Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress, in Washington,
D.C. Chris Murphy: Thank you all for coming here this afternoon.
I'm Chris Murphy, I'm the head of the Near East section here
in the African and Middle Eastern Division.
The Near East section is responsible for developing the collection
in the languages of the Near East -- basically Persian, Turkish, Arabic,
Armenian, Georgian, Central Asian Turkic languages --
and the staff of the section are the primary reference providers
for people doing research on those areas.

For the Arabic area, we have three individuals: Dr. Fawzi Tadros,
who is our senior member of the staff for Arabic; Ms. Nawal Kawar,
reference librarian for Arabic; and a gentleman --
that you will hear from in a few minutes
as he introduces the speaker -- Dr. Muhannad Salhi.

These programs, these afternoon lectures, or noontime lectures,
are an important part of how the African and Middle Eastern Division,
and particularly the Near East section, fulfill one of the Library
of Congress' tasks and missions,
which is to make information available to the general public.
And to that end, in the near future, we will have the fifth
of the five lectures on Iraq; on March 10,
Mr. Michael Albin will present a program on his work in Iraq
as an anthropologist, and then further on down the road,
there will be a Turkic-Judaica program on April 16,
and then a program and a presentation by Mr. John Kaiser


To that end, if you look at the printout of our homepage
of the Division, you'll notice under the new section that there is a
"Friends of the Near East Section," and we would be, you know,
exceedingly pleased if you or anyone you know were able
to become a friend of the section.
It can be done for as little as $25, or you can give as much
as you [laughs] should happen to desire,
and that kind of very direct support enables us to do more of these kinds
of programs, and to do other things that help give out information
about Africa and, in this case particularly, the Middle East.
And now, without further ado, I'd like Dr. Salhi to come forward.
Muhannad Salhi: Good afternoon, everybody.
Thank you all for coming.
Our guest speaker, author and journalist Jonathan Lyons,
has spent his professional life
and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries
between East and West.
After more than 20 years as editor and foreign correspondent
for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world, he is now affiliated
with the global terrorism research center,
and is completing his doctorate in the sociology of religion,
both at Monash University in Melbourne Australia.
He lives in Washington, D.C., and is conducting most
of his research right here at the Library of Congress.
He also teaches part-time at George Mason University,
and he will be speaking today on his latest book, "The House of Wisdom:
How the Arabs Transformed Civilization."
So now, without further ado, please welcome Jonathan Lyons.
[applause] Jonathan Lyons: Okay, thank you very much,
and thank you to all of you for being here.
This is a lovely setting, and as Muhannad said,
and I mention in the acknowledgements to "The House
of Wisdom," I did do most of the research here in --
not so much in this room, but in the general reading room.
It's been a fantastic resource, and anything that we can all do
to keep this resource alive would be great.
Now, "The House of Wisdom:
How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization," it tells a big story
against a big sweep of history and geography, from England
and North Africa in the West, Afghanistan and India in the East.
I put together a map here, just to give you a sort of sense
of the theater of operations as it were, for the context of the story
that I'm going to tell today.
And along the way, I present the enormous contributions
that the Arabs and Muslims made to our very notion of Western culture.
At the same time, I try to tell the story of the remarkable tales
of wandering European scholars who set to bring this science,
philosophy, and technology back to the Medieval Christian world.

So let's jump right in.
Chapter One -- I'm going to read a brief excerpt --
is entitled "Warriors of God,"
and it opens outside the gates of Constantinople.
They couldn't even tell time, this uncountable army of believers.
The warriors of God pushed on to the gates
of the imperial city of Constantinople.
Their arrival heralded by a plague of locusts that destroyed the vines
but left the wheat untouched.
Their leader, an implacable cleric who had appeared from nowhere
to great popular acclaim exhorted his charges to holy war
against the infidel with promises of a future place in paradise.
Disease and malnutrition were rife.
Medical care often involved exorcism or the amputation of injured limbs.
Torture and other ordeals settled their criminal cases.
Few had any learning at all.
Natural phenomena, such as the eclipse of the moon,
or perhaps a sudden change in the weather, terrified them.
They thought it was black magic.
The arrival of this fanatical army horrified the locals.
Who were these pale-skinned, blue-eyed barbarians marching
under the sign of the cross, and what did they want
on the Arab shores at the dawn of the 12th Christian century?

