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My sons! Wherever you stand in the market before a shop, stand only before those where weapons and books are sold.
Al-Muhallabi, tenth century64
As for the writing of books, no profession is more irksome;
Its shoots and its fruits spell penury.
He who undertakes it is like one who uses his needle
To clothe others while he himself remains naked.
Abdullah ibn Sarah, 112165
Clues to the products, knowledge and genius of Islamic civilization lie scattered through English dictionaries in words we have borrowed from Arabic. Take, for example, your common citrus fruits: lemons, limes and oranges. Then there are the flowers, herbs, sweets and spices: sherbet, saffron, sugar, syrup, jasmine, lilac and marzipan. There are clothes and fabrics, from satin to sashes to cotton to cassocks to damask to muslin. There are animals, like the giraffe and the camel; drinks, like alcohol and coffee; and musical instruments, like the tambourine and the lute. There are foods and cooking techniques, like spinach and tandoori. And there is a ripe miscellany of many words besides, from azure to safari to amalgam, from hashish to Satan to mafia, from rackets to elixirs to crimson, and from mummy to magazine to checkmate.
This flurry of words arrived on European shores as imports. All of them came from the most scientifically and intellectually advanced civilization of its day, the Abbasid Caliphate, which ruled over the lands of Islam from its capital city, Baghdad, and had won battles as far east as Talas. Yet Abbasid greatness had little to do with muslin, spinach or safaris. For that, you must look to other terms, terms for which Europe had no words of its own, terms that form the titles of borrowed genius. In mathematics, these new arrivals included algebra, the azimuth, algorithms and zero. In the earth sciences, Arabic introduced alchemy, chemistry, aniline, carat and alkali to European tongues. In the study of the heavens, it parcelled out still more words, from astrolabe to nadir to zenith.
Not all these words, or at least not all the ideas behind them, were home-grown. Thus the Abbasids took algorithms and zero from the Hindus, just as they took alchemy and the astrolabe from the Greeks. But they did domesticate them, making them their own and, in many cases, ensuring their survival. They built vast libraries to store their knowledge, but they were more than mere curators. Instead, they read, debated, proposed, tested, analysed, explored and discovered too. The Abbasids fed on existing knowledge before reproducing, expanding and filing it. They even criticized the Byzantines for ignoring the wisdom of the Greeks and repeatedly asked them for Greek texts of natural philosophy to translate. It was not simply a translation from one language to another, however. The Arabic scribes copied the Greek manuscripts from papyrus and parchment onto paper.
The Abbasid heyday is one of history’s golden ages, as the dynasty pursued philosophy, the study of the heavens (astrology, astronomy and cosmology), of language (poetry, linguistics and grammar), of the earth (chemistry, botany, geography and geology) and of mathematics (geometry, algebra and decimals). But more esoteric and reflective subjects caught widespread attention too, from magic and alchemy to theology, as well as more epicurean subjects, like cooking and erotica.
Classical Arabic is a difficult language to master. Grammar, lexicography, etymology and philology all developed under the Umayyads, Islam’s short-lived first dynasty, and their successors, the Abbasids, as the outworking of Koranic studies. These linguistic sciences were the first stirrings of an age of inquiry led by writing, and the trigger for them all had been the Koran.
The explanation of the Koran, tafsir, was considered a science in its own right, as was the study of Islamic law. Moreover, some of the laws threw up scientific conundrums too. How could the muezzin be sure that he made his five daily calls to prayer at the correct times? How could an architect check that the mihrab (the prayer-niche of a mosque) pointed towards Mecca? Only engaged, dedicated science and mathematics could provide accurate answers to these questions right across the Caliphate.
Metropolitan muezzins learnt to tell the time by careful study of the stars, often using instruments to help them, and their handbooks listed prayer times in cities throughout the empire. Yet these forms of knowledge were more than merely reactive. Instead, sums to determine the qibla, the direction of Mecca, were computed by men already conversant with trigonometry, astronomy and geography. These findings then had to be written down. As philosophy, medicine, astrology and astronomy developed alongside the linguistic sciences, and as writing flourished, the limited supply of papyrus and the expense of parchment quickly became a problem.
