Free Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy Page B

caliphs, especially caliph Al-Ma’mun (813-833; himself the son of a Persian concubine), encouraged and supported scholars who translated ancient texts into Arabic, initially from Persian, but later also from Syriac and Greek, drawing on writings discovered across the conquered territories. Al-Ma’mun’s predecessor Al-Mansur (754-775) had founded a new library, the Beyt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which attempted to assimilate all knowledge in one place, and translate it into Arabic. It wasan idea taken directly from the model of the Sassanid royal libraries, and drew extensively on writings and scholars from Gondeshapur in Khuzestan, the most famous of the Sassanid academies. 15 Gondeshapur had survived up to that time, but seems thereafter to have been eclipsed by Baghdad. At the same time the diffusion of scholarship profited from the introduction of paper manufacture from China, replacing the more expensive and awkward papyrus and parchment. Al-Ma’mun seems to have encouraged a shift in emphasis toward astrology and mathematics, and the translation of Greek texts, under the eye of his chief translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. These developments led to what has been called the ninth-century renaissance, as Persian scholars writing in Arabic discovered and applied the lessons especially of Greek philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, history and literature. The new scholarship was not merely passive, but creative, producing new scientific writings, literature, histories and poetry, of great and lasting quality, forming the basis of much later intellectual endeavour, including in Europe, in the centuries that followed.
    Through the translations, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy were especially influential, through figures like Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi. The great historian al-Tabari (838-923) also worked in Baghdad at this time (he came from Amol in Tabarestan, on the south coast of the Caspian, in what is now the province of Mazanderan). Medicine made significant advances through properly scientific researches into anatomy, epidemiology and other disciplines, building on but eventually far surpassing the work of the classical Greek physician, Galen. Many of these achievements were later collated and made known in the west through the writings of another Persian, the great Avicenna (Ibn Sina: 980-1037). Avicenna’s writings were important in both east and west, for his presentation of Aristotelian philosophical method, and especially logic; disputations along Aristotelian lines became central to teaching at the higher level in eastern madresehs from the time of Avicenna onwards. It was a period of great intellectual energy, excitement and discovery, and as the Abbasid court became a model for succeeding generations in government and in other ways, so too it became a model in the intellectualand cultural sphere. The translations into Arabic done by Persians in Baghdad in the eleventh century were later put into Latin for western readers by translators like Gerard of Cremona, working in Toledo in Spain in the twelfth century, giving a new vitality to western scholarship. Avicenna and Averroes, the latter an Arab and another Aristotelian, became familiar names in the new universities of Europe, and after the time of Thomas Aquinas the philosophy of Aristotle, following their model, dominated European learning for two hundred years or more.
    But at the same time there developed a separate tradition of Islamic scholarship across the towns and cities of the empire. This learning was independent of the authority of the caliph, based instead on the authority of the Qor’an and the hadith (the huge body of traditions of the Prophet’s life and sayings, and related material, collated with varying degrees of reliability in the centuries after his death). The ulema , the scholars practised in the study and interpretation of those religious texts, tended to be hostile to the sophistication and magnificence of the court. This was