So here we have the arrival of the first crusaders from Europe.
The year is 1096, and they are preparing the invasion
of the nearby Holy Land, then under the control of the Muslims.
This was Christian holy war on a previously unimagined scale,
and yet the strictly military consequences
of the first crusade would prove minimal.
Far more important was the view the crusades afforded Western Europe --
the first view, really -- of the Muslim world as a vast cultural,
intellectual, and economic super-power.
Now as you can imagine, many of the crusaders -- they were peasants,
soldiers, artisans, and we're told even thieves, murderers,
and adulterers -- would have taken no notice
of the cultural riches all around them.
But to Europe's small educated elite,
this came as something of a shock.
Soon, despite the displeasures of the popes back in Rome,
ideas and commerce began to flow between East and West.
The merchants of the Italian city-states, particularly Genoa
and Venice, stepped in to capture the trade in oils, perfumes,
textiles, and precious metals.
Our system of Arabic numerals was popularized in large part
to their use in commercial contracts, as were Arab systems
of calculation and accounting.
Even the language of trade adopted Arabic and Persian terms.
Some examples would include tariff, check, traffic, arsenal, and so on.
And what's interesting is that this accounting and techniques
like this were kind of, as we might say, beneath the radar
of intellectual Europe, because they were practical techniques.
And so we don't really have handbooks, early handbooks,
or what we might call textbooks from the initial period of interaction,
because these were not people whose first reaction
or even second reaction would be to write a textbook.
They were to use them in trade to teach their children,
and in fact one of the greatest Western mathematicians ever,
Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, was sent by his father
who ran an accounting house in North Africa for the Pisans
to study Arab accounting and calculation.
Now here we have a rare case where a practical technology moves
into the academic sphere, because we had a genius like Fibonacci,
but that's obviously a rare occurrence,
and it happened rather much later
than the initial adoption of these techniques.
Another example are the freemasons.
There's a lot of evidence that after the crusades, the architecture
of churches, particularly in England,
suddenly improves dramatically,
and right angles are actually right angles,
and symmetry is actually symmetrical as opposed to sort of "best guess".
So we see evidence of these techniques being used long before
they were adopted in any organized way.
And one of the stories I tell
in my book is how the artisans were building the great cathedrals
with these new techniques while their masters, the monks,
were still doing their bookkeeping with very clumsy Roman numerals
in a sort of old-fashioned system.
Now, maps, nautical charts, and navigational instruments,
these were all areas where the Muslims excelled,
and they became increasingly important to the Western economies.
Arabic books, too, would become much sought-after commodities.
At a time when Europe's richest monasteries might hold several dozen
mostly outdated volumes, the public and private libraries
of the great Muslim cities housed hundreds of thousands of books,
many concerning medicine, astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, and so on.
In fact, we are told that when the Sultan wanted to donate books
to a new school, he handed over 80,000
from his personal collection alone.
Apparently, they weren't even missed.
So what was the source of this incredible accumulation of learning
on the part of the Muslim world?
To explore that, let's turn to the Near East, and the founding
in the 8th century of the new imperial capital by the ruler
of the Abbasid Empire, Abu Ja'far al-Mansur.

This is from Chapter Three, which the title
of which is "The House of Wisdom."
Abu Ja'far al-Mansur was taking no chances
with his new imperial capital, for this was to be a city like no other.
The second Abbasid caliph of the Muslims turned for guidance
to his trusted royal astrologers: the former Zoroastrian, Nobakht;
and Masha'allah, a Jew turned Muslim from Basra,
and now considered the leading person for the science of the stars.
The pair consulted the heavens, and declared that July 30, 762,
would most certainly be the most auspicious day for work to begin.
Still, al-Mansur hesitated.
He ordered his architects to mark the layout of the walls
of his proposed city, which was to be a perfect circle.
Al-Mansur was a big fan of Euclid and Euclidian geometry,
and studied it avidly, and so the appeal
of the circle was a natural device
as he started to plan his great city.
So he ordered them to fill in the circle with ashes and then
with cotton seeds that were soaked in naphtha.
This was then set ablaze to create sort
of a fiery outline of his future city.
At last, the caliph was satisfied.
"By God, I shall live my entire life, and it shall become the home
of my descendents, and without a doubt it will become the most


Abbasid coins another official usage,
celebrated al-Mansur's capital as the
"Madinat al-Salam," the "city of peace."
But among the people, it always retained the name
of the Persian settlement that had been
on that same spot forever, Baghdad.
Now, al-Mansur's decision to shift his capital from Damascus
to Baghdad ratified important changes in the Muslim land
since the death of the prophet in 632.
Baghdad was to be a recognizably modern city,
where diverse peoples could interact under accepted codes
of personal and legal conduct.
This began to replace sort of clan-based structures
of traditional Arab society.
This eastward movement was also important
because it was a recognition of the important role
that the Persians had played in the rise of the Abbasid Empire,
and Persian scientists, Persian intellectuals, Persian culture
in general would play a vital role in Arab and Muslim science,
philosophy, and the arts.   Writing 100 years after al-Mansur,

the historian al-Yaqubi catalogued the best qualities


"No one is better educated than their scholars, better informed
than their authorities in tradition, more solid in their syntax
than their grammarians, more supple than their singers,
more certain than their Quran-readers,
more expert than their physicians, more competent
than their calligraphers, more clear than their logicians,
more eloquent than their preachers.
He does, in fact, then go on to say with a loud note of disapproval that
"no one is more dissolute than Baghdad's hedonists."

