Much credit for the Islamic flowering of knowledge and philosophy goes to the second ʿAbbāsid caliph, Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr, who ruled from 754 to 775. It was he who established Baghdad, which soon became a center of scholarship, as his new capital. He was also the founding patron of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement commencing in the middle of the eighth century, which would help catalyze the rediscovery of classical Greek knowledge that would take place in the West after the turn of the millennium.10 The patronage of al-Manṣūr and his successors enabled the translation of vast amounts of
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