Free Peace Be Upon You by Zachary Karabell

tumultuous, ever-disintegrating imperium, a place that the caliph and courtiers would retire to as a respite, to ponder the impenetrables of God, poetry, wine, and women. 2
    The move to Baghdad was more than geographic. With it, the empire shifted toward Persia and away from Arabia, toward an Islam that was more diverse and less Arab, and toward a culture that celebrated the divine right of kings and sybaritic pleasures. It was also a more urban and cosmopolitan society—which shaped the evolution of Muslim theology. Creativity, reason, and openness to new ideas were embedded in early Abbasid culture. “A city without peer in the world was Baghdad then,” said one medieval historian, and for a time, Baghdad thrived as few cities ever have or ever will.
    One of the hallmarks of that openness was the easy toleration of Christians and Jews, who still made up a majority of the population ruled by the Abbasids. That toleration ran the gamut from cool coexistence to fruitful dialogue and active collaboration. Muslim scholarsstudied the wisdom of the societies they had conquered and liberally borrowed and incorporated ideas and practices. In the two centuries after the Abbasids gained power, Islam took on most of the characteristics that were to define it for the next thousand years, and a fair number of those characteristics drew on the pre-Islamic traditions of Christians, Jews, and Persians. In those two centuries, the four major Muslim schools of law emerged, and judges and scholars placed their stamp on thousands of questions about how a Muslim should act and behave.
    This openness to the wisdom of the pre-Islamic past stemmed in part from the regime’s focus on maintaining power. Having overthrown one dynasty, the Abbasids were acutely aware that they too might be overthrown, and they were determined not to be. Any tool, technique, or philosophy that might help them govern was welcome, regardless of its provenance. In addition to studying the legacy of the Christian states that they had supplanted, they examined classical Greece and the imperial legacy of the Persian shahs. They were also utilitarian about people, and the Abbasid caliphs invited Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians to serve the state.
    As a result, non-Muslims held high administrative posts in the government bureaucracies (diwans). From the treasury to the department of public works to the department of war, the People of the Book and dhim-mi s were employed as tax collectors, guards, and scribes. One of the most influential tax collectors under Caliph al-Mansur was a Jew, and many of the ninth-century viziers of the Abbasids were Nestorians or Nestorian converts, who had replaced the first family of viziers, the Barmakids, who were Buddhist converts from what would now be Afghanistan. These non-Arabs and non-Muslims had crucial skills that the caliphs needed. They were often multilingual, and knew Greek, Persian, and Arabic, as well as Syriac. The Byzantine administration of Syria and the Near East had been conducted in Syriac and Greek, and the Abbasids were able to maintain continuity and stability by drawing on individuals who knew those languages and were in some way connected to that legacy. Al-Mansur was aware, however, that he could not simply rely on their knowledge. That would give the People of the Book too much influence over the court and the empire. In order to build up a Muslim alternative, he ordered the translation of Syriac, Greek, and Persian texts.
    The consequences of this state-sponsored translation movement were tectonic. The impetus may have been banal—how to govern anempire using a predecessor’s tools. But the translation of Greek knowledge into Arabic eventually paved the way for the transmission of classical knowledge into Western Europe. It is not a stretch to say that the West as we know it could not have emerged had it not been for the translations commissioned by the Abbasids in Baghdad as well as in Basra. Similar efforts