[laughter] Al-Mansur cultivated the sciences, and he ordered
up translation into Arabic of numerous works of Hindu,
Greek, and Persian scholars.   To accommodate his vast enterprise,

al-Mansur established a royal library, modeled after those
of the great Persian kings of antiquity.
And this was the origin of the House of Wisdom --
in Arabic, the Bayt al-Hikma.
And it was the institution -- I have a slide here,
I'm sorry about the reproduction, a depiction of activity
at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
Large sums of money were dedicated to the scholars at the House
of Wisdom, and it's crucial to note
that Abbasid society enthusiastically supported
this effort.   Social advancement, diplomacy,

even war were all mobilized behind the drive for knowledge.
There's a story that at one point the Abbasids demanded some rare
Greek text from the Byzantines in order to stop a border skirmish.
So over the course of 150 years, the Arabs translated all available books
of science and philosophy, and Arabic replaced Greek
as the universal language of scientific inquiry.
Now, I want to stress, again,
the fact that this was a socially-based movement,
because in latter histories of science, written particularly
in the 19th and early-20th century from the Western perspective --
and we can get into that perhaps in the Q-and-A --
it's often asserted that there was a very weak social basis for science,
and that's why science, from the Western perspective,
seems so fragile in the Islamic context.
I think that's an assumption that needs to be revisited
and radically rethought, and as I said, we can discuss that later.
It's also important to emphasize that translation was
but a first step in a systematic approach to learning
on the part of the Abbasid.
The Arab scholars, including the translators,
they would work their way very carefully through texts,
often correcting, editing, or adding to the material that they found.
And they then went on to achieve significant advances in a wide range
of scientific fields, and they were not, as is popularly portrayed
in the West, mere caretakers of ancient wisdom.
And the fact that when they did translation they would come to grips
with the texts themselves is a crucial one,
because we have this phenomenon in the early Renaissance period
when a sort of newly self-confident Europe started looking at the world
through a prism, if you will, of humanism,
and there was a renewed emphasis on the importance of Greek texts,
scientific texts, than those that had gone
through the Arab translation.
But in fact, Ptolemy, whose great "Almagest" text was one
of the examples of this, was rather sloppy in much
of his data collection and calculation,
and so the Arab translations were improved versions
by a large measure.
So if one were to translate the Arab version correctly into Latin,
it would be a far superior product than to go back
to the original, authentic Greek text.
But this problem wasn't really resolved


It's also worth noting that Arab science developed largely
within the context of Islam, and not in conflict against it.
Of course, there were tensions.
As in any tradition, astrology was problematic for many Muslim thinkers
as it was for many Christian --
and remains so for many religious thinkers.

Astrology claims to foresee the future, and in the minds
of some theologians it then infringes


Western experience, of course, grew out of this tension between science
on the one hand and faith on the other, but it was largely lacking
in the Muslim world, in my view.
In fact, Islam was seen by the early scientists as an enormous source
of strength, of language, even of scientific language,
and of methodological approach.
Now remember, the Quran ushered in a social revolution,
a religious revolution, but also an intellectual revolution,
and many scholars found that Arabic was really very well suited
to scholarship and to writing.
And I have an anecdote in my book about a Persian mathematician,
who wrote a text in Persian, and then essentially tore it up
and rewrote it in Arabic, because he felt Arabic was more precise
for what he needed to do.
And in fact, as part of the back story, that's why I chose
to call this -- subtitle this,
"How the Arabs transformed Western civilization."
If you read the book itself, you'll see that I talk
about Muslim scholars of all persuasions,
and I go into some detail sort of justifying my use of Arab science,
but the language, the lingua franca of scholarship
of this period was Arabic,
and that's why I chose to do it that way.
So let me present a really nice example of how religion
and science seem to work together, particularly in the early period.
As I'm sure all of you know, Muslims are required to know the direction
of Mecca in which to pray, to align the bodies for burial,
to slaughter animals ritually, et cetera.
This is known, of course, as the qibla.
The earliest Muslims of Central Asia
and Spain simply directed their prayers to the South,
in imitation of the prophet Muhammad.
When Muhammad moved to Medina, which of course is north of Mecca,
he would simply turn south -- once he had established the qibla
for good, originally it was Jerusalem, then it became the Mecca
and the Kaaba -- all he did was turn South.
So for very early Muslims wanting to imitate the prophet,
the southern direction, regardless of their location,
was what they chose to do.
But of course Islam spread very quickly, didn't it, within a couple
of generations we had Muslim communities in North Africa,
Central Asia, not long after that into China, in the subcontinent,
and so it's easy to figure out where Mecca might be if you're
in a small radius around the Kaaba in Arabia, but as you move
out into the broader world, of course,
it becomes a much more difficult problem.
And so as the Arabs and the Muslims scientific understanding
of their universe became more sophisticated, they began,
not surprisingly, to demand greater accuracy
in conforming their practice to the sacred geography of Islam.
But where exactly was Mecca?
Now one common approach invoked the pre-Islamic directional system,
which used the four winds.
Others relied on the position of prominent stars, or the direction
of the winter sunrise, or other easily observed phenomenon.
Yet another popular schema identified the four corners
of the Kaaba with each of Mecca's traditional trading partners --
these are Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and then a sort
of catch-all known as the West.
Over time, finer distinctions were made
by associating more narrow geographical zones
with specific architectural features of the Kaaba,
such as a water spout or a doorway.
And I have here a diagram of sacred geography,
with a Kaaba at its center.
And these became increasingly sophisticated parallel
to the evolution of -- of more technical geometric means and means
of spherical geometry, as we'll see in a minute.
Still, despite these systems,
confusion over the correct qibla often prevailed.
So in one far off land, for example,
believers faced four different choices.
They could face due West, in the direction
of the traditional pilgrimage road to Mecca.
Or they could try this older southern tradition of the prophet
at Medina that I mentioned a few minutes ago.
A third chose to honor the somewhat arbitrary qibla
in the region's earliest mosques -- you probably know,
qiblas in early mosques were often quite inaccurate.
A fourth figured, "Well, let's just leave it up to the astronomers."
So the use by the Muslims of early religious structures,
such as synagogues and churches --
these were often converted into mosques, and they would have a qibla
of their own, an orientation of prayer --
made it all the more confusing.
But what's particularly noteworthy here, and what I want
to stress today, is the way
that medieval religious opinion generally deferred
to the mathematical astronomers and other scientists
on such an important question of religious ritual.
These scientists argued, and successfully,
that the common sense straight line to Mecca was not the proper qibla.
Instead, worshippers had to take into account the curvature
of the Earth, and find the shortest route,
very much the way a long-haul aircraft today will fly
over the polar caps to save time and save fuel.
One of the greatest treatises on mathematical geography was a work
by al-Biruni, written in the 11th century, to find the direction
of Mecca from his location in Afghanistan.
I have a diagram of some work al-Biruni did
on the eclipse of the moon.
His book, "The Determination of the Coordinates of Cities,"
it's the first work in history
to determine accurate geographic locales with the techniques
of spherical trigonometry.
And it's worth noting in passing that by the 9th century,
all six trigonometric functions -- the sin and cosin,
tangent/cotangent, secant and cosecant -- were known.
Only the former, the sin, was an import, from Hindu astronomy;
the others were Arab discoveries.
And this allowed the substitution of calculations in the place
of geometric diagrams, paving the way for the full development


