The Abbasid House of Wisdom

109 Pages·2022·3.871 MB·English

by  Ekmeleddin Ihsanolu

The Abbasid House of Wisdom
This volume examines the library of the Abbasid caliphs, known
as “The House of Wisdom” (“Bayt al-Hikma”), exploring how this
important institution has been misconceived by scholars.
This book places the palace library within the framework of the
multifaceted cultural and scientific activities in the era of the caliphs,
Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun, generally regarded as the Golden
Age of Islamic civilization. The author studies the first references to
the House of Wisdom in European sources and shows how misconcep-
tions arose because of incorrect translations of Arabic manuscripts
and also because of how scholars overlooked the historical context
of the library in ways that reflected their own cultural and national
ambitions.
The Abbasid House of Wisdom is perfect for scholars, students, and
the wider public interested in the scientific and cultural activities of the
Islamic Golden Age.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu is a Turkish scholar and diplomat and a pio-
neer of studies of Ottoman Science and the history of institutions of
learning. He was the founder and chair of the first Department of
the History of Science in Turkey at the University of Istanbul, the
IRCICA, the Turkish Society for the History of Science, and president
of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science from
2001 to 2005. He is editor and co-author of many volumes, including
18 volumes of History of Ottoman Science Literature, and laureate of
Alexandre Koyré Medal.

The Abbasid House of
Wisdom
Between Myth and Reality
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2023 Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu
The right of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-032-34745-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-34748-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32367-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003323679
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
Abbreviations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
PART I: Baghdad and the Rise of Interest in Foreign Sciences 1
A Revisiting the Abbasid House of Wisdom 8
B Short Note on the Proposed Origins of
the House of Wisdom 10
PART II: Creating A Myth 14
PART III: Dissecting the Myth 25
A Bayt al-Hikma and Translation Movement 28
B Bayt al-Hikma as a University 31
PART IV: What to Call a Library in Arabic? 34
PART V: What Was the Abbasid Caliph’s Library Called? 39
PART VI: Was the House of Science an Arena for Debates? 50
PART VII: What Was the Reality? 56
A The Origin of Book Collections 59
B Patronage Associated with the Library 60
C The Library and Greek Books 61
D Abbasid Caliphal Library and Persian
Royal Libraries 64
vi Contents
PART VIII: What Happened to the House of Wisdom? 68
PART IX: The Impact 72
PART X: Concluding Remarks 78
Bibliography 81
Index 89
Abbreviations
AN. I: Al-Nadim’s The Fihrist Al-Furqan Edition Vol: 1
AN. II: Al-Nadim’s The Fihrist Al-Furqan Edition Vol: 2
Dodge: Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of Al-Nadim:
A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture
Ibn Juljul: Ibn Juljul al-Andalusi, Tabaqat al-’Atibba
Al-Qifti: Al-Qifti’s Tarih al-Hukama
Rosenfeld-
Ihsanoglu: Rosenfeld, Boris A., Ihsanoglu,
Ekmeleddin, Mathematicians,
astronomers, and other scholars of
Islamic civilization and their works
(7th–19th c.), IRCICA Publication
EI2: Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd Edition
EI3: Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd Edition

Preface
The ninth-century Abbasid palace library known as the House of
Wisdom has attracted the attention of generations of scholars from the
end of the nineteenth century until today. The transformation of this
institution from a palace library into a nineteenth-century modern
European academy or fully-fledged modern-day university has had a
very interesting journey.
In this book, we shall take up the few accounts in the classical
Arabic sources and references in the biographies of the scholars
associated with this library and evaluate how they were turned into a
myth. Some innocent errors, the shifting of a word’s meaning during
translation, the imagination of those dealing with the subject, and also
emotional and nationalist aspirations paved the way for the birth of
this myth.
The early studies conducted by pioneering orientalists reveal that
the first examples of the confusion related to Bayt al-Hikma resulted
from the problems of editing Arabic manuscripts or translating
specific Arabic words and terms that had no standard equivalents in
the European languages. At the turn of the twentieth century Bayt
al-Hikma was transformed into an active institution of scientific pur-
suit including a library and observatory. As will be explained under
Part II, a PhD dissertation came to the conclusion that
the “House of Wisdom” appears to have been the university of
Baghdad with its distinguished performance, library and obser-
vatory … [it] may justly claim the honor of having been the first
university of both the medieval and the modern world; for it bore
the torch aloft long before Bologna, Paris, Prague, Oxford and
Cambridge …