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(MJ & AS, pp. 254 & 255; NM, p. 129) Such cities included Mosul, Basra, Shiraz, Rayy, etc. (Encycl. of Islam). The languages which were spoken, read and written there were Arabic (as the lingua franca), Farsi, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek and Latin; also occasionally Sanskrit, which was used to translate the old Indian manuscripts in astronomy and mathematics. The House of Wisdom was also referred to as Al-Hikma Bookstore (Khizanat Al-Hikma), and The House of Wisdom Bookstore of Al-Ma’moun (Khizanat Dar Al-Kutub Al-Ma’mouniya). It should be pointed out that the Arabic term Khizanat Kutub, meaning literally a bookstore, is an old name meaning a present day library. Foreseeing the impending tragedy, the Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi ( ) saved several thousand manuscripts by moving them to the Maragheh Observatory in northwestern Iran, built by Mongol ruler Hulagu in 1259. The Assyrian scholar Yahya Ibn al-Batriq ( ) translated all the major works of the ancient Greek physicians, including Galen and Hippocrates.
Greek Mythology
Beginning in the 1950s, the government used increased oil revenues to develop manufacturing industries. Some of the important cultural institutions in the city include the National Theater, which was looted during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but efforts are underway to restore the theater.[134] The live theater industry received a boost during the 1990s, when UN sanctions limited the import of foreign films. As many as 30 movie theaters were reported to have been converted to live stages, producing a wide range of comedies and dramatic productions.[135] Institutions offering cultural education in Baghdad include The Music and Ballet School of Baghdad and the Institute of Fine Arts Baghdad. The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra is a government funded symphony orchestra in Baghdad. The INSO plays primarily classical European music, as well as original compositions based on Iraqi and Arab instruments and music. Baghdad is also home to a number of museums which housed artifacts and relics of ancient civilization; many of these were stolen, and the museums looted, during the widespread chaos immediately after United States forces entered the city.
Welcome to the New IslamiCity
The architecture of the city ranges from traditional two- or three-story brick houses to modern steel, glass, and concrete structures. The traditional Baghdad house, usually located on a crowded narrow street, has latticed windows and an open inner courtyard; a few fine specimens from the late Ottoman period are tucked away in traditional quarters of Al-Karkh, Ruṣāfah, and Al-Kāẓimiyyah. The typical modern middle-class dwelling is built of brick and mortar and has a garden and wall. At this point Baghdad was ruled by the Il-Khanids, part of the Mongolian Empire centered in Persia.
Tradition of Learning
Assassin’s Creed Mirage: What to know about the ‘Golden Age’ of Baghdad - Al Jazeera English
Assassin’s Creed Mirage: What to know about the ‘Golden Age’ of Baghdad.
Posted: Thu, 05 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Rashīd Street in downtown Baghdad is the heart of this area and contains the city’s financial district, many government buildings, and the copper, textile, and gold bazaars. South of Rashīd Street a commercial area with shops, cinemas, and business offices has spread along Saʿdūn Street. Parallel to Saʿdūn, Abū Nuwās Street on the riverfront was once the city’s showpiece and—as befits a thoroughfare named for a poet known for his libidinous verse—its entertainment centre. During the 1990s the street lost much of its old glamour, and its cafes, restaurants, and luxury hotels either closed or suffered from a loss of business.
Cures from the East
The Sabian Thābit ibn Qurra (826–901) also translated great works by Apollonius, Archimedes, Euclid and Ptolemy. Translations of this era were superior to earlier ones, since the new Abbasid scientific tradition required better and better translations, and the emphasis was many times put in incorporating new ideas to the ancient works being translated. By the second half of the ninth century al-Ma’mun’s Bayt al-Hikma was the greatest repository of books in the world and had become one of the greatest hubs of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages, attracting the most brilliant Arab and Persian minds. The House of Wisdom eventually acquired a reputation as a center of learning, although universities as we know them did not yet exist at this time — knowledge was transmitted directly from teacher to student, without any institutional surrounding. Maktabs soon began to develop in the city from the 9th century on, and in the 11th century, Nizam al-Mulk founded the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, one of the first institutions of higher education in Iraq.
