The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization Review

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The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization ReviewAn excellent story teller, Lyons uses the curiosity, conversations and travels of Adelard of Bath to provide a historic context for Arabic influence on European thought. Traveling to the east from his home in England's West Country, Adelard hoped to increase his knowledge by learning the teachings of the Arabs. As the story of the wandering Adelard unfolds, the reader gleans some knowledge of the dominant beliefs of the middle ages, the philosophical debates of the day, of Church ideology in shaping views of the Muslim world, the crusaders, and the incorporation of Arab innovations by some of the Christian conquerors. Adelard returns home after seven years of travel with knowledge gained about Euclidean geometry, alchemy, and astrology. His publication of "On the Use of the Astrolabe" provides the west with an aid to timekeeping, navigation and measurement of the physical world as well as an introduction to astronomy.
One of the great centers of knowledge dissemination was the House of Wisdom. Located in Baghdad, it housed a library and translation/research center, and brought together from afar scholars as well as a very large collection of Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek texts of science and philosophy which became the bases of further advances in arithmetic, astronomy, medicine. For example, the Hindu "9 number system plus zero", which we use today, was explicated by Al-Khwarizmi, who later wrote "The Book of Restoring and Balancing", a study in algebra.
In like manner, Cordoba in Muslim Spain became an important center for the dissemination of knowledge. Bordering directly on Christian Europe, ideas, poetry, fashions, and foodstuffs flowed from east to west. In al-Andalus, the innovations included sophisticated agronomy and engineering to ensure successful crops of fruits and foods previously unknown in a region and climate quite different from India and Persia. Eventually translators from European countries followed Adelard in pursuing Arab knowledge, returning with their translations and original works to build or enhance universities in Bologna, Paris and Oxford.
This book is very accessible. It is written in so lively a prose the readers will hear Pope Urban II urging his crusaders to overcome the infidel Muslims and later will envision the scholars working together in translating ancient texts!
The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization OverviewFor centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch. There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as keeping alive the works of Plato and Aristotle. When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad's great library, The House of Wisdom, housed four hundred thousand. Jonathan Lyons shows just how much "Western" ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.

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