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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The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present Review

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The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present ReviewI stumbled upon this book for one of my early research papers about Islam, and I was amazed. This is truly an academically honest masterpiece. It covers everything from the political system created in Islam right after Muhammad's death to the contemporary Salafi movement including the work of Maududi, Qutb, and Khomeini. It also references common hadiths, fikh, and the Sira, which is a breath of freash air because recently everybody believes they are an Islamic scholar but they've only remotely studied books about the Qur'an (not even the Qur'an itself, seriously it's frustrating in academia).
The bottom line is if you're a student (informal or formal) of Middle Eastern and Islamic politics you need this book.The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present OverviewThis book provides a complete history of Islamic political thought from early Islam (c.622-661) to the present.This comprehensive overview describes and interprets all schools of Islamic political thought, their origins, inter-connections and meaning. It examines the Qur'an, the early Caliphate, classical Islamic philosophy, and the political culture of the Ottoman and other empires. Major thinkers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Ibn Taymiyya are covered as well as numerous lesser authors, and Ibn Khaldun is presented as one of the most original political theorists ever. It draws on a wide range of sources including writings on religion, law, philosophy and statecraft expressed in treatises, handbooks and political rhetoric.The new edition analyses the connections between religion and politics, covering the most recent developments in Islamic political thought and the current historical scholarship. It ends with a critical survey of reformism (or modernism) and Islamism (or fundamentalism) from the late nineteenth century up to the present day. In this, the only book to cover the whole of Islamic political thought, past and present. Key Features of the Second Edition:-Revised and updated throughout-A new final section on Islam and the West-New bibliographies of primary and secondary sources

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Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (Arabic Thought & Culture) Review

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Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (Arabic Thought & Culture) ReviewA superb review of the subject. I thought I knew a bit about the translation movement into Arabic through Syriac, but Gutas showed me I knew nothing almost. Very deeply researched, by an editor of Brill's Mediaeval Greek and Arabic lexicon. There can be few scholars with such a grasp of Greek-Arabic translation, or of Arabic translations of Greek works. He demolishes some old myths - the idea that Ma'mun's "Bait al-Hikma" in Baghdad was anything other than a library is shown to be baseless speculation, for example - and provides us with a view of the translators that I'd have thought impossible before. The analysis of what was translated was most interesting.
Who knows who "Jake", "Kevin" and the anonomous reader are! I see they - or he, as I suspect - have only done a single review apiece. If "they" are really disappointed by the work, it would be helpful if "they" did a fuller review of the book to let us what in "their" view the book's weaknesses are, supported by the text, if possible. I suspect however that it's Professor Gutas' public protests about the damage to Iraq's cultural heritage resulting from the war in Iraq that's "their" issue.
For more general reading on the adoption of parts of the Classical tradition by the Arabic-speaking world, I can recommend Franz Rosenthal's reader on the subject, "The Classical Heritage in Islam". His introduction is excellent and the texts well-chosen.
I thought the Gutas book interesting enough, by the way, to give a copy to my mediaevalist sister-in-law as a present.Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (Arabic Thought & Culture) OverviewFrom the middle of the eighth century to the tenth century, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, botany and medicine, that were not available throughout the eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East, were translated into Arabic.Greek Thought, Arabic Culture explores the major social, political and ideological factors that occasioned the unprecedented translation movement from Greek into Arabic in Baghdad, the newly founded capital of the Arab dynasty of the 'Abbasids', during the first two centuries of their rule. Dimitri Gutas draws upon the preceding historical and philological scholarship in Greco-Arabic studies and the study of medieval translations of secular Greek works into Arabic and analyses the social and historical reasons for this phenomenon.Dimitri Gutas provides a stimulating, erudite and well-documented survey of this key movement in the transmission of ancient Greek culture to the Middle Ages.

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