The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization [Hardcover]

Jonathan Lyons (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2009

The remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy—and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West.

For 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 catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand.

 

Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much “Western” culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.

Editorial Reviews

Review

 

"Sophisticated and thoughtful... In The House of Wisdom, [Lyons] shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century.... Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant."—Wall Street Journal

"With a storyteller's eye for the revealing detail and an artist's feel for the sweep of history, Jonathan Lyons has uncovered the debt that the Christian world--and Western civilization--owes to Muslim philosophy and science. House of Wisdom is a fascinating and picturesque page-turner."—Ian Bremmer, author of The J Curve

"Lyons capably delineates the fascinating journey of this knowledge to the West, highlighting a few key figures, including Adelard of Bath, whose years spent in Antioch paid off grandly in bringing forth his translations of Euclid and al-Khwarizmi; and Michael Scot, science adviser and court astrologer to Frederick II, who translated Avicenna and Averroes."—Kirkus

"The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization is a 320-page treasure trove of information for the uninitiated that packs a powerful punch of science, history, geography, politics and general knowledge at a time when so much disinformation about the Arab world is swirling around in various media."—Magda Abu-Fadil, Huffington Post

"Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace."—Times (UK)

“Sophisticated and thoughtful…In The House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English…. Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant.” –Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal

“Jonathan Lyons vividly conveys the excitement young European scholars travelling east must have felt as they glimpsed a dazzling new world of learning.” –Jo Marchant, New Scientist (UK)

“In unearthing this buried intellectual heritage, Jonathan Lyons gives us a new and important understanding of our historical and cultural relation to Islam and the Arab world… this is a well crafted, powerful account which asks us to re-examine our assumptions about East and West, a task never so necessary as now.” –Marc Lambert, Scotsman (UK)

“This is a refreshing book, one that discovers, or rediscovers, common ground between Islam and Christendom, a historical survey that reminds us that civilizations can converse as well as clash.” –Robert Cremins, Houston Chronicle

About the Author

Jonathan Lyons served as an editor and foreign correspondent—mostly in the Muslim world—for Reuters for more than twenty years. He is now a researcher at the Global Terrorism Research Center and a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology of religion, both at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596914599
• ISBN-13: 978-1596914599
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #245,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I have spent much of my professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West, first on both sides of the Cold War divide and, more recently, on the cusp between the Islamic and Western worlds. Over time, I have come to see the relationships between these seemingly polar fields as a problem not of geography or politics (or even geo-politics) but of thought, ideas, and knowledge - that is, as essential problems of epistemology.

This realization prompted me to leave behind more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent and editor, much of it in the Islamic world, and to complete a doctorate in sociology at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Already, I had begun my journey from agency journalist to author with publication in 2003 of Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran, co-authored with Geneive Abdo. My second book, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (2009), presents a narrative account of the West's extensive borrowing from the medieval Arab and Muslim world.

Columbia University Press has just published my newest book, Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. This social history of ideas, based on my recent doctoral dissertation, attempts to explain the fact that Western images of Islam have remained to this day almost unchanged since they were first crafted from wartime propaganda at the time of the First Crusade, one thousand years ago.

Lately, I have shifted gears a bit to explore early American intellectual history as a way of uncovering the roots of today's technological nation. America, and by extension much of the modern world, has lost touch with Classical notions of wisdom and mystery. This new book traces the trajectory of our national consciousness.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How and what we learned from the Arabs, January 24, 2009

By 

C. Baril "audiobook reader" (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (Hardcover)

An 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!

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating account of hidden chapter of history, February 11, 2009

By 

Alan A. Elsner "Alan Elsner, author" (Washington DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: House of Wisdom (Hardcover)