The eleventh-century historian al-Tha’labi created an extensive inventory of the empire’s market goods, matching products to their places of origin. In the Levant, he listed the cottons and papyrus of Egypt, the apples, glassware and olive oil of Syria, the swords and cloaks of Yemen, the robes of Rum and the roses of Jur. In the Caucasus and Persia, he praised the carpets of Armenia, the honey of Isfahan, the clothes of Merv and the cloaks of Rayy. Still further east, he named the musk of Tibet and, finally, the paper of Samarkand. Ibn al-Faqih, a tenth-century historian, wrote that the people of Khurasan were so expert in papermaking that their country might as well be a part of China itself. Yet papermaking would not remain confined to Khurasan and East Asia for long, thanks in particular to the Barmakid family.
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The word Barmecide (from Barmakid) is another Arab import; in English, it describes something illusory or imaginary. It derives from a story from The Arabian Nights, in which a member of the Barmakid family offers a meal of many courses to a beggar, a meal in which each dish is in fact empty. The beggar, Shacabac, is able to see the funny side and so pretends to eat the dishes. This was the first Barmecide feast.
Other than the Abbasids themselves, the Barmakids were Baghdad’s most prosperous and famous family and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they were from the east. For generations, their family had been guardians of the great Buddhist shrine at Balkh in northern Afghanistan, one of the major metropolises of the Middle Ages. The shrine was a magnet for Buddhist pilgrims and among the religion’s holiest sites.
Around the 660s, the Barmakids had married into the royalty of Transoxiana to the north and converted to Islam. The conversion proved political too, as the family switched its allegiance to the Abbasids. When the Abbasids took power in 750, Khalid ibn Barmak threw in his lot with the bureaucracy and never returned to the east. Instead, he became the financial administrator of the early Abbasid Caliphate and was appointed to the governorship of Fars in Persia, where he quickly became popular and even turned his hand to archaeology, storing ancient Persian treasures in a mountaintop refuge that the Arab armies would not attack. Back in Baghdad, he persuaded the caliph not to destroy the palace of Ctesiphon, begun under the Persian king Chosroes I in the seventh century. This rediscovery of Sassanid Persia was one of the driving forces of both scholarship and cosmopolitanism. There was even an Iranophile movement, a reaction against the dominance of the Arabs. The tolerance and inclusiveness of the Barmakids may have been symptoms of their Iranian loyalties or even of their private coolness towards Islam (although if such coolness existed they were careful not to let it show). In their home, theologians and free thinkers would meet to debate theology, linguistics and the sciences. Khalid also introduced the codex to replace the scroll in the taxation and military bureaus.
When Khalid ibn Barmak died in 780, his sons were already senior civil servants. (His son Yahya was so impressive that the caliph quipped that, whereas some men beget sons, Yahya had begotten a father.) Yahya ibn Khalid was appointed grand vizier in Baghdad under Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the picaresque hero of The Arabian Nights. His own sons, Fadl and Jafar, rose to senior positions too, until the Abbasid administration had become a Barmakid affair. The caliph even handed his personal affairs to Yahya, and the Barmakids skilfully administered the empire and encouraged the arts, allowing the caliph to play a largely ceremonial role.
It was Yahya’s two sons who brought paper to the heart of the Abbasid empire. Papyrus had quickly partnered with Islam and with Arabic but, aside from the island of Sicily, quirks of soil and climate had granted Egypt the monopoly on production. Yet it could not meet the demand for writing surfaces across the empire. In the 830s the caliph had even tried to found a papyrus factory a little north of Baghdad but it had not been a success. Besides, papyrus was good for scrolls but ill-suited to codices, as its edges frayed too easily, and Islamic literature tended to sit between two covers, a habit it had acquired from Syriac Christianity.
Parchment, however, could work only so long as scribes and authors were few in number, and given the outpouring of bureaucracy and learning even in its first half-century, the Abbasid Caliphate could not find all the parchment it needed, nor could it afford it. There was another problem: writing was the medium for Abbasid governance across the empire, but, with the deft use of water and a cloth, writing on parchment could be wiped off the page without a trace. And if words could disappear, they could also be replaced.
The two Barmakid brothers decided that the Abbasids needed to make the switch to paper. Fadl was governor of Khurasan, home to the city of Samarkand and its famous paper mills. The switch was surely his idea, but it was Jafar, the grand vizier, who took the decision to convert the empire to the paper of Khurasan. Jafar knew that the catalyst of such a transformation could never be the scholars, the booksellers or even the theologians, but only those High Priests of the Pax Islamica: the Abbasid bureaucrats.
