Bayt al-Hikmah House of Wisdom, Islam, Time Period, Significance, & Baghdad

baghdad house of wisdom

However it was not the norm for the well-to-do people to leave their libraries open to public or to endow them for users. Libraries of The Nizamiyyah School were somewhat similar to the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) for the former had had many facilities to offer for students, including student's scholarships and endowment professorship. The Nizamiyyah School libraries and Cairo libraries were reported to have their own binders, administrators, librarians and even guards, they have shared almost all supported by endowments from governments, caliphs and kings. The example of the house of wisdom was remarkably followed and its influence appeared when other many public libraries have emerged all the way from Bokhara and Merv, in the heart of Asia, on the route to China through Basra and Damascus, Algiers and Cairo. The famous geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi who had visited Merv in the late 1220s, found more than twelve libraries there opened for public.

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baghdad house of wisdom

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi rescued about 400,000 manuscripts which he took to Maragheh before the siege. The House of Wisdom was much more than an academic center removed from the broader society. Scholars from the Bayt al-Hikma usually doubled as engineers and architects in major construction projects, kept accurate official calendars, and were public servants.

The House of Wisdom: One of the Greatest Libraries in History

The intellectual weaponry of the inquisition was supplied by the import of Hellenistic thought and the translation of Greek philosophy into Arabic, which al-Maʾmūn had begun sponsoring in the years prior to his conversion. The study has demonstrated that the house of wisdom was the leading library or in other words a leading Islamic university that the Abbasid age required. The most interesting thing about the naming of house of wisdom is that all labels signify the same meaning that Bayt al-Hikmah was the place of all knowledge and wisdom to be found. After the spread of Islamic faith, people were very attentive to gain knowledge and to participate in the life of thoughts, as a result libraries had emerged to reflect the loftiness of the intellectual life during the second, third until the seventh century AH (after hijrah) when libraries started to vanish. Libraries represented new reality for Muslims and new passion towards the human knowledge and education (Mohammad Ali, 1980).

Legacy and myth as an academy

Baghdad is known for its famous Mutanabbi street which is well established for bookselling and has often been referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. The annual International Book Fair in Baghdad is well known to the international publishing world as a promising publishing event in the region after years of instability. Not only did the Muslims in this era build observatories but soon after in Central Asia, they built a paper mill, which then led to the production of dyes, inks, glues, and even book bindings.

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The arches and the Unknown Soldier’s monument are all located on a parade ground complex in Zawrāʾ Park, near Al-Karkh. Under the Baʿathist regime this was the site of numerous rallies and nationalist parades. A cultural revival in the post-1958 period produced many modern monuments, the work of contemporary artists and sculptors. During the construction of the city, gates were placed at the entrances of the major roads into the city, in order to funnel traffic into the city. The Kufah Gate was on a major road that pilgrims took to Mecca, and the Anbar gate linked the bridges over the canals and Euphrates River to the city.

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Translation

What was now known as Bayt al-Hikmah (the House of Wisdom) soon attracted scholars from far and wide, and rapidly expanded to include a translation house, an observatory, and accommodations for visiting scholars. In eighth-century Baghdad, the Abbasid Caliphate took a momentous decision to found a library dedicated to preserving knowledge from across the world, known as Bayt al Hikmah, the House of Wisdom. At Ancient Origins, we believe that one of the most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings.

Books

In the House of Wisdom, translators, scientists, scribes, authors, men of letters, writers, authors, copyists and others used to meet every day for translation, reading, writing, scribing, discourse, dialogue and discussion. Many manuscripts and books in various scientific subjects and philosophical concepts and ideas, and in different languages were translated there. Over a thousand years ago, the city of Baghdad was a melting pot that attracted minds from far and wide, who drew on a vast collection of scientific, medical and philosophical books. Many libraries and intellectual centres gathered fame including the House of Wisdom, the library of Al-Nizamiyya school and that of Al-Mustansiriya school.This 13th-century manuscript of Maqamat al-Hariri shows the public library of Hulwan in Baghdad.

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In his book, al-Jahith argued that animals like dogs, foxes, and wolves must have descended from a common ancestor because they shared similar characteristics and features such as four legs, fur, tail, and so on. The most famous of all the Baghdad translators, Hunayn ibn Ishāq, was born in the ancient Christian city of Hira and never converted to Islam. He would spend many years travelling around the world in his search for Greek manuscripts. It is the medical work of the physician Galen that is his most important legacy, for not only did it open up the Islamic world to this great treasure, in many cases it is only via these Arabic translations that much of Galen's work reaches us today. For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict.

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baghdad house of wisdom

The Kufa Gate to the southwest and the Basra Gate to the southeast opened onto the Sarat canal – a key part of the network of waterways that drained the waters of the Euphrates into the Tigris. The Sham (Syrian) Gate to the northwest led to the main road on to Anbar, and across the desert to Syria. To the northeast the Khorasan Gate lay close to the Tigris, leading to the bridge of boats across it.

The house wisdom was a center of knowledge and education, it was a rival of the Constantinople's if it did not exceed it. It was the model for other libraries and similar institutions throughout the soils of Islamic civilization. When the Caliphs have had a huge collection of books and a considerable number of translations, maps, manuscripts, etc. they had to construct an appropriate place for these collections, historians have a consent that the caliphs' most desirable location for the library was the palace itself.

The older core of the city, a rectangle about 2 miles (3 km) long and 1 mile (1.6 km) wide, is located on the east bank. Its length extends between two former city gates, Al-Muʿaẓẓam Gate, now Al-Muʿaẓẓam Square, in the north and Al-Sharqī Gate, now Taḥrīr Square, in the south. From the Tigris the rectangle runs eastward to the inner bund, or dike, built by the Ottoman governor Nāẓim Pasha in 1910.

Al-Karkh in particular was the centre of Baʿathist political offices and of regime security services. Planned middle-class neighbourhoods are located between the bund and the Army Canal, which connects the Tigris and Diyālā rivers. Beyond the canal, at the eastern edge of the city, is a sprawling low-income district of some two million rural Shiʿi migrants known alternately as Al-Thawrah (“Revolution”) quarter or, between 1982 and 2003, as Saddam City. Modern manufacturing began in the 1920s and ’30s, spurred by the Law for the Encouragement of Industry in 1929. Early factory production centred on textiles (cotton ginning, spinning, and weaving), food processing, brick making, and cigarettes.

The paper shall follow a historical method which comprises some guidelines by which the authors utilize primary sources to conduct a historical account. Law is a critical study for the Muslim people, because of the understanding of justice on Earth as applied to God.[8] The Hanafi today is the largest school of legal thought in the Muslim world, and it was a draw for scholars to the city of Baghdad. Another school was the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which focused on translating texts from various languages into Arabic. Under the sponsorship of caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813 – 833), economic support of the House of Wisdom and scholarship in general was greatly increased. Indeed, Ptolemy’s Almagest was claimed as a condition for peace by al-Ma’mun after a war between the Abbasids and the Byzantine Empire.

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