The house of wisdom - Jonathan Lyons

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backwardand benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell thetime of day. Augustine had decreed that belief, not reason, should bethe guiding light of Christian thinking and partially as a resultEuropeans lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming,where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine,and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to itsown ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars -the Crusades.

Arabculture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse ofintellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes ofAdelard of Bath who ventured to the Near East in search of thescientific riches pouring out of cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whoseHouse of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when thebest European libraries housed, at most, several dozen. The Arabs couldmeasure the earth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West foreight hundred years; they discovered algebra; were adept at astronomyand navigation, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greekscientific and philosophical texts including, importantly, those ofAristotle; they made paper lenses and mirrors. Without them, and theknowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europewould in all likelihood have been a very different place over the lastmillennium.

In this fascinating and thoughtful book JonathanLyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, explores andreveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepidadventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laidthe foundations of what we now call the Renaissance.