The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization

Front Cover
Bloomsbury, Feb 2, 2009 - History - 272 pages
For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward

and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the

time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief, not reason, should be

the guiding light of Christian thinking and partially as a result

Europeans lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming,

where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine,

and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its

own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars -

the Crusades.

Arab

culture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse of

intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of

Adelard of Bath who ventured to the Near East in search of the

scientific riches pouring out of cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whose

House of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when the

best European libraries housed, at most, several dozen. The Arabs could

measure the earth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West for

eight hundred years; they discovered algebra; were adept at astronomy

and navigation, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greek

scientific and philosophical texts including, importantly, those of

Aristotle; they made paper lenses and mirrors. Without them, and the

knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe

would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last

millennium.

In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan

Lyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, explores and

reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid

adventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid

the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance.

From inside the book

Contents

The Warriors of God
9
The Earth Is Like a Wheel
28
The House of Wisdom
55
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and

personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West.

After more than 20 years as an editor and foreign correspondent for

Reuters, he is now a researcher at the Global Terrorism Research Centre

and a PhD candidate in sociology of religion at Monash University in

Melbourne, Australia. He lives in Washington DC.






He has a BA with Honours in Russian and History from Wesleyan

university and was a Fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute

of Soviet Studies. He also studied at the Pushkin Institute of Russian

language in Moscow.

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