Islamic teachings also went hand-in-hand with other disciplines,
so we have injunctions in the Quran to heal the sick.
This provided great impetus to the study of medicine
and the practice of surgery.
The religious ritual of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca created a need
for cartography and navigation.
Speculation among Suffi mystics on the transformation of the soul
in union with God helped fuel the alchemist's search for ways
to transform base metals.
This laid the groundwork for modern chemistry.
And Muslim princes, no less than their later Christian counterparts,
relied heavily on the complex reading of astrologers.
Even many of the foods we eat -- artichokes, oranges, apricots --
and much of our technical vocabulary -- words like algebra, azimuth,
zenith, and zero -- all come from Arab hands.
Most important of all, there came the very idea that man was capable
of understanding God's universe, and of interpreting it for his benefit.
And when we study the history of science
and the Islamic contribution --
and there are a number of works that do this, of course --
I think we often overlook this final point.
We get bogged down in specific etymologies
or specific transferences of specific technologies,
but we forget the conceptual breakthrough that the Arab
and Muslim world helped the world through in this period,
and that is understanding that man really could focus on God's universe
without violating the tenets of monotheism, and could start
to incorporate a view of the universe
that would benefit society and benefit mankind.
As you know, the Quran recalls that God made the universe and the stars
so that you, man, could navigate,
and could find your way in the desert.
So this was quite a revolutionary notio tat the Muslim world helped
bring to the attention of Western thinkers at this time.
Now, I'd like to turn to one of the most colorful and important figures
in our drama, that of the traveling Englishman known as Adelard of Bath.
Unfortunately, we don't have any portraits of Adelard;
this is a front piece from his work on geometry, and it shows geometry
as a woman educating some Western students.
That's the closest thing that I do to illustrate Mr. Adelard.
He was born in 1080, in England's West Country,
the son of a prosperous religious functionary,
who served the powerful local bishop.
Adelard hunted with falcons, a pursuit reserved
for the privileged few; in fact, he even wrote a treatise on falconry.
He played the guitar for the queen,
and he enjoyed the best education the West had to offer
at the Cathedral schools of France.
But Adelard was a restless young man, and he was clearly dissatisfied
with the state of the world around him.
In his first known essay,
he condemns all contemporary learning, and yearns for the past.
"When I examine the writings of the ancients, not all of them but most,
and compare their talents with the knowledge of the moderns,
I judge the ancients eloquent and I call the moderns dumb."
Soon the Crusaders would be off on their mission to the East,
but Adelard had no interest in following in their footsteps
to k8ill Muslims and seize their land.
He resolved instead to master their language, and return home
with the secrets of Arab learning.
Now, we don't know exactly when or how Adelard got to the Near East.
Like many other figures of the period, he doesn't write
about himself in any detail, but he gives us a few hints.
He reports that he was on a bridge near Antioch in modern Turkey
on November 13, 1134, when a deadly earthquake struck the region.
And in fact, if you go and check the geographical survey listings
for earthquakes going back to the Middle Ages,
there was in fact a major earthquake at this time.
Adelard lived through the ordeal, and he spent a total
of seven years -- give or take -- in the region.
There he meets a wandering philosopher who quizzes him
about physics before praising Adelard's mastery
of the liberal arts, especially when Adelard gives the right answer.
And it's this famous puzzle that if there were a hole drilled
through the center of the Earth, and you dropped something through it,
would it come out the other end?
Adelard says, "No, it would move towards the center
and remain there."
So our wandering philosopher, who seems to have been an Arab,
is pleased that Adelard has mastered some of the basics.
He also learns the study of the nerves of the body,
by immersing a cadaver in running water
until all the soft tissue is worn away.

