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The Abbasid House of Wisdom
This volume examines the library of the Abbasid caliphs, known as "The House of Wisdom" ("Bayt al-Hikma"), exploring how this important institution has been misconceived by scholars’. This book places the palace library within the framework of the multifaceted cultural and scientific activities in the era of the caliphs, Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun, generally regarded as the Golden Age of Islamic civilization. The author studies the first references to the House of Wisdom in European sources and shows how misconceptions arose because of incorrect translations of Arabic manuscripts and also because of how scholars overlooked the historical context of the library in ways that reflected their own cultural and national ambitions. The Abbasid House of Wisdom is perfect for scholars, students, and the wider public interested in the scientific and cultural activities of the Islamic Golden Age.
108 pages, Hardcover
Published August 1, 2022
22 people want to read
About the author
Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu
54 books15 followers1943’te Kahire’de doğdu. Ain Shams Üniversitesi Fen Fakültesi’nden mezun olduktan sonra el-Ezher Üniversitesi Mühendislik ve Fen Fakültesi’nde akademik hayata başladı. Türk kültürünü çok küçük yaşta iken aile çevresinde tanıyan İhsanoğlu, Kahire Milli Kütüphanesi’nde (1962-66) ve Ain Shams Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi’nde (1966-70) Osmanlı kültürü ve edebiyatı ile ilgili araştırma ve eğitim çalışmalarında bulundu. 1974’te Ankara Üniversitesi Fen Fakültesi’nde doktora çalışmasını tamamladıktan sonra, İngiltere’de Exeter Üniversitesi’nde doktora sonrası çalışmalarını sürdürdü. 1984’te profesör oldu. Eğitim ve meslek hayatı boyunca İslâm ve Batı kültürüyle yakından teması olan İhsanoğlu, halen İslâm Tarih, Sanat ve Kültür Araştırma Merkezi’nin (IRCICA) genel direktörlüğünün yanısıra İ.Ü. Edebiyat Fakültesi Bilim Tarihi Bölümü ile Türk Bilim Tarihi Kurumu’nun başkanlığını ve İ.Ü. Bilim Tarihi Müze ve Dokümantasyon Merkezi’nin müdürlüğünü yapmaktadır. Kurucusu olduğu bu kurumlar bünyesinde öncülük ettiği araştırma ve yayınlarla Türkiye’deki bilim tarihine ve özellikle Osmanlı bilim tarihi araştırmalarına yeni bir yaklaşım getirmiştir. UNESCO, Harvard Üniversitesi’ndeki görevlerinin yanısıra, ulusal ve uluslararası birçok bilim kurumunun üyesi olan İhsanoğlu, bilim ve eğitim tarihine katkı ve hizmetlerinden dolayı birçok ödüle layık görülmüştür.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 21, 2023
I did not find the author's premise, evidence, or conclusion convincing at all.
January 1, 2023
The Routledge Focus series describes itself as a home for publications too long to be articles and too short to be books, and it boasts a short time between submission and publication. What they don’t seem to be advertising is that this speedy publication process apparently means a bare minimum of copyediting, editorial intervention, and peer review.
There’s a solid academic article somewhere in this book, and a good editor could have coaxed it out and suggested publication elsewhere. Ihsanoğlu sets out to demolish the historiographical myth of the ninth-century Abbasid House of Wisdom. He argues that far from being an academy or even a dedicated school, it was in fact the palace library of al-Ma’mun and under that fabric we can include a number of scholars who made translations or wrote studies under caliphal patronage. How far exactly this differs from Dimitri Gutas’ earlier arguments is not entirely clear to me, but in general Ihsanoğlu has done a convincing job situating the House of Wisdom into its particular time and place and demonstrated that the organization itself has been misread over the years and that it never existed as a corporate body.
That’s all fine. There’s a 10k word article there. But including supporting materials, we have about 40k words here, far too many of which are repetitive. The book is also poorly edited, and needed a major copyedit to take care of numerous grammatical and spelling errors, something Routledge should have done as a bare minimum. There’s also too much historiography in first two “chapters”, and much of it is the sort of thing that should have been condensed to footnotes, while at the same time we don’t get the most important argument that Ihsanoğlu needs to deal with (Gutas) spelled out until half-way through the book.
It’s good that publishers are experimenting with something that sits in between the traditional academic article and the traditional monograph (ie: Routledge Focus, Cambridge Elements) but we’ve yet to see whether this will produce works of lasting value rather than a short-term, speedy road to publication designed to make money for the publisher while providing none of the services that they ought to provide.
There’s a solid academic article somewhere in this book, and a good editor could have coaxed it out and suggested publication elsewhere. Ihsanoğlu sets out to demolish the historiographical myth of the ninth-century Abbasid House of Wisdom. He argues that far from being an academy or even a dedicated school, it was in fact the palace library of al-Ma’mun and under that fabric we can include a number of scholars who made translations or wrote studies under caliphal patronage. How far exactly this differs from Dimitri Gutas’ earlier arguments is not entirely clear to me, but in general Ihsanoğlu has done a convincing job situating the House of Wisdom into its particular time and place and demonstrated that the organization itself has been misread over the years and that it never existed as a corporate body.
That’s all fine. There’s a 10k word article there. But including supporting materials, we have about 40k words here, far too many of which are repetitive. The book is also poorly edited, and needed a major copyedit to take care of numerous grammatical and spelling errors, something Routledge should have done as a bare minimum. There’s also too much historiography in first two “chapters”, and much of it is the sort of thing that should have been condensed to footnotes, while at the same time we don’t get the most important argument that Ihsanoğlu needs to deal with (Gutas) spelled out until half-way through the book.
It’s good that publishers are experimenting with something that sits in between the traditional academic article and the traditional monograph (ie: Routledge Focus, Cambridge Elements) but we’ve yet to see whether this will produce works of lasting value rather than a short-term, speedy road to publication designed to make money for the publisher while providing none of the services that they ought to provide.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews