Bayt al-Hikmah

Bayt al-Hikmah, royal library maintained by the Abbasid caliphs during their reign in Baghdad.

History as the royal library in Baghdad

The foundation of Bayt al-Hikmah coincided with the rise of Baghdad as the capital of the Islamic world and the subsequent reception of Persian culture into the Arab court of the Abbasids. The site of Baghdad was chosen by the second Abbasid caliph, al-Manṣūr (reigned 754–775), to replace Damascus, whose status as the Umayyad capital had made it difficult for the new dynasty to fully uproot the one that it had overthrown in 750 ce. But Baghdad, located near the former Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon, was also in the heart of a predominantly Persian populace. Instead of repressing what remained of Sasanian society, al-Manṣūr absorbed it into the new bureaucratic structure and portrayed Abbasid rule as the revival of the Sasanian empire.

Bayt al-Hikmah served as an arm of the caliphal bureaucracy and appears to have been modeled on an earlier Sasanian practice. Persians in the early Islamic era, writing in Arabic, indicated that buyūt al-ḥikmah (literally “houses of wisdom”) followed in the fashion of Sasanian nobility. Middle Persian literature also refers directly to the storage of books pertaining to Zoroastrian religion, Sasanian dynastic history, and scientific knowledge for medical and administrative purposes. The storage space was called a ganj (“treasury”), a term equivalent to the Arabic khizānah.

The collection of Bayt al-Hikmah, like those of its Sasanian predecessors, was intended to reflect the continuity of Persian heritage in the current ruling dynasty. It included Arabic translations of Middle Persian chronicles and astrological histories that were developed by Sasanian astrologers (see astrology: In Sasanian Iran). The reproduction of earlier works at Bayt al-Hikmah was evident in its staffing, which included copyists and bookbinders alongside library administrators. Some amount of translation activity—almost exclusively from Persian into Arabic—also took place, but it was not among the primary functions of Bayt al-Hikmah.

Bayt al-Hikmah, like Baghdad itself, was greatly enriched under the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809). The caliph and his court were flush with wealth from tributes paid across the empire. The splendour of Baghdad at that time was immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights. The narrator of one story, relating the experience of one of his brothers, describes a palace “of the utmost beauty and elegance, paved with marble, hung with curtains and having in the midst of it a flower garden whose like he had never seen” and hails the “Caliph’s generosity and natural beneficence and princely wisdom.” Hārūn’s reign was also the height of power for the Persian aristocracy, with the dynastic Barmakid family serving as the empire’s chief administrators (viziers). Patronage of the arts and sciences—and, of course, luxury—poured in not only from the caliph but also from the viziers and the other courtiers.

Bayt al-Hikmah reached its zenith under Hārūn’s son al-Maʾmūn (reigned 813–833), who expanded both the activities undertaken at the library as well as the types of scholars associated with it. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a mathematician and astronomer frequently credited as the father of algebra, was perhaps the best-known figure affiliated with Bayt al-Hikmah at this time. Other prominent scholars were also involved with Bayt al-Hikmah during al-Maʾmūn’s reign, including Yaḥyā ibn Abī Manṣūr al-Munajjim, the astronomer, and the Banū Mūsā brothers, who made essential strides in the field of mechanics. It is unclear, however, how much knowledge production was undertaken by these scholars at Bayt al-Hikmah rather than elsewhere.

But it was also al-Maʾmūn’s reign that brought about a change in wind for Bayt al-Hikmah, which had hitherto specialized in Persian knowledge. In the final years of his reign, he undertook a dramatic shift in the imperial ideology. He endorsed an Islamic theology that stressed free will and dialectical reasoning (see kalām; Muʿtazilah). In an ironic show of force, al-Maʾmūn engaged in an inquisition (the miḥnah) and persecuted those who would not conform. The intellectual weaponry of the inquisition was supplied by the import of Hellenistic thought and the translation of Greek philosophy into Arabic, which al-Maʾmūn had begun sponsoring in the years prior to his conversion.

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Although it is unknown whether the miḥnah had any direct impact on Bayt al-Hikmah, mention of the library ends almost entirely after the death of al-Maʾmūn in 833. Tensions between the caliphate and the old establishment continued into the reign of al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842) and forced him to move the capital from Baghdad to nearby Sāmarrāʾ. Bayt al-Hikmah remained intact in Baghdad, but its association with al-Maʾmūn in 10th-century texts may indicate that its collection was not supplemented after the capital was moved to Sāmarrāʾ. Whatever may have remained of the collection in 1258 was destroyed in the Mongol sack of Baghdad.

Legacy and myth as an academy

In modern times the library became a symbol of the scientific enterprise and imperial glory of the early Islamic period. It is frequently imagined as a centre of scholarship and collaboration for the greatest minds in Baghdad and its environs as well as the heart of a robust translation movement of Persian, Greek, and Syriac literature into the Arabic language. Some historians have even gone as far as to describe it as an academy.

Although scholarship and translation indeed flourished in 8th- and 9th-century Baghdad, and some of that activity took place in association with the library and its collection, there is little evidence that Bayt al-Hikmah was at the centre of any of these trends. The translation of Greek literature into Arabic—perhaps the most cited activity identified with Bayt al-Hikmah—took place elsewhere entirely, as did the work of Greco-Arabic translators such as Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Ṣabāḥ al-Kindī.

Still, the importance of the royal library to global scholarship cannot be overstated. Not only did it reflect the value of literature and scholarship in the culture of the Abbasid caliphate, but its grandeur stirred wealthy individuals to maintain their own private collections of books as a matter of prestige. Rival dynasties, eager to attract the Islamic world’s most innovative thinkers, also built great libraries of their own: the library of al-Ḥakam II (reigned 961–976) in Córdoba helped make the city the “ornament of the world,” while Dār al-ʿIlm (“House of Knowledge”) of al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (reigned 996–1021) in Cairo marked the height of the Fatimids in Egypt. Such libraries—as well as belles lettres—became a regular fixture of Islamic empires.