Ibn Khaldun, the great North African historian of Islam, wrote in the late fourteenth century that parchment had no longer been sufficient. The reason, he argued, had been the expansion of both bureaucracy and scholarship.
Paper was used for government documents and certificates. Later, people used sheets of paper for state and scholarly writings, and its manufacture rose to new heights in quality.
It was still possible to import high-quality Chinese paper, but it was too soft, designed for the brushes of East Asia not the pens of the Muslim Caliphate. Moreover, Silk Road goods were expensive. Centuries earlier, Pliny the Elder had written that goods increased in value by a hundred times as they passed along the Silk Road from east to west and, as if to prove him right, the eleventh-century Muslim calligrapher Ibn al-Bawwab once accepted a stock of Chinese paper (presumably no more than 200 or 300 sheets) instead of a hundred gold dinars and a robe of honour.
Importing paper 1,300 miles from Samarkand was hardly a long-term solution. Fortunately, Baghdad was itself the greatest metropolitan invention of the eighth century and it was ready to learn everything it could. It radiated from the Round City, a geometrically planned symbol of power, order and learning which its founder, al-Mansur, built as a statement of intent. He wanted Baghdad to become the greatest city on earth, the world’s intellectual and scientific superpower – and he achieved his ambition. The first Arab institute of science was built here, while books were gathered in from neighbouring kingdoms and the city became a hub for scholars and scientists from distant lands.
In 795 Baghdad finally built its own paper mill. After centuries marooned in East Asia, papermaking had spread from China’s western borders to Mesopotamia, some 1,400 miles in less than fifty years. Moreover, the Baghdad mill produced enough paper for it to replace papyrus and parchment as the surface of the civil service’s bureaucratic records.
The Barmakids barely lived to see the beginning of the knowledge revolution they had wrought. There is still uncertainty over what led to their fall from favour but it may have been the discovery that Jafar was having an affair with the caliph’s sister. Whatever the cause, in 803 the caliph ordered one of his pages, Salam al-Abrash, to confiscate Jafar’s goods. When Salam arrived at Jafar’s house, the curtains had already been pulled down and Jafar himself was complaining that it was as though the apocalypse had begun. In the end, he was beheaded. The fall of the Barmakids robbed Baghdad of its most colourful and cultured family and the remaining six years of Harun’s reign were lacklustre by comparison. But one of their greatest legacies was the adoption of papermaking – there was even a type of paper called Jafari – and the city’s paper soon became known elsewhere too. Some Byzantine writers named it Bagdatixon.
Papers were exported outside the Muslim empire and even into Europe. Paper attracted writings on subjects in those foreign lands too. One of the earliest surviving writings on Arabic paper is a Greek manuscript on the teachings of the Church Fathers called Doctrina Patrum. It comes from Damascus and dates to around 800. The oldest extant and complete Arabic paper book dates to 848 and was found at Alexandria in Egypt.
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Islamic papers were usually made from a recipe of linen and hemp, which made them strong, durable and opaque. (The earliest Islamic papers were thick and weighty too; later on, a better mashing process improved their quality.) Rags and cords were unravelled and softened by combing before being steeped in lime water and then hand-kneaded to a pulp and bleached. The pulp then progressed from the mould onto a smooth wall to drain it, until it fell off. Next it was rubbed smooth with a starch mix and later dipped in rice water to clog the pores, thus holding the fibres together more firmly. Sometimes just one side was smoothed for writing so that two sheets could be stuck to one another for added strength. The paper came in three grades: common, raw or straw. It could also be given a range of finishes, from glazed to glossy to smooth.
When a buyer received his order, his sheets had been pre-folded to the size requested. They arrived in packs of twenty-five called dast, the Persian word for ‘hand’, which was translated into kaff in Arabic and, later, into main de papier in French. Five of these hands formed a rizma, from which comes the word ‘ream’.
After choosing the appropriate quality of paper, a calligrapher would combine it with ahar, a mixture of rice powder, starch, quince kernels, egg white and other ingredients, to give the paper a shiny surface which the pen could glide over easily. The calligrapher then burnished and smoothed the paper with a stone and placed a mastar between two sheets. (A mastar was a series of silken threads set across a cardboard frame to act as a ruler.) When he finished his writing, he sprinkled some sand over it as a ritual blessing.
