Customer Reviews

The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization

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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!

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.

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.

The subtitle of this book is `How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization'; and in order to show this, Jonathan Lyons devotes the first 50 pages of a 200 page text principally to show how badly the West needed to be transformed.

When the First Crusade (about which we are given many unnecessary political details) began in 1096, the people of the West were rightly looked upon by the Arabs as coarse, brutish, and dirty; so ignorant that they could not even tell the time with any exactitude; their notion of justice involving trial by ordeal; their `medical' procedures which killed rather than cured; a clumsy numerical system they had inherited from the Romans; and with only scraps of knowledge of the achievements of antiquity having survived the barbarian invasions. In Europe, there was indeed some scholarship - we speak of a Carolingian and of an Ottonian Renaissance - but most learning was theological, and the official line of the Church was that any pragmatic attempt to understand the material world was suspect as being at best a distraction from seeking salvation and at worst a danger to it.

But there was also, among the violence, more peaceful interaction between the western invaders and the Arabs (and between the Arab invaders of Spain and the Christians there). Lyons describes how Arab scholarship of every kind had been promoted by the early Abbasid caliphs from the middle of the 8th to the first half of the 9th century (i.e. well before the First Crusade of 1096): by al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid, and especially by al-Mamun, who had established the House of Wisdom as a great centre of learning and translations from Greek, Persian and Indian manuscripts.

Among the early westerners who were eager to learn what the Arabs had to offer was Roger II of Sicily (1095 to 1154), son of the Norman mercenary who had conquered Sicily from the Arabs between 1068 and 1091. He was already very knowledgeable about the achievements of the Arabs and brought Arab scholars to Sicily to extend that knowledge still further. A contemporary of Roger's was one Adelard of Bath (ca. 1080 to 1152) who in 1109 set out for the East specifically to see what he could learn from the Arabs, and who in Antioch came upon a treasure trove of Arab books. He was the most important of those who first transmitted Arab knowledge to the West. Lyons gives an excellent account of this hugely influential man, who not only translated Arab texts (like Euclid's Elements, translated from the Greek by the Arabs three centuries before Adelard brought it to Europe), but entered deeply into the spirit of scientific thought which was at the time quite alien to the West. Adelard produced the first comprehensive work on the astrolabe (which Lyons calls `the most potent analogue computer until the modern era', whose use had been refined by al-Khwarizmi in the 9th century and which was the most important tool for astronomy) and he introduced a translation of Ptolemy's Amalgest from the Arabic. Adelard certainly ought to be very much better known than he is.

At the College of Translators set up in Toledo in 1130 by its Archbishop Raymond , the most prominent of those working there was the industrious Gerard of Cremona (1114 to 1187), who translated no fewer than 87 books from Arabic into Latin.

Roger II's grandson, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (reigned from 1220 to 1250), was another great patron of Arab learning, and it was under his patronage that Michael Scot produced translations from the great Arabic Aristotelians, Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980 to 1037) and Averroës or Ibn Rushd (1126 to 1198). From Italy the reception of Averroës spread to France and to the rest of Europe.

The earlier transmissions from the Arabic had for the most part been scientific, but now, with the reception of Avicenna and Averroës, they were also metaphysical, raising the question of the relationship between philosophy and religion. So when the Sorbonne became one of the great centres of Averroism, a battle broke out between the Averroists, headed by Siger of Brabant (1235 to 1281), and those who thought that the Aristotelian metaphysic was a threat to Christian orthodoxy. The immense achievement of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225 to 1274) was to create a system in which Aristotelean/Averroist philosophy and Christian theology were seen as complementary and not as antagonistic. There was some resistance to this synthesis from the Franciscans, but in the end Thomism carried the day, and the canonization of Aquinas in 1323 ensured that the transformation of the West through Arab influence was safeguarded, and it is on that foundation that much of the later progress of western civilization would rest. Actually, the influence of Averroës would bear more fruit in the West than it would bear in the Islamic world - but that is another story.

Some readers may find some the technical details of both Arab science and Arab philosophy a little difficult to understand; but no reader will be left in any doubt that there was a time, lasting for at least three centuries, when the Islamic world was far more sophisticated and advanced than was the West and was indeed in many respects its teacher.

As Americans struggle to understand and define a relationship with the Muslim world, this book illustrates the many, and sometimes surprising, ways that the Arabs contributed to the development of our culture and way of life. At a time when we are likely to label Muslims as dangerous and different, this book demonstrates that, in fact, our early scientific and philosophical traditions are built on learnings imported from Baghdad and other centers of scholarship in the Middle Ages. I write this review on a day that this country is celebrating the start of a new era, embracing diversity at home and in the world. This book helps us understand why it's not crazy to include the Muslim world in that embrace.