Adelard later made his way back to his native England,
probably around 1116, and now he is very much a changed man,
an experience he records in his essay,
"Questions on Natural Science."   I'm going to read briefly from it.

Upon the assistance of friends and family
with whom he had just reunited, Adelard surveyed English society.
"I found," he writes in "Questions on Natural Science,"
"the princes barbarous, the bishops bibulous, judges bribeable,
patrons unreliable, clients sycophants, promisers liars,
friends envious, and almost everybody full of ambition."
Ever the teacher, Adelard resolves
that knowledge offers the best antidote to what he calls
"moral depravity on display" in his homeland.
"I undertook the following treatise, which I know will be useful
to its auditors, but whether it is pleasant I do not know.
For the present generation suffers from this ingrained fault,
that it thinks nothing should be accepted
that is discovered by the moderns."
So you can see, we have a different Adelard on our hands, here.
During his wanderings, Adelard tells us,
he adopted his trademark flowing green cloak ad began
to sport a prominent signet ring set with an obscure astrological signal
in the same rich green hue.
Adelard's new intellectual outlook is no less startling.
The new Adelard, now a citizen of the world,
challenges the intellectual corruption, complacency,
and rigidity that has dogged the West for centuries.
Unlike the student from the Cathedral Schools
who once branded the moderns dumb,
the reborn Adelard is an ardent proponent
of contemporary scholarship, only now his world is shaped by the new
and dynamic learning coming from the East.
"Man should take refuge in God," he declares,
"only when his intellect proves incapable
of understanding the world around him."
Such a declaration connects Adelard of Bath directly to his spiritual
and intellectual heir, the pioneering astronomer Galileo,
whose public showdown with religious orthodoxy five centuries later would
seal the end of the beginning of the Western Scientific Revolution.
This wanderer in the flowing green robes issues the first explicit
assertion in the Christian Middle Ages that the existence
of God must not prevent man from exploring the laws of nature.
"I will detract nothing from God, for whatever is, is from him.
We must listen to the very limits of human knowledge,
and only when this utterly breaks down should we refer things to God."

Among Adelard's intellectual trophies were the geometric system
of Euclid, an elaborate table of the movements of the stars,
several works of Arab astrology, and a book on alchemy revealing ways
to dye leather, tint glass, and produce green pigment,
which as we've already seen was Adelard's favorite color.
He also returned with the secrets of the astrolabe,
the most powerful analog computer of its day.
It was capable of telling time,
determining one's geographical latitude, measuring the height
of a tower or the depth of a well, locating true North,
and working out the positions of the sun and the major planets.
I have a lovely Persian example here.
The various museums here and at the Smithsonian have some
beautiful astrolabes.
Unfortunately, the only two I know of that are on display today are
at the Air and Space Museum, but the collection itself is quite famous,
so I would certainly recommend it.
Now the astrolabe is, I believe, a perfect metaphor for Arab science,
for it was based on earlier Greek ideas,
but the Arabs went well beyond that, to refine the device
into a powerful calculator as well as a thing
of real beauty and elegance.
Now Adelard was not the first Western figure to get his hands
on an astrolabe, nor was he the first to write about the instrument.
But he was the first to move beyond the mere technique
and into the underlying scientific principles that make the thing work.
So think of a small child, perhaps, using a pocket calculator
or a personal computer to multiply two numbers.
Most likely she will get the correct answer,
but not necessarily understand the mathematical operation itself.
Adelard wrote a book called "On the Use of the Astrolabe."
And this is not just a how-to manual, as were most previous works.
It offered the West the beginnings
of a comprehensive and coherent cosmology.
So in this way, Adelard whetted the West's appetite
for the study of astronomy.
Both the astrolabe and the star tables known as zij became crazes,
intellectual crazes in Europe.
The famous star-crossed lovers, Abelard and Heloise,
name their illegitimate child Astrolabe.
Chaucer left behind an unfinished essay dedicated to his nephew
about using the astrolabe, and really,
at some point within a couple a decades, anyone who was anyone
in European letters had an astrolabe.
You kind of had to have one.
A lot of that is due to Adelard's ability to connect the technology
to the underlying science of the stars.
So in this work, he writes, "Concerning the universe
and its different parts, I will write in Latin what I have learned
from the Arabs: you can take it for granted
that the universe is not a square, nor a rectangle, but a sphere.
What is said of the sphere can be said of the universe."