Machines from the East: Mechanical innovations from Muslim Civilisation
Baghdad played a major part in the propagation and spread of knowledge in the Arts and in the Sciences and in the development of their material wealth. Al-Ma’moun took after his father Al-Rashid in establishing many higher institutes, observatories, and factories for textiles. It is said that the number of higher institutes during his reign reached 332, and they were packed with students pursuing various subjects in the Arts and in the Sciences.(ref). These were built in according to the finest style, and most of them were in mosques and monumental buildings (Mashahid); this figure excludes the equivalent of primary schools (Katateeb) not including schools. In 1258, the Mongol army ransacked the city of Baghdad and threw such a great number of manuscripts into the river Tigris that the waters ran black with ink. One popular narrative holds that the impetus behind the translation movement was because of Al-Mamun’s encounter with Aristotle in a dream.
Physicians from a lost history
There are many religious centers distributed around the city including mosques, churches and Mashkhannas cultic huts. All these men are no less worthy of mention in the history of science than Aristotle, Galileo, Newton or Einstein. People from all over the Muslim civilisation flocked to the House of Wisdom – both male and female of many faiths and ethnicities.
He also compiled the universal Kitab Sirr al-Srar, known in the West as the Secretum Secretorum (Secret of Secrets). The doctor Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (1405–68), accompanied by his son Ishaq ibn Hunayn and his nephew Hubaysh, was one of the most important translators of Greek medical and scientific treatises. But the great humanist also advanced the frontiers of knowledge by commissioning the translation of his trove of literary and scientific works into Arabic. Before that decision, the works were exclusively reserved for court scholars, however now the library could be accessed by general public. Inspired by the ancient Museum of Alexandria (Mouseion), the project was envisaged during the reign of the Caliph Al Mansur ( ) as a simple repository of books, the Khizanat al-Hikmah (Library of Wisdom), but it would expand, under the rule of Harun al-Rashid ( ), into a flourishing academic centre. Bayt al-Hikmah, royal library maintained by the Abbasid caliphs during their reign in Baghdad.
Greco-Arabic translation movement
The Nezamiyeh was founded by the Persian Nizam al-Mulk, who was vizier of two early Seljuk sultans.[60] It continued to operate even after the coming of the Mongols in 1258. The Mustansiriyah madrasa, which owned an exceedingly rich library, was founded by Al-Mustansir, the second last Abbasid caliph, who died in 1242.[60] This would prove to be the last great library built by the caliphs of Baghdad. In 750, the Abbasid dynasty replaced the Umayyad as the ruling dynasty of the Islamic Empire, and, in 762, the caliph al-Mansur (r. 754 – 775) built Baghdad and made it his capital, instead of Damascus. Baghdad’s location and cosmopolitan population made the perfect location for a stable commercial and intellectual center. The Abbasid dynasty had a strong Persian bent, and adopted many practices from the Sassanian Empire – among those, that of translating foreign works, except that now texts were translated into Arabic.
The data provided by Ptolemy was meticulously checked and revised by a highly capable group of geographers, mathematicians and astronomers. Al-Mamun also organized research on the circumference of the Earth and commissioned a geographic project that would result in one of the most detailed world-maps of the time. If this backward projection of our idea of a research institution works for the Library of Alexandria, then it is just as valid in the case of Baghdad's House of Wisdom.
Works translated at the House of Wisdom include Aristotle’s books Rhetoric, Poetics, Metaphysics, Categories and On the Soul, as well as Plato’s Republic, Laws and Timaeus. The philosopher apparently urged the caliph to preserve the knowledge of ancient civilisations by gathering classical literature and sponsoring translation. The second was to dispatch missions to emperors and other rulers throughout the empire to facilitate the gathering of valuable manuscripts, such as the 2nd-century astronomical treatise by the Greek scholar, Ptolemy, whose English name, Almagest, derives from its later Arabic translation.
In the Abbasid Empire, many foreign works were translated into Arabic from Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian and Syriac. The Translation Movement gained great momentum during the reign of caliph al-Rashid, who, like his predecessor, was personally interested in scholarship and poetry. Originally the texts concerned mainly medicine, mathematics and astronomy; but, other disciplines, especially philosophy, soon followed. Al-Rashid’s library, 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”). Originally the texts concerned mainly medicine, mathematics and astronomy but other disciplines, especially philosophy, soon followed.
His reign saw the establishment of the first astronomical observatories in Baghdad and major research projects. Despite the sundry vicissitudes visited on the city in its history, Baghdad has maintained a mystique and allure equaled by few of the world’s cities. Many Muslims revere it as the seat of the last legitimate caliphate and others as the cosmopolitan centre of the Arab and Islamic worlds when they were at the height of their grandeur. Still others—including many in the West—know it primarily through print and film as the scene of many tales of The Thousand and One Nights adventures and other accounts found in a rich tradition of Middle Eastern storytelling.
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