As a reader more interested in the modern day, I felt that the author does an amazing job of bringing the history and actors from this period to life and making them seem relevant to the 21st century. This is not a dry historical analysis, but rather an engaging page-turner that keeps the reader curious to find out what will come next. The timeline and summary of leading figures are helpful resources for the reader while maps and illustrations provide some additional color and context.

Jonathan Lyons' book, "The House of Wisdom", makes a compelling argument for western recognition of Islamic contributions. Arab technologies predated western civilization. Western societies need only to read this book to recognize the tremendous accomplishments achieved by Muslims and, Arabs, in particular. This would increase their awareness of contributions made to the fields of medicine, philosophy and other scientific innovations, and their influences on western civilization. The translations by Arab sages (at Baghdad's historic House of Wisdom) of Greek and Indian ancient texts have had an impact on the modern world. These pursuits have been overlooked and forgotten in the wake of emerging European imperialism and advances in technology. This important information may have been lost without their prescient intervention.

I was fascinated to see first hand, the legacies of Islamic art, architecture and history at the Alhambra, and the water works in the "General Life" in "Muslim" Spain. The influences of Arab philosophy and culture on Moses Maimonides, a Jewish jurist, and other non-Arab scholars, were prevalent throughout the Iberian Peninsula and were later transposed to other European cultures. This set the stage for enhanced learning based on Islamic intellectualism. This may seem counter-intuitive considering the disparities and incongruities of religious dogma and the stark realities of theocratic philosophy.

This book is a great read for those interested in a comparative study of religion, history, philosophy and Islamic culture. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge and strongly recommend it.

The historical setting for Adelard's 7 year journey of discovery in the Middle East is:
P.20 "The Christians' reliance on trial by ordeal offended he sensibilities of the Muslims, with their highly evolved system of legal disputation and formal schools of religious law. Western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism, in sharp contrast to the Arabs' advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology, and epidemiology. The newcomers lacked any real knowledge of hygiene and sanitation, a deep affront to Muslims who performed ritual ablutions before each of the five daily prayers."
P.34 "By far the most popular Western text book was an encyclopedia of half-remembered knowledge and often far-fetched explanations of natural phenomena compiled in the 7th century by Isidore, bishop of Seville. In his Etymologies, Isidore laid out in 20 volumes every bit of knowledge he thought worth preserving in the face of what he feared was a rising tide of barbarism threatening his native Spain."

Examples of the important things that Adelard brought back that in time influenced European thinking and discovery:
P.113 Euclid's 13 books of Elements "offer a comprehensive logical system and an introduction to deductive reasoning, essential to the development of the scientific method and rational philosophical inquiry."
P.114 "For medieval Europe, the discovery of the complete Euclid was a sensation." Adelard is credited with writing a lot of the translation.
P.129 "Adelard first presents the basic tenets and concepts of spherical and theoretical astronomy, as well as key points of geography. He uses a globe as a model of the sphere of the earth, before introducing the computational powers of the astrolabe."

The book answered my question on how the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans which had been preserved by the Eastern Roman Empire and then by the Arabs got to Western Europe. Although little was put to use right away, I already knew that many Western advances were copies of the superior Eastern technology.

To learn about the long term conflict between Western Europe and Eastern Europe (with strong influences from the Muslims) from before 400AD to the present, I recommend Worlds At War by Anthoby Pagden and Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends by L.R. Johnson.

There are two books titled "The House of Wisdom." This one, by Jonathan Lyons was published in 2010, and, as far as I can determine, it preceded The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili. Two books of the same title, covering the same topic, and they even have remarkably similar dust jackets. Both books are of some interest, but I would recommend Al-Khalili's (he capitalizes the article in his last name) version, because it simply has more specific information it.

The House of Wisdom was a real place, an institute in Baghdad that existed from the eighth century until the Mongol invasion of 1258, during which time the level of civilization in the Mideast, fueled largely by learning imported from the Far East and ancient Greece, leapt far beyond the backwardness of Europe. Al-Khalili's book examines the specific advances of this remarkable place, as well as the similarly enlightened Alhambra in Moorish Spain, but the book by Lyons mainly depicts events in Europe, and dwells on an obscure writer, Adelard of Bath. It has scant information about the precise activities which took place in The House of Wisdom, because it focuses on unrelated affairs in Europe. For example, there are two pages devoted to the predictions of astrologer Michael Scot and how he may (or may not) have inspired the character of Prospero in "The Tempest." We are supposed to be learning about scientific achievements in Baghdad, but instead we are treated to a silly story about how a stone fell on Scot's head during mass.

We never discover exactly what advances we have to thank the realm of Islam for, because this book simply repeats such vague proclamations as, "Influential Arabic writings on the classification of the different sciences stimulated interest in a broader range of translations: on medicine, pharmacology, optics, alchemy, and ways to use the astrolabe and the zij. By the second half of the twelfth century, translations of major scientific works were being augmented by the teachings of Arab philosophers." (This, on page 143.) Very nice, but just what information was being translated, and how did it influence the Europeans? This book is full of such nebulous panegyrics and short on detail, and that makes for tedious reading.