Adelard then concludes his treatise on the astrolabe
with some pointed political advice to the future King Henry II,
whom he apparently served as tutor.
"The king's future domain," says Adelard, "should be ruled
by a philosopher king, for philosophers speak the truth,
and are guided by natural justice and by reason.
It should be tolerant of all religions and beliefs,
and it should recognize the authority of the Arabs --
that is, of the scientists and thinkers --
and not that of rigid church dogma."
We don't really know much about Adelard's last years.
Scholars have uncovered a series of royal horoscopes
that may be Adelard's own handiwork,
and perhaps even in his own handwriting.
Now the book has some lovely reproductions.
I don't have a slide of this, but I can show you --
you can maybe see it here --   is on parchment, a series

of horoscopes attributed to Adelard of Bath.
The bulk of this collection dates to 1151,
when Adelard would have been around 70 years old.
A ripe age at that time, but not impossible.
And there were certainly no more than one or two astrologers
that we know of in all of England that had the capability to carry
out such complex readings.
And of course, we know that Adelard enjoyed the trust
of the royal household, which would have also been a prerequisite
for any astrologer being asked political and dynastic questions,
as these are, by the king.
After that, unfortunately, the trail disappears


His contributions to Western science were remarkable.
He returned a respected scholar, an intellectual elder statesman,
England's first real Arabist.
He introduced the Latin world to Euclidean geometry, the star tables,
the wonders of Arab astrology, elements of alchemy,
and as I've said, of course, the workings of the astrolabe,
and more importantly to the universe that it captures
in that brilliant, bronze faceplate.
He inspired a stream of scholar-adventurers who set off
in search of Arab learning on everything from astronomy
to zoology, and soon Europe would be awash in Latin translations
of all the great works of the Arabs
as the West's new scientists struggled to keep up with the East.
Most of all, Adelard bequeathed us the spirit of scientific inquiry,
which had so far failed to take hold in a society oriented
for the afterlife and inclined to see the physical world only
as a pale imitation of God's heavenly rewards.
Adelard writes, "Of course God made the universe, but we may
and should inquire into the natural world.
The Arabs teach us that."
Now I would like to return to the present, just briefly,
for I believe the story of the House of Wisdom has a lot to say
about the ways we think about Muslims today, and in fact,
this is the subject of my ongoing Ph.D. research,
which I'm doing mostly here in the main reading room.
You may know, a recent public opinion survey,
I believe it was Gallup, found that a majority of Americans see little
or nothing to admire in Islam or in the Muslim world,
and yet as we have seen, the Arabs bequeathed us the very core
of what we generally take to be Western Civilization,
the realization that science can grant man power over nature.
So I'll just conclude with a final excerpt from the prologue:
The West's willful forgetting of the Arab legacy began centuries ago,
as anti-Muslim propaganda, crafted in the shadow of the crusades,
began to obscure any recognition of Arab culture's profound role
in the development of modern science.
These views gained further currency in the Renaissance,
when the West increasingly looked for its inspiration
to an idealized notion of Classical Greece.
Eager to claim direct descendance from the likes of Aristotle,
Pythagoras, and Archimedes,
Western thinkers deliberately marginalized the role
of Arab learning.
"I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia,"
wrote Petrarch, the most famous
of the early humanists in the 14th century.
So you see, not long after the phenomenon of Adelard
and the translation movement he helped launch,
Europe makes a decisive and explicit attempt to cut the Arabs
out of the story, as it were, and that's one of the reasons
that I wanted to write "The House of Wisdom."
And so I conclude the prologue as follows: Western historians
of scientists have largely carried on in this vein.
Many cast the Arabs as benign but effectively neutral caretakers
of Greek knowledge, who did little or nothing
to advance the works of the ancients.
Such accounts are grounded in the persistent notion of the West's
"recovery" of Classical learning, with the clear implication
that this knowledge was somehow the natural birthright
of Christian Europe, and was merely misplaced during the Middle Ages.
They are also profoundly colored by a Western consensus,
often invoked to explain the state of the Muslim world today,
that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation, and became all the more
so from the early 12th century onward.


[applause] [Q.] Okay, thank you very much.
The question was, given Petrarch's animosity towards Arab science,
how was Adelard received by humanists in general.
Is that correct?   Is that your questions?

Male Speaker: It seems strange that with -- yes.

Jonathan Lyons: All right, well, that's a good question.
In fact, it flows into the discussion very nicely,
thank you very much.
We can see in Petrarch -- and there are other examples,
one of the most interesting examples are the later French humanists.
In the 16th century, French humanism devises --
there's no other word for it -- a new history of Algebra,
which completely cuts the Arabs out of the story.
And they do this for many reasons that have nothing to do
with the traditional history of ideas, but have to do
with the political and social pressures and circumstances
in which the French humanists were working.
Most of the French humanist mathematicians are actually lawyers,
and there was a strong effort then to break French legal thinking away
from some of its Classical roots,
and to create a national legal tradition.
Within that context, they also wanted
to create a national tradition for higher mathematics,
and to elevate mathematics from a practical art
to an intellectual subject.
So we can see in that era -- and you can follow it very easily
by just reading, in a serial fashion,
the work of French humanist thought on the history of Algebra,
and you see first they acknowledge the Arab role,
and then very quickly they minimize it,
and by the end it's eliminated altogether, there is no Arab role.
So Adelard has actually floundered in obscurity.
I would guess that very few of you really know much about him;
maybe some of you do, specialists write about him a little bit,
but I guess a broader question I would ask --
and this is what I'm trying to answer in my Ph.D. research --
is why is "The House of Wisdom" a book?
Why are we here today?
Why don't we all know this in our DNA the way I was taught,
and many of you were certainly taught in America,
that Greek heritage, that Greek mythology was my
cultural birthright?
So we can see how effective, in my view, the humanists were
at reshaping the way we think about intellectual history,
and it's never really recovered.   Thank you.

