The House of Wisdom

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward
and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the
time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief, not reason, should be
the guiding light of Christian thinking and partially as a result
Europeans lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming,
where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine,
and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its
own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars -
the Crusades.

Arab
culture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse of
intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of
Adelard of Bath who ventured to the Near East in search of the
scientific riches pouring out of cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whose
House of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when the
best European libraries housed, at most, several dozen. The Arabs could
measure theearth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West for
eight hundred years; they discovered algebra; were adept at astronomy
and navigation, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greek
scientific and philosophical texts including, importantly, those of
Aristotle; they made paper lenses and mirrors. Without them, and the
knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe
would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last
millennium.

In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan
Lyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, explores and
reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid
adventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid
the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance.