From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

So great during this brilliant literary period was the love of learning that there were in Bagdad more than a hundred booksellers. How many of our modern cities could count so great a number? And so large were even private libraries that we are told of a doctor of Bagdad who “refused the invitation of the Sultan of Bokhara, because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels.”[442]

Nor was it in Bagdad alone that the zeal of Harun and Mamun for the progress of knowledge had stimulated enthusiasm for science and letters. Under these two illustrious patrons of learning, homes of science that almost equaled that of Bagdad were established in all parts of the Caliphate—in Cufa and Basra; in Fez and Morocco; in Cairo and Alexandria and Damascus; in Balk, Ispahan, and Samarcand—many of which, in the splendor of their buildings and in the equipment of their libraries, rivaled the famous Arabian schools of Granada, Seville, and Cordoba, which were in their heyday “when all that was polite or elegant in literature was classed among the Studia Arabum.” And it is to be observed that these institutions, created and fostered by the benign influence of the Caliphs, had reached the acme of their glory when the greater part of western and northern Europe was in a condition of comparative darkness.

But in paying this tribute to the Caliphs of Bagdad—especially Harun-Al-Rashid and his son Al-Mamun—I do not wish to appear as overrating their achievements in science and letters. One may, indeed, concede that they always held literary excellence in the highest honor; one may admit that never, not even in the days of Mæcenas and Lorenzo the Magnificent, did men of letters receive greater encouragement and rewards; one may acknowledge that for centuries the Saracens were far in advance of many of the western nations of Christendom in many branches of science and philosophy, but, granting all this, the indisputable fact still remains that they were borrowers and not originators.

All their achievements in philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics were due to their Greek masters—to Plato and Aristotle; to Galen and Dioscorides; to Hipparchus and Ptolemy; to Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes. And it must not be forgotten that the Saracens owed their knowledge of Greek science to Christians, for it was Christians who translated for them the works which they were unable to read in the original. Thus it was the Christian scholar Honein, who was the physician to the Khalif Motowakkel, that translated into Arabic the “Elements” of Euclid and the “Almagest” of Ptolemy; and it was his pupils who made the Arabic versions of the greater number of the works of Galen and Hippocrates.[443] And it was to the celebrated Christian family, the Boktishos, and to the Nestorian school of Gondisapor, from which issued so many scholars of distinction, that the Saracens were indebted for versions of countless other works of Greek science and philosophy.

Among the many learned men whom the Caliph Al-Mamun invited to his court and “who contributed far more than his own subjects to the reputation that sovereign has deservedly gained in the history of science,” was Leo the Mathematician, who subsequently became the Archbishop of Thessalonica. The Caliph desired to have made an accurate measurement of the earth’s orbit and he called this distinguished Greek to his court to take charge of this important work because “he was universally recognized to be the superior to all the scientific men of Bagdad in mathematical and mechanical knowledge.”[444]

But while the Arabs were good borrowers from Greek writers on medicine, astronomy, and mathematics, they almost completely ignored the great poets, orators, and historians of ancient Hellas. Never cultivating any language but their own, they were unable to read the masterpieces of Greek literature except in a translation, but as there was no demand by the Saracens for translations of these works into Arabic, none were ever made. For this reason the matchless poems of Homer and the Greek dramatists; the orations of Lysias and Demosthenes; the histories of Herodotus and Trucidides, were for the Saracens as so many closed books. The noted Syriac author, Bar-Herbræus, does, indeed, mention a version of the Iliad and Odyssey by a Christian Maronite of Mount Lebanon, but his translation was into Syriac and not Arabic.

These facts show how much the great reputation of the Saracens for learning was due to their immortal Greek masters and to the literary activity of their Christian subjects, especially the Greeks of the Lower Empire. It is true, as Freeman observes, that “the Arabs studied Aristotle and taught him to the men of western Europe; but it was surely from the men of eastern Europe that they obtained him in the first instance. He was read in translations at Samarcand and at Lisbon, when no one knew his name at Oxford or Edinburgh; but all the while he continued to be read in his own tongue at Constantinople and Thessalonica.”[445]

The impulse that Harun-al-Rashid and his son Al-Mamun gave to educational progress by encouraging the translation of the works of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and others of the great Greek masters will always give their reigns a conspicuous place in the annals of science and civilization. But the successors of these two illustrious monarchs did not follow in their footsteps. Although the power of the Caliphate seemed still unimpaired and its splendor was apparently undimmed, the seeds of decay, which led to ultimate destruction, were already at work. The vices of sloth and luxury and cruelty which prevailed at the court and in many of the most important departments of the government of the Caliphate, slowly but surely entailed their fatal consequences. Besides these, there were other causes of decay and extinction. Chief among them were internecine strife and the separation of the remoter provinces from the central power. Added to these disintegrating factors the Caliphate had become top-heavy, and under a weak and degenerate ruler like Al-Mostassem, the last of the Abbassides, its downfall was inevitable.

In contemplating the fall of the power which was for five centuries the glory of the Moslem world, one is led to compare the close of the reign of the last of the Caliphs with that of the last of the Byzantine Emperors:

The last and weakest of the Caliphs without an effort of arms or policy to stay his fall, sinks from senseless pride to craven terror and expires amidst the tortures of a faithless victor. The last and noblest of the Cæsars, after doing all that mortal man could do for the deliverance of his city, himself dies in the breach, the foremost among its defenders. Not Darius in the hands of the traitor, not Augustulus resigning his useless purple, not the Ætheling Edgar spared by the contempt of the Norman Conqueror ever showed fallen greatness so dishonored and unpitied as did Al-Mostassem Billah al Wahid, the last Commander of the Faithful;[446] not Leonidas in the pass of Thermopylæ, not Decius in the battle below Vesuvius, not our own Harold upon the hill of Senlac, died a more glorious death than Constantine Palæologus, the last Emperor of the Romans.[447]