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Some scholars, like the Banu Musa brothers, were famous for sponsoring translation works too and seeking to obtain precious ancient manuscripts. The magnificent collection of books and manuscripts of the House of Wisdom was thrown into the muddy waters of the River Tigris whose brown colour turned black for days as a result of the washing away of the ink used in the of the writing of these books and manuscripts. Here, teachers and students worked together to translate Greek, Persian, Syriac and Indian manuscripts. They studied the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Brahmagupta and many others. Then, they began building on and testing the knowledge of the greatest ancient scholars, resulting in the development of the scientific method of observation and experimentation.
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The Nezamiyeh was founded by the Persian Nizam al-Mulk, who was vizier of two early Seljuk sultans.[60] It continued to operate even after the coming of the Mongols in 1258. The Mustansiriyah madrasa, which owned an exceedingly rich library, was founded by Al-Mustansir, the second last Abbasid caliph, who died in 1242.[60] This would prove to be the last great library built by the caliphs of Baghdad. During the Umayyad era, Muawiyah I started to gather a collection of books in Damascus. He then formed a library that were referred to by the name of “Bayt al-Hikma”.Books written in Greek, Latin, and Persian in the fields of medicine, alchemy, physics, mathematics, astrology and other disciplines were also collected and translated by Muslim scholars at that time.
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Ma'mūn was not the only caliph to support scholarship and science, but he was certainly the most cultured, passionate and enthusiastic. As a young man, he memorised the Qur'an, studied the history of early Islam, recited poetry and mastered the newly maturing discipline of Arabic grammar. Most importantly, he was a brilliant student of philosophy and theology, or more specifically what is referred to in Arabic as kalam, which is a form of dialectic debate and argument. It is even quite likely that by the early 9th century, some of their work had already been translated into Arabic.
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As a result, the academy incubated the translation of various scientific books and manuscripts and the exchange of philosophical concepts and ideas. One impetus for so many books was the introduction of new writing material, namely paper—a technology as revolutionary as the printing press for its time. The House of Wisdom attracted Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars from all over the Muslim world and was a place where a wide range of languages including Arabic, Farsi, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Latin could be spoken and read. The study highlights the development that marked the house of wisdom in the time of the Abbasids. The main objective of this paper is to explore the impact of the house of wisdom on the Islamic libraries, moreover it studies the organizational structure of Bayt al-Hikmah along with library divisions and services that it provided for scholars and readers.
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The research has dealt with funding sources and the budget that the state caliphs dedicated to the library. The study found out that, the house of wisdom has had a very organized administration and affair management system. In addition, new competing libraries have been influenced by the system of the house of wisdom in Baghdad which resulted in the emergence of newfound libraries in Egypt, Maghreb and Andalusia. The Abbasid library had preserved the knowledge and heritage of the ancient civilizations and it passed them to the west with a remarkable contributions, the latter has utilized some of the Abbasid period unprecedented discoveries to flourish and modernize.
The term ‘algorithm’ is derived from a Latin version of al-Khwarizmi’s name which is ‘Algorithmus’. He was instrumental in introducing the Arabs to Hindu numerals and algebra so he is known as “The Father of Algebra”. Additionally, al-Khwarizmi wrote about the astrolabe, sundial, and elaborated on Ptolemy’s geometric model. Al-Khwarizmi is also known as the first geographer of Islam with his famous Picture of the Earth treatise. In Picture of the Earth, he arranged the coordinates of hundreds of cities in the world at that time and gave instructions for drawing a new map of the world.

Originally the texts concerned mainly medicine, mathematics and astronomy; but, other disciplines, especially philosophy, soon followed. Al-Rashid’s library, direct predecessor to the House of Wisdom, was also known as Bayt al-Hikma or, as the historian Al-Qifti called it, Khizanat Kutub al-Hikma (Arabic for “Storehouse of the Books of Wisdom”). On 14 July 1958, members of the Iraqi Army, under Abd al-Karim Qasim, staged a coup to topple the Kingdom of Iraq. King Faisal II, former Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, former Regent Prince 'Abd al-Ilah, members of the royal family, and others were brutally killed during the coup. Many of the victim's bodies were then dragged through the streets of Baghdad.[citation needed]During the 1970s, Baghdad experienced a period of prosperity and growth because of a sharp increase in the price of petroleum, Iraq's main export. New infrastructure including modern sewerage, water, and highway facilities were built during this period.