In this fascinating book, Jonathan Lyons uncovers a mostly-unknown period of our history. During the Dark Ages and early medieval period, western Europe sunk into a deep pit of ignorance and intellectual stagnation. The scientific and philosophical achievements of the ancient world were forgtten. Europeans could not even tell the time or know for certain when Easter would fall.
Europe was wrenched out of its ignorance, Lyons argues, by contact with the intellectually vibrant Islamic world, starting with the Crusades.
Under the Caliphs of Bagdhad and later the Muslim rulers of Spain, Arab scientists and philosophers rediscovered the great thinkers of ancient Greece and subjected them to a rigorous analysis. They also learned from the vibrant traditions of Hindu India. While Europe huddled in intolerant misery, these Islamic rulers were open to all ideas, tolerated religious minorities and produced amazing advances in math, medicine, astronomy and other sciences.
Lyons introduces us to Adelard of Bath, an Englishman who went to the Near East shortly after the First Crusade in search of the scientific secrets of the Arabs and came back laden with intellectual riches.
This book is clearly written and bears the marks of years of rigorous research. My one question after completing it was, what happened to sap the Islamic world of its vitality. How did the spirit of questioning and free inquiry disappear? How did the Arab world cede primacy to the West? What brought it to its current miserable state?
These are questions outside of the scope of this book but I wish the author had provided at least a brief outline.
Full disclosure: the author and I worked together at Reuters for several years.

84 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Book lacks understanding, August 19, 2009

By 

R. E. Verhoef - See all my reviews
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This review is from: House of Wisdom (Hardcover)

Contrary to the other reviews, I found the book extremely poor. Lyons has no grasp of medieval Europe what so ever. He believes that T-O maps were actual attemps at drawing a map of the world. He ignores the actual theological basis of the maps. He also ignores many of the great European thinkers.

He tells us the West had no great scientist, but gives ample examples of the opposite. He takes many of his sources at face value. The speech of Uban II, for example, is not viewed as a rethorical speech of war, but as an actual account of Medieval life.

Moreover his account is largely about the rather obscure Adelard of Bath, a rather obscure monk whose influence is debatable. Historians doubt wether Adelard actually mastered Arabic. Lyons does not even mention this debate but assumes Adelard could read Arabic.

Most major books on the subject are not listed in the bibliography or the endnotes (how could he miss Hugh Kennedy's major book on the Arab conquest?). Much of his discourse on the Western European Dark Ages is based on works that are over 50 years old! He doesn't use any books that challenge his thoughts.

There are so many factual errors that it's impossible to name all of them. Just a few then.

On page 49 he qoutes from the Ecclesiastical history of the English people by Bede. The qoute relates, according to Lyons, to the battle of Poitiers, as Lyons calls it, but is known as the battle of Tours nowadays (as Lyons doesn't use any books on Western European history that postdate 1974 it's not suprising he has missed this name change). If so Bede must have been able to foresee the future. The battle took place in 732 (according to Lyons pre-1974 literature, 733 or 734 according to modern scholars), the book was written in 731.

Later on he mentions Al-Khwarizmi wrote a book that included the Christian Calendar, starting from 632, although the book was written in the 8th century. However in 632 there was no Christian calendar. Christians used the Roman calendar throughout the 7th and 8th century. It was Bede who thought of the Christian Calendar early in the 8th century, but it didn't catch on immediately.

West Europeans were capable of calculating Easter. The problem was not that they could not calculate but that they could not agree on the interpretations of the Bible. So the Celtic church celebrated Easter on the first day of Spring (regardless of whether this was on a Sunday), while the Romans did not. The Easter tables that were eventually adopted at the synod of Whitby (664 AD) are still in use today.

The Arabs did not invent the two cilinder pump. In fact this was an invention of the ancient Egypts. The Europans did not believe that disease was a punishment from God (if they did why would they need doctors?). They believed in the Greek theory of Galen and assumed there was an imbalance in the four humours. Of course there were Christians who believed that diseases were a punishment of God and took to exorcism, but this was by far a minority.

Medieval people did not think the Earth was flat. Isidore of Sevilla might have done, but this was not the general view of the Medieval academic world. How could he not mention the universities, by the way?

I could go on. But there are so many of them. Most derive from the imagination of Lyons, rather than from fact. None of the above fictions has an endnote.

This is by far the worst history book I have read in my life. And that's a pity because his central thesis is right! Large parts of Western science and Philosophy owe enourmous debt to Arabic learning (by the way, Arabic is not the same as Islamic and here again Lyons misses the point and does not mention that many achievements were reached despite Islam, as many Western inovations were made despite the church). And yes, European knowledge was remarkably poor at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Christians did destroy much of what the Ancients had written. But Medieval Europe was not as bad as Lyons thinks it was, and there was enormous progress, both thanks to the Arabs and thanks to Europeans themselves. Moreover he only focuses on The Franks and Normans (Vikings and Celts are not researched).

In his quest to hammer home his point, Lyons has recreated a Medieval world that never was. Somebody should rewrite this book in a more balanced way. For now, avoid this book.