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.32 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.33
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.34
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 re
ligious 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.35 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.
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