Yes, please.   [Q.] There is unfortunately,

except for a few really exceptional figures,
there are some well-known women philosophers
in the late Pagan Greek period, and there's beginning
to be new scholarship in that area, but as you can imagine, A,
they haven't received much attention, and B, they haven't left
that much of a record that we know of.
But I want to clarify one of the major problems in history
of science, when it comes to the Muslim contribution,
is how little we really know.
There are hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in Turkish, Urdu,
Persian, Arabic, that have not been studied in any meaningful way.
And so, many people will stand up and write the epitaph
of Islamic science, and cut it off in the 12th century,
or under some new research they might concede on the 14th century.
But we have, for example, a letter describing the court
of the Mughal emperor in Muslim India from the 16th century talking
about the wonderful philosophers and mathematicians at the court,
and recalling how the sultan himself was an adept of astronomy.
And he would go riding, he would try to calculate the solar position
and its angle to the Earth,
and figure out therefore what time it might be by using methods
of calculation rather than traditional timekeeping.
So my point is we don't know much, and there hasn't, until now,
been much impetus to answer these questions, and one of the questions
that has lacked some impetus is the role of women.
So I can't go beyond that at this stage.
Thank you.
[Q.] As far as we know, he wasn't really engaged beyond his trip.
he seems to have brought back some manuscripts.
Now one of the great things about astrolabes and star charts is
that they can only work for specific locales.
Now, much later, particularly in Persia, some astrolabes
and related technologies were developed that could be used
at varying latitudes, but generally you could work backwards
from an astrolabe where it was built,
or what locale it was designed to be used in.
So we can get some -- we know that his start tables
that he brought were based on work originally done by al-Khwarizmi
in Baghdad, then transferred somehow to Spain, to Islamic Spain,
because they were recalculated for the latitudes of Toledo.
Now of course, when he got them to England, they didn't work,
and one of the interesting processes we can watch is how Western science
started to figure out how to correct them,
and what the underlying calculations were.
But as far as we know, Adelard's contribution was a kind of one-off.
He went there, he absorbed some of this stuff.
He did have a number of students, and there are several texts,
for example, of the early Euclid translated out of the Arabic,
some of which we believe was the direct work of Adelard,
some may have been the work of his students,
and they become increasingly sophisticated.
So we know that he passed along some of his knowledge, but --
and finally, he was part of a small circle of astronomer monks
in the West Country in the Severn Valley in England,
so there was some interchange there, but no evidence of correspondence.
We don't even know how much Arabic he really knew.
I mean, there are some people who think he knew rather little.
My sense is he took away an awful lot of understanding,
he must have had some command of it.
And we know, in some of his translations
and texts he writes Latin and Arabic couplets together for equivalence
as if he were teaching vocabulary.
But no, we don't have much evidence of sort of an ongoing tradition.
It's too early, I would say.   Yes, please.

[Q.] All right, the question was, am I looking in my present research
at the role of Islamic legal systems and its views on science.
That's a great question, because one of the turning points
in what some scholars have termed the classical narrative
of Islamic science, which is essentially there was this great
flowering, they did some amazing things, but religious
and legal juris put a stop
to independent scientific reasoning sometime
around the early 12th century.
The figure of al-Ghazali is usually invoked
as the one who killed science.
The problem with this, on the face of it,
is there's some brilliant work that goes on well after al-Ghazali,
and the best example is some research that was done
after the fall of Baghdad.
Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.
The new Mongol sovereigns collect some of the best Muslim scientists
who at this point are Arabs and Persians, and they move them
to Northwest Persia, to the Marageh Observatory.
And I think I have a print in the book --
here, this is actually Galata in Istanbul, but it's a similar --
it's a lovely picture, if you can see that, of Arab scholars working
with astronomical instruments.
What's important about Marageh is they created a number of advances
in the accepted Ptolemaic view of the universe 200
and 300 years before Copernicus, and yet when Copernicus publishes
on his deathbed, or has published, his famous work,
the only two mathematical theorems in there seem to have come straight
from this Arab-Persian tradition.
And in fact -- and this has been known since the 1950s --
and in fact the notation on some
of the diagrams not only mirrors the Arab to Latin transliteration,
but even includes an error that's made in the Arabic,
so some people have taken this as evidence
that they were actually working from the same text.
So to return to the question -- so my question would be,
well how can we have this brilliant science hundreds of years
after al-Ghazali if al-Ghazali was responsible
for killing Arab science, or Muslim science?
And yes, the classical narrative often hinges on this notion
that law, jurisprudence in the Islamic context,
was opposed to rational thinking, particularly in the Sunni context.
I think that's to misunderstand the nature of Islamic science
and its place in Islamic civilization and society,
and to overlay it with our own Western experience,
where we very much had a battle
between religious thought and scientific thought.
If you look at al-Nazim's book on the biographies of the great Arab
and Muslim scholars, so many of them were theologians as well
as astronomers, as well as mathematicians.
And I gave you the example of the qibla; by 12th
or 13th century Cairo, every major mosque had an official timekeeper,
who was an employee of the mosque and an astronomer,
who made instruments, taught students,
and helped predict Ramadan, and measured the time for prayers.
And so, what I'm hoping we're starting to see
in contemporary scholarship -- and I hope I can contribute to it
in a very small way --
is a rethinking of this notion that law was somehow implacably opposed
to science and Islam, because I think that's a dead end that sort
of hasn't -- we cannot explain, if that's our theory,
we cannot explain -- there are too many anomalies, as it were.
We don't understand the Copernicus thing, there are lots
of other discoveries that don't fit in with this notion
that science came to a screeching halt
because the religious juris didn't like it.
Thank you, any more questions?   Yes, please.

