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Baghdad is a city screaming in pain and dying in the smokescreen. As we watch the tangled mess on our television screens, it is hard to imagine that Baghdad was once a great seat of learning. Baghdad and books have been synonymous for hundreds of years.
Bookshelves line family homes and booksellers line the streets of Baghdad. Even now, amidst the rubble and pandemonium the residents of Baghdad shop for books. “It is an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food,” jokes an Iraqi translator for NBC News
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In the period, that western history has come to call the Dark Ages, the love affair between Baghdad and books began. In a time when churches across Europe felt themselves fortunate to have a library consisting of several books, there was a street in Baghdad lined with more then 100 shops, each selling books, stationary, or both.
Across the western world, literacy was restricted to the rich or religious authorities, but in Baghdad, the people had access to more then 30 libraries.
Within 200 years after the death of Prophet Muhammad, the small Islamic nation grew into an Empire that stretched from North Africa to Arabia, from Persia to Uzbekistan and pushed onwards to the frontiers of India and beyond.
750CE Baghdad, the city built on the banks of the Tigris River was established as the capital of the Islamic empire. Its location connected it to countries as far away as China, and Baghdad soon became not only the political and administrative centre but also the hub of culture and learning.
Men and women from all parts of the Empire flocked to Baghdad and brought with them knowledge from the far corners of the known world.
Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and even people from other more obscure faiths lived in Baghdad. Books began to symbolise life of Baghdad. The streets were alive with authors, translators, scribes, illuminators, librarians, binders, collectors, and sellers.
However, these people from such diverse backgrounds need to be connected. Arabic developed as the language of scholarship and the connection was established.
The works of Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Plutarch among many others were translated into Arabic. Jewish philosophers used Arabic translations of Greek philosophical works to write their own treatise and essays. When Europe began to emerge from the Dark Ages into a period of enlightenment, they relied on books written in Arabic to redeem and reclaim the foundations of the Western empire.
Many of the original books translated in Baghdad were lost or destroyed in their home countries, and remained only in their Arabic translations. The scholars of Baghdad were responsible for preserving classical works from the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians and even translated classics from Persia, India and China. These great works were then translated from Arabic back into languages such as Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, and Latin.
Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas made his famous integration of faith and reason after reading Aristotle’s philosophy in a translation by Baghdad scholars.
The scholars of Baghdad not only collected and synthesised the great works, they added to the body of knowledge. They opened up new fields of scholarship, such as celestial mechanics, and introduced the world to algebra and geometry. A Baghdad scholar produced an ophthalmology textbook, believed the world’s first medical book containing anatomical drawings. It was the definitive work in both the east and west, and was used for more than eight centuries.