Books, Manuscripts and Camels: A Look at the Glory of the Abbasid Dynasty (chapter 1)

 

Books, Manuscripts and Camels: A Look at the Glory of the Abbasid Dynasty

Apart from being a center for education, the mosque also functions as a place to store books. The books were obtained from gifts given to mosque administrators or search results from various sources. Therefore, the mosques in the Abbasid period have a very rich treasure trove of religious books.

One of the donors of the books was a famous historian named al-Khathib al-Baghdadi (1002-1071), who gave his books as waqf for Muslims. It's just that the books are kept at a friend's house. Other libraries were built by the nobility or the rich as study institutions that were open to the public, storing a number of collections of books on logic, philosophy, astronomy, and other fields of science.

The library is also a center for Muslim education. Muslim scholars from various types of scientific traditions: religion ( naqliyyah ), literature, philosophy, mathematics, physics, medicine, botany, to Sufism, each contributed a wealth of treasures of Islamic knowledge to be proud of. The intellectual property of classical Islam comes from two sources.

First, it comes from translations of ancient manuscripts from various pre-Islamic civilizations along with comments given by Muslim scientists. Second, sourced from scientific works. Generally, these Muslim scholars gave birth to spiritual children, in the form of hundreds of scientific works of various types of science during their lives, as if they lived only to read, research and write. Ibn Hazm, for example, is reported to have written four hundred books totaling 80,000 pages.

In the mid-tenth century, the city of Mosul had a library built by one of its inhabitants. In the library, students who visit it can get paper and other stationery for free. The library ( khizanat al-kutub ) was built in Shiraz by the ruler of Buwaihi, 'Adud al Dawlah (977-982) whose books were all arranged on cupboards, listed in catalogs, and well managed by the administrative staff who took turns guarding .

In the same century, the city of Basra had a library in which scholars worked and earned wages from the library's founder. And, in the city of Rayy there is a place dubbed the "House of Books". It is said that the place holds thousands of manuscripts transported by more than four hundred camels. All of the manuscripts were then listed in a ten-volume catalog.

The libraries were used as meeting places for scientific discussion and debate. Ulama Yaqut al-Hamawi, for example, spent three years gathering the materials he needed to write his geography dictionary. The materials he obtained from various libraries in Marwa and Kharizm. He also had to stop his efforts in 1220, when the Mongol army under Genghis Khan began to attack Muslim lands and burnt the entire library.

In the 13th century, the Fatimid library in Cairo had a collection of two million titles. There are also many libraries in Tripoli. In general, by the 13th century there were about five million titles available; a very large number of books for that era.