Choice of colour was especially significant. Blue paper was used for mourning and even for death sentences in Egypt and Syria, whereas red was preferred for festivals and deep red for letters between senior officials. Baghdad even produced its own characteristic size, known as Baghdadi, which measured 42 by 29 inches, but the range of sizes trickled right down to the ‘bird paper’ that was attached to the fixed feathers of carrier pigeons: these papers measured just 3½ by 2½ inches. (It was also paper that allowed the shift to smaller, more personalized Korans, even pocket-sized Korans, always a turning point in the culture of any book-based religion.) If the paper looked antiquated, which some buyers preferred, it was because it had been treated with saffron or fig juice.
Paper raised the profile of the bureaucratic scribal class in general, known as the ‘people of the pen’, who kept their writing sets in decorated boxes which they carried on their waistbands. But it raised the profile of calligraphers in particular, and the Islamic injunction against representing God in an image (combined with Islamic coolness towards figurative art more generally) made calligraphy a more appealing art form. The greatest Abbasid calligrapher was Ibn Muqla, who was vizier to three caliphs in the tenth century and invented six script styles for Arabic. But his involvement in politics led to his lower right arm being amputated. It was said that he still managed to attach a reed pen to what remained of his arm and to compose calligraphy as beautifully as ever.
A trainee calligrapher needed to study under a calligraphy master for months or even years before he received the certificate that allowed him to sign products with his own name. The master taught him how to sit, usually squatting but sometimes kneeling with his feet folded backwards under him. He taught the student to rest the paper on his left hand or on the knee so that it was slightly flexible, as the round endings could be written more easily in this way than if it was placed on a hard desk or low table.
The student had to learn to curve some of his letter-endings until they appeared ‘woven on the same loom’. He was taught to trim his reed pen, although he might also use a quill. If he received the certificate, he could be sure of respect, but he would have to be exceptional to secure a place in a royal library, which would earn him a title: ‘Model of Scribes’ or ‘Golden Pen’. The first great Abbasid calligrapher was known as ‘the Squint-Eyed’. Perhaps the long hours spent pen-in-hand had spoiled his eyesight. In the fifteenth century, the great Persian calligrapher Mir Ali recalled forty years he had spent in calligraphy but complained that, while it had been slow to learn, yet without practice the skill was quickly forgotten.
This new passion for writing began, however, not with single-minded calligraphers but with bureaucrats. The Abbasid state used writing as its means of political control across the empire and its secretarial corps needed to be familiar with good grammar as well as with the administrative literature of bureaucracy, from technical terms for pens and inkwells to how to seal a document or keep a tax register. They used these skills to keep records of income and expenditure as well as military pay levels. Such men were trained in stylistics and orthography so that they could use and preserve the best Arabic possible as glue for the empire.
In fact, the Abbasids developed an abstruse bureaucracy so loaded with formalities and protocol that only experts could compose official documents of state. Moreover, in the provinces, registers had to be kept in different languages: Pahlavi in Mesopotamia and Persia, Greek and Syriac in Syria, Greek and Coptic in Egypt. Scribes quickly rose in stature under the Abbasids and it was only these same scribes who could have invented the new ‘stationer’s script’, an angular script coined for copying onto paper – the product of people who knew the surface well. By the mid-tenth century a few of them were even writing books about the bureaucracy itself – its development, achievements and even its heroes – or simply books of advice to their fellow scribes, like The Craft of Writing and The Education of the State Secretary.
Their aim was hardly original, namely, to govern the state by writing. But this did expand the use of paper, whether for tax records, legal documents, official correspondence, state archives, postal missives or military registers. Paper became the field of engagement for taxes, army services and the myriad new offices in Baghdad: the War Office, the Office of Expenditure, the State Treasury, the Board of Comparison, the Office of Correspondence, the Post Office, the Cabinet, the Office of Signet, the Office of Letter Opening (the caliph’s inbox), the Caliph’s Bank and the Office of Charity.
Fortunately, there was plenty of linen and hemp to feed this new culture of paperwork and books. The population was probably able to offer a continuous supply of rags to recycle, a supply that fuelled the mills that sold to the bookmakers, bookshops and libraries throughout the city. Walking through eleventh-century Baghdad, you had a choice of more than a hundred bookshops.