[Q.] Well, I think they're several-fold.
I think -- I've already alluded to some of them.
The Renaissance Humanists --
humanism was a sociopolitical movement.
The humanists were generally not within the church,
thought they interacted with the church.
They were creating social positions, they often won appointments
to the major universities who were funded by independent city-states
in Italy and by various bodies in France.
And so there was social advancement to be made from creating and sort
of capitalizing on this notion of Renaissance humanism.
There was just no place in that narrative for Muslims and Arabs,
so that would be one very immediate contribution.
More fundamentally, I found that Islam's image in the West --
and I don't say this lightly, I believe this has been more
or less maintained to the present moment --
was largely crafted in Crusade-era propaganda.
So if we look at Western interaction with Muslims
up until this Crusade period,
the Muslims have very little content for Western culture.
They don't mean anything.
They're not Christian, they might be seen as barbarian like the Vikings
or the Magyars, but they're not an existential threat
to Christian threat to Christian culture and Christian civilization.
They become that in Western eyes with the build-up to the Crusades,
and so then we get -- content is assigned to Muslims.
And that content is the mirror opposite of Christian values.
So where Christians are chaste, Muslims are seen
as sexually perverse; polygamy really flummoxed --
and their understanding of polygamy --
really flummoxed the first Western scholars who looked at it.
Where Islam -- Christianity is seen as a religion of peace,
Islam is seen as a religion of war.
Where Christians are seen as rational, Muslims are seen
as irrational and fanatic.
Doesn't take a lot of imagination -- or a couple of seconds on Google,
these days, to find those very arguments in the blogosphere
and popular media, and unfortunately in a lot of academia,
particularly in terrorism studies, an area that I engage
with just on the margins.
So these are fundamental ideas of Islam that seem on their surface
to be inhospitable for modernity, for democracy, and for science,
and so we get a narrative with its roots in the Crusades,
maintained by various social groups
of whom the Renaissance Humanists were perhaps the most influential,
and a very brief period of assimilation --
I would even suggest cultural theft by the West from Islamic culture,
but this period of translation movement really is a very small one
if you look at the arc of relations between East and West.
And so I ask myself traditional history of science and history
of ideas, the paradigms of Thomas Kuhn and things like that tell us
that as we accumulate knowledge, right, we reevaluate the anomalies
and we correct our theory, and we may not have a truth
but we explain the pattern more accurately than we used to.
I would suggest that hasn't happened when it comes
to Western views of Islam.
Sure, we know more than we did at the Crusades.
At the time of the Crusade propaganda,
the West hadn't really met any Muslims,
and yet they crafted a very lasting image of Islam.
Now, of course, many of us study Arabic or Persian, we travel,
we fight wars, we trade, we read the Quran, we read the great works
of literature, they come here, we go there,
but yet I see in the public discourse, political discourse
and in the academic discourse pretty much the same language
and same ideas that you might have found in the 11th century.
And I don't know how to explain that, and that's what I'm trying
to do in my present research.
[Q.] I think that clearly is a component,
and the Quran is very open: why would God have a son?
He neither begets nor is begotten, it's right there in black and white.
Yes, this is a -- I mean, there's no denying it.
I don't want to suggest, either then, or in the Renaissance or today
that the Muslim world
and the Western world don't have some fundamental differences,
including the idea of science and the idea
of modernity, and ideas of democracy.
What I would suggest is that we have, unfortunately,
been colored by modes of thought whose origins lie
in a Crusader period of wartime propaganda,
and that has really paralyzed us, and as a result, Western society,
in my view, is intellectually, socially and politically unprepared
to deal with the challenges it faces when it looks to the East.
I think with that we're out of time.   I want to thank you.

I just want to say, we were unable, unfortunately,
to arrange books to be available.   I would direct you to my Web site.

I do have a few copies, privately we can --
I'd be happy to sign them and make them available.
I apologize for that, but thank you so much,


[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]