During the construction of the city, gates were placed at the entrances of the major roads into the city, in order to funnel traffic into the city. The Kufah Gate was on a major road that pilgrims took to Mecca, and the Anbar gate linked the bridges over the canals and Euphrates River to the city. These helped in bringing people into the city, and around these entrances, markets allowed travelers to trade.[9] The link in trade routes provided goods to the city, which allowed markets to draw people from all over the Middle East. The four straight roads that ran towards the center of the city from the outer gates were lined with vaulted arcades containing merchants' shops and bazaars.
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The paper shall follow a historical method which comprises some guidelines by which the authors utilize primary sources to conduct a historical account. Law is a critical study for the Muslim people, because of the understanding of justice on Earth as applied to God.[8] The Hanafi today is the largest school of legal thought in the Muslim world, and it was a draw for scholars to the city of Baghdad. Another school was the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which focused on translating texts from various languages into Arabic. Besides their translations of earlier works and their commentaries on them, scholars at the Bayt al-Hikma produced important original research.
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. The study has demonstrated that the house of wisdom was the leading library or in other words a leading Islamic university that the Abbasid age required. The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) had influenced not only similar public libraries, but a new form of libraries that were for personal use and for show.
The library grew to become the flower of the Islamic Golden Age, a period between the 7th and 13th centuries of great intellectual growth and discovery in the Islamic world. The death in AD 809 of al-Rashid resulted in a civil war among the Abbasids, after which his son al-Mamun managed to take power after a long struggle with his half-brother. Intent on securing his rule, al-Mamun moved his official residence to Baghdad, bringing his authority and royal patronage to the House of Wisdom. The House of Wisdom’s main project was collecting and translating numerous works from the Greek literary canon, which established an enormous influence on Arab thought. Works including those by Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Euclid were requested from libraries in the West, such as the library at Constantinople, and brought back to Baghdad to translate.
Indeed, Ptolemy’s Almagest was claimed as a condition for peace by al-Ma’mun after a war between the Abbasids and the Byzantine Empire. In the House of Wisdom, translators, scientists, scribes, authors, men of letters, writers, authors, copyists and others used to meet every day for translation, reading, writing, scribing, discourse, dialogue and discussion. Many manuscripts and books in various scientific subjects and philosophical concepts and ideas, and in different languages were translated there.
One writer has estimated that some private libraries were bigger and richer than public or private, libraries in Western Europe. However it was not the norm for the well-to-do people to leave their libraries open to public or to endow them for users. The example of the house of wisdom was remarkably followed and its influence appeared when other many public libraries have emerged all the way from Bokhara and Merv, in the heart of Asia, on the route to China through Basra and Damascus, Algiers and Cairo. The famous geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi who had visited Merv in the late 1220s, found more than twelve libraries there opened for public. And the same as the house of wisdom in Baghdad functioned, ten libraries were through endowments (awqaf). He interestingly expressed his admiration for about the lending policies of the libraries there, he noted that libraries in Merv were being liberal enough to lend him more than 200 volumes he could use in his room at the same time.
This growth would have gathered pace with the use of paper, the production of which the Arabs had learnt from Chinese prisoners of war, as a new and cheaper writing material replacing papyrus and parchment. The translators would have had scribes recording their work and producing multiple copies of each text. By the middle of the ninth century, Baghdad had become the centre of the civilised world, attracting the very best of Arab and Persian philosophers and scientists for several centuries to come.
The heyday of Baghdad was 1,200 years ago when it was the thriving capital of the Muslim civilisation. The second was to dispatch missions to emperors and other rulers throughout the empire to facilitate the gathering of valuable manuscripts, such as the 2nd-century astronomical treatise by the Greek scholar, Ptolemy, whose English name, Almagest, derives from its later Arabic translation. Adept at the sciences since his early childhood, he had extensions built for each of the house’s different branches of knowledge, where scholars from around the world came to exchange knowledge. 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.
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