House of Wisdom

The triumphant Muslim era

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr,” said the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

We are living in a science and technology dominated era but the roots of our understanding of different fields like physics, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics, etc can be traced back to the era between 8th and 14th centuries when Muslims ruled the world. That was the time when the scientific revolution started in the Islamic world. Known as “the golden age of science,” I still remember my days as a student, the books, discussions, and lessons about the golden era of the Islamic world that started from Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. It was indeed a prodigious era of Islamic history. Arab Caliphs built and established Baghdad as the hub of the Abbasid Caliphate. Baghdad was centrally located between Europe and Asia and was an important area for trade and exchange of intellectual ideas.

Baghdad was a thriving capital of the Muslim world and the galaxy of scholars made it the jewel of the whole world. Baghdad was called the ‘’House of wisdom’’ which was an institution that also included a vast library which was the treasure trove for the whole world. House of Wisdom or “Bayat-al-Hikma” was established in the 8th century (786-809 AD) by the Caliph Harun-ur-Rashid who was larger than life character and later his son Caliph Mamun-ur-Rashid took a keen interest in collecting scientific works from across the world. Another famous library “Khazana –al-Hikma” (library of wisdom) had a good collection of old manuscripts and rare books collected by his father and grandfather. These books were about various subjects in arts and sciences in different languages. Three decades later, the collection grew so large that Caliph Mamun-ur-Rashid had to build an extension to the original building that housed different branches of all the knowledge of that time.

The first paper mills were established in Baghdad at the end of the eighth century; dyes, inks, glue, and bindings followed

For the next 500 years, alchemists, scientists, scholars, writers and copyists, painstakingly, learned to read, write and translate manuscripts that were originally in Persian or Pahlavi, Aramaic, Cyanic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Devanagari and other languages and expert linguistics converted them into Arabic in the “House of Wisdom.” Then the whole collection of books was circulated throughout the Arabic speaking world. Similarly, the scientific study of astrology, which may originally be based on mathematics texts in Sanskrit, was also given due consideration. The empire also needed Arabic versions of texts on geometry, engineering, and arithmetic; it clashed with the Chinese and learned the fine art of papermaking from the prisoners. The first paper mills were established in Baghdad at the end of the eighth century; dyes, inks, glue, and bindings followed. During and after the reign of Harun al-Rashid, the fabulous Caliph of the one thousand and one Arabian nights, Persian, Arab, Christian, and Jewish scholars began to translate and publish medical and mathematical texts from Greek and Syrian as well as from Persian and Indian scripts.

From east to west, books or scripts were collected; this process of education and gathering knowledge brought together all Muslims from different lands to create one of the greatest intellectual academies in history. All Muslim scientists were very clear in their mission as mentioned in the Holy Quran to gather knowledge of “Arz-o-Samawat.” Many non-Muslims worked with Muslim scholars and researchers. It was the time when the whole western world was living under the dark ages and that was the only place where the light of knowledge was present. Around this time, Geber or Jabir ibn Hayyan the alchemist composed the Kitab al-Kimiya, a systematic examination of the nature of matter, which in 1144 would be translated into Latin by Robert of Chester. Polymaths produced maps that showed the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic as open bodies of water, and tried to breach the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; they composed star charts and adopted the Hindu numerical system to deliver the numerals we now use every day. Omar Khayyam calculated the length of the solar year to 11 decimal places and composed in his native Persian a famous Treatise on Demonstration of Problems in Algebra. Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics pioneered the study of refraction and applied mathematics to a theory of vision, his successor Ibn Mu’adh used Euclidian geometry to calculate the height of the atmosphere at 52 miles (it is about 62 miles).

In the 10th century, in Andalusia, Al-Zahrawi devised the forceps, speculum and bone saw, published a 1,500 page illustrated encyclopedia of surgery; anesthetics in the form of sponges soaked with cannabis and opium, and even introduced surgical instruments. Ibn al-Nafis, in the 13th century, anticipated Harvey and described the pulmonary transit of the blood from the right side of the heart, via the lungs, to the left. Al-Khalili, who was a physicist, had a good command on Arabic and mathematical physics. Al-Biruni measured the height of a mountain and the angle of dip of the horizon to calculate the circumference of the planet. From Al-Razi to Ibn al-Nafis, to the 10th-century philosopher and physician Ibn Sina, Khalili examines the most influential medics of the Golden Age. He shows us his personal copy of Ibn Sina’s Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine), a comprehensive text which was the pinnacle of medical knowledge at that time. It was widely copied and translated, becoming a standard medical reference across the world for centuries. Andalusian cartographer Al-Idrisi produced this world map in the 12th century, which is regarded as the most elaborate and complete description of the world made at the time. Muslim poet, astronomer, musician, and engineer Abbas Ibn Firnas is called the Leonardo Da Vinci of the Islamic world. The 9th-century inventor was 65 when he made his famous attempt at controlled flight in a rudimentary hang-glider he built.

In the House of Wisdom, meetings of different scholars were held daily for the exchange of knowledge and many scholarships were given to the appreciable brains of that time. This period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the siege of Baghdad under Hulagu Khan in 1258 AD. The whole knowledge was drowned into the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the water turned black and red with the blood of scholars, philosophers, and scientists.  A few contemporary scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries. Alas! The Muslim world is, hitherto, unable to regain that prestige and glory.