Islamic Golden Age: Legacy Written Out Of History

Muslim rulers supported scientists, philosophers, and artists regardless of their backgrounds, built observatories, libraries, academies and hospitals during the Islamic Golden as they oversaw pivotal advancements in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy, creating a legacy in science and culture with lasting impact before before Europeans wrote Islamic civilization out of history

When Abu Jafar Abdullah al-Mansur, the second Abbasid Empire Caliph, finalised the site Nestorian Christian monks suggested for his new capital—Baghdad—a Jew and a Zoroastrian were among the astrologers he turned to for divination. He laid the first ceremonial brick for the city’s foundation only after the astrologers chose the auspicious date for it—July 30, 762. This openness and acceptance defined the Abbasids, making their period from the eighth to the 11th centuries a high point of the Islamic Golden Age and civilization.

Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian Arab Christian, called the era a brilliant period of cultural history, likening it to Italy’s High Renaissance. Mansur, who oversaw much of the progress during this era, studied Euclid’s geometric teachings and designed Baghdad as a tribute to the Greek mathematician. Rulers like him patronised the best of scientists, philosophers, theologians, poets, artisans, and craftsmen irrespective of their ethnic or religious backgrounds, helping Baghdad become the preeminent seat of scholarship, culture, and trade.

The Abbasid period coincided with the centrality of Baghdad to global trade and scholarship at the high noon of the Islamic Golden Age. Baghdad drew people from all over the world. Indians, Chinese, and Europeans were drawn to the city when the Abbasid Empire, one of the world’s greatest ever, stretched from modern-day Tunisia to the Indian subcontinent at its peak.

Leading From The Front

The Abbasids built the best hospitals, libraries, palaces, and educational institutions. They led from the front in pursuing one of their key interests—knowledge. Abu Jafar al-Mamun (786-833), the seventh Abbasid Caliph, mastered philosophy, theology, dialectic debate, and argument. He preferred that conquered adversaries surrender to him with books rather than gold. Mamun built Baghdad’s first astronomical observatory to check the accuracy of the often conflicting Greek, Persian, and Indian astronomical texts. He commissioned mathematicians, astronomers, and geographers to draw a world map and devise a fresh way of measuring the Earth’s circumference. In this sense, argues British theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili, Mamun’s ‘true legacy is that he was the first to fund big science.’

Pursuit Of Knowledge

The Arab pursuit of the lost Greek knowledge from Nestorian Christians intensified under the Abbasids. The translation of Indian, Syriac, Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chinese astronomers’ texts accelerated when Arabs mastered the paper-making technology from the Chinese captured after the 751 Battle of Talas (near Tashkent). The technology was effectively used to promote education. Baghdad became synonymous with high-quality paper, so much so that Byzantines referred to standard 29 inches by 43 inches paper sheets as Baghdadi sheets.

Abbasids prompted paper use by making it free in schools in the ninth century when over 100 paper-selling shops alone lined Baghdad’s Suq al-warraqin (Stationer’s Market). The market would become a hub of bibliographies and scribes in what is now Mutanabbi Street, a booklover’s paradise and a cultural and intellectual hub. The Umayyad Empire (661–750 CE) that preceded the Abbasids used paper effectively in the quest for knowledge by mainly acquiring and translating Greek manuscripts. The process gained momentum under the Abbasids.

In an article in the University of Western Ontario Medical Journal in 2008, Daren Lin noted medieval Islam was, as a result, ‘responsible for translating and preserving many medical works into Arabic.’ Lin wrote that this allowed an international community of scholars to improve on inherited knowledge.

Global Light Of Learning

Academic powerhouse Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) carried the global light of learning in Baghdad for centuries as the centerpiece of the Islamic Golden Age. Founded as a private collection for the fifth Abbasid Caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late eighth century, the academy epitomised the ‘vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression’ that thrived under the Abbasids. It welcomed philosophers, mathematicians, scholars, and doctors with open arms after it became a public academy.

Hunayn ibn Ishaq (830-910), a Christian polymath, was among the leading scholars associated with the academy. Many like him flocked to Baghdad during the Abbasid reign to escape persecution their Syrian Nestorian denomination faced in the eastern Roman Empire, where they were considered heretical. Multilingual translators such as Ishaq were in high demand in the Abbasid Empire for translating Greek and Syriac manuscripts into Arabic.

Ishaq went on to head Bayt al-Hikma. He translated Galen’s text and the Mathematical Treatise of Ptolemy, known in Arabic as Al-Megiste (the Great Book), or Almagest. The book is recognised as the great synthesis and ‘the culmination of mathematical astronomy of the ancient Greek world.’ It constituted the basis of mathematical astronomy during the Islamic Golden Age. Ishaq translated nearly all known Greek medical books into Arabic.

Bayt al-Hikma is believed to have been as big as the present-day British Library in London, the world’s biggest with up to 200 million catalogued items, and Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale. To conjure the great monument thus, wrote writer Adrienne Bernhard, ‘requires a leap of imagination (think the Citadel in Westeros or the library at Hogwarts).’ Bayt al-Hikma was a centre for the humanities and sciences. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature, and the arts were studied at the academy that seeded the ‘subsequent achievements of this golden age of science, from Uzbekistan in the east to Spain in the west.’

Arabic Translation Movement

Bayt al-Hikma powered an epochal cultural transformation as part of the Arabic Translation Movement from the ninth to the 11th century. The rendering of nearly all of the philosophical and scientific works accessible to the translators into Arabic was the movement’s defining consequence, making Islamic civilization one of the heirs of Graeco-Roman civilisation.’

Arabic translators transformed ancient Greek thought into ‘versatile intellectual tools for investigating nature’, especially medicine, and ensured their works were accessible to the reading public. Glen M Cooper, an expert on the Islamic Golden Age, studied Arabic and Greek texts to show how the language of Galen’s work was transformed during the translation. He wrote that the concepts ‘took up a home in a new linguistic and cultural milieu’ and ‘profoundly affected the development of empirical science.’

Cooper has argued today that the West is ultimately the heir of scientific developments that took place in the Arabic/Islamic world.’ He has highlighted Muslim contributions to the flourishing of science during the Islamic Golden Age:

Islamic civilization in its heyday had an imperial confidence that enabled them to take whatever they needed from the store of ancient Greek science and philosophy and use it for their own purposes, without regard for original contexts or intentions

Glen Cooper, Adjunct Philosophy Professor, Brigham Young University

Forgotten Legacy

Cooper wrote that medieval Europe felt ‘inferior to the then vastly more advanced Islamic world’. When Europeans became capable of original science, they rejected the Arabic legacy completely, and went so far as to write Islamic civilization out of their intellectual history, despite its staggering achievements. Al-Khalili writes that Ibn al-Haytham was the greatest physicist in the 2,000 years between Archimedes and Newton. Similarly, al-Bīrūni, the Persian polymath, is regarded as the Da Vinci of Islam. Al-Tūsi, a mathematician and astronomer, influenced Copernicus. Ibn Khaldūn is the acknowledged father of social science and economic theory.

But the likes of al-Haytham, al-Bīrūni, Al-Tūsi, and Ibn Khaldūn have not found their rightful place in the history of science as Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, or Einstein do, thanks to the continued traction of Eurocentrism, which posits Europeans as superior to others, including in their contribution to civilization. The racist, orientalist, and Islamophobia rejection of Muslim contributions to civilization has, as such, become a common anti-Muslim trope.