The House of Wisdom (10 page)

Muslim conquest and empire building also restored ancient ties among historic centers of civilization across a huge landmass. This created an invaluable melting pot for intellectual traditions that had been forcibly kept apart for centuries by political divisions: Hellenistic learning that evolved in Greece and, later, Alexandria, on the one hand, and Sumerian, Persian, and Indian wisdom, on the other.
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Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, the star-worshipping Sabeans, and assorted other pagans were all able to exchange ideas and teachings. Under Abd al-Rahman, the surviving Umayyad prince, and his successors, this same intellectual tradition put down deep roots in Muslim Spain. There, its guardians would one day hand over priceless gifts to the army of Latin scholars who, fired by the example of Adelard of Bath, set off on their own hunt for the
studia Arabum
.

Not all the consequences of Islam’s great expansive push were as grand, perhaps, as the confluence of some of the world’s great intellectual traditions, but they proved at least as vital. One such was the acquisition of the wondrous Chinese technology of paper, an enormous aid to the intellectual enterprise just beginning to take shape at the Abbasid court. Arab tradition tells us that a prisoner of war from the battle of Talas, where in 751 Muslim forces decisively defeated those of the Tang dynasty for control of Turkic western China, brought the art of papermaking to the Central Asian city of Samarkand. The Chinese prisoner taught his captors how to produce paper from linen and hemp. The story itself is most likely apocryphal, but its general account of the flow of paper technology from China and Central Asia to the Arabs still rings true.

The result was a relatively inexpensive, resilient, and convenient medium for recording information of all kinds—from tax rolls to love poems, from philosophical tracts to star tables. Samarkand soon became the leading Muslim center of papermaking. The art also flourished in Syria, Yemen, North Africa, and the Spanish city of Játiva, which specialized in the production of heavy, glazed sheets. The first mention of a paper factory in Baghdad dates to 795, and the Abbasid capital later boasted a fine stationers’ bazaar, the Suq al-Warraqin, featuring hundreds of stalls with high-quality wares. In fact, Baghdad paper was highly prized around the region, and some Byzantine Greek sources even refer to paper as
bagdatixon
, directly associating the product with the city on the Tigris.
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Christian Europe, meanwhile, relied on the painstaking task of reproducing its books and maps on animal skins that had been stretched, scraped clean, and then dried. The resulting parchment was unwieldy, difficult to work with and store, and expensive to make. Paper was none of these, and its ready availability and ease of use and transport accelerated the production and spread of manuscripts throughout the Abbasid Empire and beyond. This in turn allowed the rapid and efficient interchange of ideas and knowledge, prompting demand for further scholarly works, research, and writings. Papermaking also fostered a profound culture of the book among the Arabs. Knowledge and scholarship had always been prized by Muslim society. Now, book bazaars and specialty shops became a regular feature of urban life. Book production, bookbinding, and transcription services all flourished alongside writing, research, and translation. The work of individual calligraphers was prized by discerning buyers, while many of the best copyists also served as editors or authors in their own right. Books were costly to produce, and rare editions were coveted by both intellectuals and the rich and powerful. Price gouging and forgery were not unknown hazards for the unwary, while authors at times found themselves at the mercy of scribes holding out for more money before handing over their completed manuscripts.

Patronage among the elite for authors and their books soon led to the creation of great libraries, some of which were open to the public and featured reading rooms and copying materials. In Damascus, the Umayyads had created the first Arab library, collecting Greek and Christian works on alchemy, medicine, and other sciences. The Fatimid sultans of Egypt were also great collectors of books and patrons of affiliated academies to propagate their Shi’ite beliefs. By the late tenth century, the second Fatimid ruler, al-Aziz, maintained forty rooms filled with books, with the so-called ancient sciences represented in eighteen thousand volumes.
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When Baghdad’s al-Mustansiriya madrassa, or Islamic school, was founded in 1234, its initial endowment was said to have included eighty thousand books donated from the personal library of the caliph.
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Even private collections were vast, often numbering in the tens of thousands of volumes. These were commonly left as charitable bequests on the death of the owner to mosques, shrines, or schools, where they could be properly looked after and made available to scholarly readers.
¹⁰

Like many other aspects of Muslim public life, much of the Arab book industry revolved around the mosque. Lectures, debates, and discussions on a wide range of religious, scientific, and philosophical issues of the day were common at these houses of worship, which also served as centers of judicial proceedings. According to the fourteenth-century world traveler and writer Ibn Battuta, the Damascus booksellers’ market was close to the great Umayyad Mosque; in addition to books, the merchants there sold all the tools of the literary trade, from inks to reed pens to fine paper. However, the book dealers of Baghdad were barred from setting up shop inside the austere walls of the Round City and instead took up residence in a prestigious district to the southwest.
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Caliph al-Mansur’s decision to forsake Arab-dominated Damascus and base his new capital in Mesopotamia ratified fundamental changes at the heart of the Muslim world. Already, the tribal organization of traditional Arab society was giving way to a new, Islamic culture in which the individual and his family, not the wider clan, were the primary social and political actors. This opened the way for the rise of the recognizably modern city, in which unrelated, ethnically diverse citizens interact with one another under accepted codes of legal and personal conduct.
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Al-Mansur’s ringed city of Baghdad, with its two sets of walls, would represent a radical new beginning for the world of Islam.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 …”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.