Arab Golden Age and Education

The educational standards during the Abbasid era were high. Elementary education, both for boys and for girls, flourished. Theological colleges were maintained, and extension courses from mosques as centers radiated outward to areas beyond.

Private as well as public libraries were common, and one street alone in Baghdad contained a thousand book sellers' shops. Paper, introduced from China via Samarkand, was manufactured in the provinces from vegetable fibber.

Music was cultivated, and among the musicians mentioned was one Ibrahim al-Mousili who, "could detect a false note among thirty lute-players, and tell the player to tighten up her string." He received as much as (equivalent) US $20,000 for one song from the doting Haroun al-Rashid.

All this time, while Europe was almost illiterate and Charlemagne himself could hardly write his name, a great intellectual awakening was taking place in which the Arab, with nothing but an intellect stimulated by great mental curiosity and a language which had then been the vehicle only of revelation and desert poetry, took a great and glorious part.

The currents of learning and culture which had earlier originated in Egypt, Babylonia, Phoenicia had been funneled into Greece, and having been there assimilated and vastly augmented by the Greek mind, had spread again in the form of Hellenism to the adjoining world. Among the centers of Hellenism one remembers Edessa, Antioch and Alexandria.

As the night of the Dark Ages settled down over Europe this learning had become embalmed in manuscripts and books buried in monasteries throughout the Near East, and available chiefly to monks and prominent scholars. But the flame of Hellenic learning, into which the Arab learning had been infused, feeble though it was, and was kept burning among them.

Among the by-products of the recurrent raids to which Haroun was addicted was that among the loot many manuscripts were brought to the capital. Haroun al-Rashid and his immediate successors dispatched emissaries far and wide in search of more and ever more manuscripts.

A college of translation, called the "House of Wisdom," was set up in Baghdad, and for more than a century, translation work was vigorously carried on, from Greek into Syriac and then into Arabic. Interest among the Arabs centered, however, not on Greek history, drama, and poetry, but rather on medicine and mathematics, as well as on the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato and the astronomy of Ptolemy.

An important name to remember is that of Hunyan, a Nestorian Christian whose chief contribution among very many was the Translation of Galen's Anatomy. Outstanding work was done as well as the Sabeans, or star worshipers, particularly and naturally along the line of astronomy.

A current from India also contributed to the stream with the introduction of the digits known as Arabic numerals, as well as the decimal system and the use of zero. The century of translation was but the prelude to the original contributions made through the Arabic language and under the stimulus of Arab encouragement.

Some of the translators themselves did significant original work. It was the Nestorian Christian physician Yuhanna who used apes as subjects for dissection. He also wrote the oldest work on the disorders of the eye, and his pupil Hunayan produced a ten volume treatise on the eye.