Even worse, Lyons is so enthusiastic about the superiority of the Arabs (he lumps everyone, even Jews, living in Islamic lands as "Arabs") that the book is unbalanced and borders on propaganda. For example, he states as established fact that the European Crusaders practiced cannibalism. (The only source given for this extraordinary claim is "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" by Amin Maalouf.) On page 86, Lyons proclaims that the Arabs displayed "an early and growing recognition" of the germ theory of disease by testing various sites in Baghdad to see where "raw meat rotted most slowly." (Typically, he does not say exactly when this discovery of the germ theory occurred, but the next date on the page is 1206.) Likewise, the Arabs are said to have invented toothpaste and underarm deodorant, but what these products consisted of is not revealed.

On page 117 he declares that "[Copernicus] could not have completed his work without the aid of his Arab forerunners." Why? Precisely what did the geocentric Arabs contribute to Copernicus's heliocentric theory? This book is poorly organized, so the answer to that is found on the last two pages. Although "No means of direct transmission has yet been established . . ." and "There are only hints . . ." Copernicus *may have* been influenced by the "Tusi Couples," which are never adequately explained. In other words, it's merely more speculation on the part of Lyons.

Page 155 tells of more translations of "assorted treatises" (nothing specific) on various topics including "the science of weights." If you, like me, are so ignorant that you are unfamiliar with what is meant by "the science of weights," you will have to learn about it elsewhere, because it is not explained in this book. And let us not overlook that Lyons claims [pg.96] that several Muslim explorers -- "Arab, Malian, and Chinese" -- discovered America before Columbus.

If you swallow all of this, I have a flying carpet I can sell you.

The parts of the book which do contain adequate detail are those in the later chapters concerning theology and metaphysics. The question of how God was spending His time before the Creation is brought up again and again, and I would assume this is because Lyons is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and religion.

If your interest is the topic of how advancements in Eastern mathematics, geometry, biology, physics, and medicine brought about the Renaissance in Europe, The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili is the book to get, because Al-Khalili is a lecturer in physics, and he can explain the science in fascinating detail. If your interest is theology and metaphysics, this is the book for you, but wasn't the Renaissance mostly about jettisoning theology and metaphysics in favor of empirical observation and data?

Although I enjoyed a great deal of this book's information and insight, I do have a serious issue with the mention of many scientists/philosophers in the book, as being "Arabs". Avecinna (Ibn Sina in Farsi), AL-Razi and many others, were Persians writing in Arabic, not Arabs!! The author would have been much more accurate and honest if he called them Moslem or islamic wisdom, instead of Arabic one. The Bedouins who over-ran Persian Empire were not learned or educated, and 99% of the "moslem Warriors" could not read or write. Therefore, attributing this body of knowledge to the "Arabs" is simply wrong. Many scientists/novelist/university folks around the world write in English as second language for journals and research institutes, while at home they speak their native tongues....should the future historians then say that these intellectuals were all "English" or "British"?? This book would need a serious revision to get the facts right (replacement of Arab with the world Islamic is a good start) . We certainly don't need more historical inaccuracies added to the already biased case against Islamic Civilization.

There are many in the mainstream who believe the European Renaissance occurred due to a direct transfer of knowledge from the Greeks to Christian Europe or it occurred in a complete vacuum. There seems to be no acknowledgment of the Islamic connection in between and the immense research and discoveries made by Muslim scientists.

The House of Wisdom is a story of how the Muslims bridged the intellectual gap between the fall of the Roman Empire and the renaissance and how this pulled Europe out of the dark ages. This is not a book about the individual discoveries made by Muslim scientists, although Mr. Lyons covers some of the big ones.

Mr. Lyons shows how Muslims first absorbed the knowledge from the Greeks, Persians and Indians, how they added their own original research and discoveries and how this knowledge was transferred to Europeans such as Kepler, Copernicus and Newton (in astronomy for example) who added to this base to create the modern understanding of the universe. He writes about curious individuals from Europe who were thirsty for knowledge and travelled to Muslim lands in search of scholars to learn from. He focuses specifically on Adelard of Bath who travelled from England to learn from these Eastern Masters.

Although the focus of the book is about the knowledge transfer to Europe, Mr. Lyons also devotes a chapter on how the religion of Islam was the initial impetus to encourage Muslims to understand the natural world. He argues the Muslims wanted/needed to understand to help them to practice their faith better. Once these initial questions were answered, it opened up new questions and they naturally turned their attention to other areas of study.

By the end of the book the reader will be left with no doubt that the Muslims filled the intellectual vaccum left after the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the European Renaissance. It is a well written book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Note: For those interested in the many discoveries made by Muslims scientists and researchers and not necessarily on how knowledge was transferred, I recommend Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists by Michael Hamilton.