Jim Al-Khalili — The House Of Wisdom
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Scornful dogma
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Withering era
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Silence in sight
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Treasures of cognition
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Have ceased to be
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Destructive minds
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Turning life to ashes
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Relentlessly
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Despotic hands on recollection
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Restraining man from recollection
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II. |
WANDERING TIMES
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Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing;
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knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance
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Ibid
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Wandering times
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Crawling thoughts abandoned at dusk
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Thinker’s dream
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Lost in doubts
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Streams of lore
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Concealing in drought
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Wandering times
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Scripted thoughts emerging at dawn
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Scholars' dream
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Starts to blink
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Streams of lore
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Submerging with ink
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Glimpse of light in sight
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Dazzling minds are turning the page
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On darker times
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III. |
WITHIN THE ROUNDED WALLS
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Like the city of Alexandria, founded a thousand years earlier by Alexander the
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Great, Baghdad grew from nothing to become the world’s largest city just fifty
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years after the first brick was laid. |
And just like Alexandria, it became a
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centre for culture, scholarship and enlightenment that attracted the world’s
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greatest minds
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Ibid
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Nightfall unfurls its sky
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Whispers of waves… mesmerised
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Nightfall’s canvas unfolds
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Frame in time, the stars have told
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Mighty circle of stone
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Standing strong, on the sands, alone
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Rounded walls
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Once foreseen
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Standing tall
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To the thinker’s realm
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All roads shall lead
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IV. |
PEARLS OF TRANSLATION
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(…) the success of a spectacularly massive translation movement — a process
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that lasted for two centuries — during which much of the wisdom of the earlier
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civilisations of the Greeks, Persians and Indians was translated into Arabic (.
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.) The translation movement owes its beginnings to the appeal of Persian
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culture (…) along with the development of paper-making technology they have
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learned from the Chinese. |
But once it began, this obsession with translating
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ancient texts sparked the beginning of a golden age of scientific progress (…
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) By the mid-ninth century it had evolved into a new tradition of original
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scientific and philosophical scholarship that further fuelled the demand for
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more translations, both in quantity and quality
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Ibid
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Enthralling thirst for ideas
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Led by translation’s quill
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Searching the world with no fear
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Paving the way for curious minds
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Roaming the land for ideas
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Led by translator’s will
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Reading the world becomes clear
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Paving the way for golden times
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V. COMPENDIUMS
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He (Al-Ma'mun) was well aware of the treasures to be found in the ancient texts
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of the Greek philosophers… He would send emissaries great distances to get
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hold of these scientific texts. |
Often, foreign rulers defeated in battle would
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required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their
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libraries rather than in gold. |
Al-Ma'mun was almost fanatical in his desire to
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collect all the world’s books under one roof, translate them into Arabic and
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have his scholars study them. |
The institution he created to realize his dream
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epitomizes more than anything else the blossoming of the scientific golden age.
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It became known throughout the world as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma)(…
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) By the middle of the ninth century the House of Wisdom would have become the
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largest repository of books in the world
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Ibid
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Word by word
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Scribing compendiums
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Page by page
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Crafting compendiums
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Book by book
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Gathering compendiums
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Library filled with compendiums
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Embracing texts from the past
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Hints of knowledge are grasped
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Concepts in fragments, scholars, will craft
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Sheltered on paper, ideas shall last
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VI. |
STRANDED MINDS
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ON THE SHORES OF DOUBT
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By the end of the tenth century the translation movement was coming to an end,
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the Abbasid Empire was crumbling, less-enlightened caliphs were cracking down
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on freedom of speech and rationalist enquiry, and the great names associated
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with the House of Wisdom were already a distant memory. |
But to infer from this
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that the golden age of Arabic science was on the wane would be utterly wrong,
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for the best was yet to come (…) It was during the second half of the tenth
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century that we saw the three most outstanding thinkers in the history of Islam |
arriving on the scene
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Ibid
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(Instrumental)
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VII. |
BESIEGED
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It was in 1258 that the accomplishments of the House of Wisdom and the Islamic
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Golden Age were brought to a cruel halt. |
During the Mongol invasion of Baghdad
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(…) the mosques, libraries, homes and hospitals of the great city were all
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destroyed. |
The family of the last Abbasid Caliph Al-Musta'sim, as well as
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thousands of the city inhabitants, were slaughtered, and the extensive
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collection of books and manuscripts at the House of Wisdom were thrown in the
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Tigris. |
It is said that for days afterwards the river ran black with the ink of
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books and red with the blood of scholars. |
It was a tragic ending for one of the
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most advanced, diverse and progressive cities of the age, and an ending from
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which it would take Baghdad centuries to recover
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Isabella Bengoechea — Iraq’s Golden Age: The Rise and Fall of the House of
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Wisdom
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Winds of dogma
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Have reached the rounded walls
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The flame of lore has been blown
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Arrows will, soon, be thrown
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Darkened era
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Will fill the land and souls
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As life turns black as ink
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A chapter starts to sink
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Rising storm from the East
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Circle of archers, intruding beast
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Trampled furrows of memory
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Seeds of invasion sowed by enemies
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Blindly burning to decimate
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Pages to ashes… Cognition's fate
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Drowned in despotic waters
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Treasures from minds are lost forever
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Stream of lore destroyed at last
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Running, for days, from red to black
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Scornful dogma
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Withering era |