Most of the bookshops lay in the south-west of the city, in the Suq al warraqin, the Stationers’ Market, feeding and expanding the demand for paper. There were paper shops here too, as stationery was now one of the city’s great trades. (Some of the mills on the River Tigris may have been paper mills.) By the mid-ninth century, many educated Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Abbasid Caliphate were using paper to write letters, to keep records and to copy out literary or theological works.
Book collections began to sprout across Baghdad, as the readers’ market grew. Some 600,000 hand-copied Arabic manuscript books survive from the pre-printing era and this number can only be a small proportion of the number actually produced. There were public libraries and fee-charging reading rooms, since paper had made books cheaper but not yet cheap enough for all to afford. Calligraphers and copyists were the beneficiaries.
Bureaucrats are not usually dubbed pioneers, but in the Abbasid Caliphate it was bureaucrats who drove a new, literary culture until good diction and good calligraphy became marks of good breeding. Mudari Arabic, as the post-classical language is known, gathered to itself a galaxy of words and wordplays for men of letters to draw on. In a few cases, women took up the pen too, especially among those women based at court. At the roots of this new passion for the Arabic language lay not just the Koran itself, reckoned the highest authority on good Arabic, but also the scholars who studied Arabic grammar and vocabulary for more technical purposes. The tenth-century philologist al-Bawardi, who died in 957, dictated 30,000 pages on linguistic topics from memory. From such scholarly beginnings, more frivolous uses of language began to emerge too.
Men were admired for wording their thoughts playfully and intricately while their letters of state were expected to be lessons in elegance, feathered with rhyming prose. Any serious composition included quotations from poetry and references to obscure points of learning. Often men wrote about, say, biology, not to explore and explain the animal world but to amuse their readers with well-worked phrases and witty observations. At court, writing was still more frivolous and poems even composed about the food at state banquets.
Meanwhile, the Arabic language was taking over from Greek as the Mediterranean’s storehouse of ideas and science. As the translations into Arabic poured in – of Greek and Persian philosophy, Indian mathematics, Jewish and Christian scriptures and works in Pahlavi, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew and Syriac – the Abbasid bookshelves became a library of Eurasian learning and ideas.
Caliph al-Mansur, Baghdad’s eighth-century founder, devoted himself to literature, opening a translation bureau and collecting Greek, Persian and Sanskrit works in their hundreds on philosophy, medicine and astronomy, to name just a few of their subjects. All were translated into Arabic. Bibliophiles built private libraries. A popular explanation of the death of the ninth-century scholar al-Jahiz, already partially paralysed in his old age, was that he had piled so many books around his house that one day they collapsed and killed him. Another Baghdad bookworm had his sleeves enlarged so he could carry bigger volumes in them as he walked through the city.
Baghdad had no professional academic class, as we would understand it, but the city was full of unofficial intellectuals, of people absorbed in books, copying, book dealing, reading and in collecting the Traditions of the Prophet, the hadith. The influence of the Koran was far-reaching: Koranic injunctions to heal the sick propelled medicine and led to free local health care, as well as to new drugs and to advances in optics and surgery.
The Caliphate’s first Institute of Scientific Studies (mentioned earlier) was founded in Baghdad in 830, a fusion of a library, an academy and a translation bureau. It was known as the House of Wisdom. After a dream in which he claimed Aristotle had appeared to him, Caliph al-Mamun, who governed the empire from 813 to 833, sent letters to the Byzantine emperor requesting works by Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid and Ptolemy. Once he received them, he commissioned the most experienced of his translators, notably al-Kindi (author of more than 260 titles, according to Ibn al-Nadim) to produce Arabic versions. He also sent astronomers to work in the House of Wisdom, its library inherited (if only in its conception) from Sassanid Persia and home to many translated scientific works.
Al-Mamun collected rare books from anywhere he could, sending scholars to Egypt, Syria, Persia and India. Some went of their own accord, as the empire allowed them to travel and scholars were increasingly curious to learn from other cultures. One bibliophile, Husain bin Ishaq, travelled to Palestine, Egypt and Syria in search of a single book – in the end he found half of it in Damascus. But foreign scholars came to Baghdad too; the Hindu physician Duban worked for al-Mamun alongside Parsees, Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Caliph Mamun’s scholars calculated the earth’s circumference with remarkable accuracy. The West would name algorithms after the philosopher and mathematician al-Khwarizmi. He also resurrected algebra and introduced the numerals we use today, which led to the discovery of decimal fractions and the calculation of pi to six decimal places. Five of the six trigonometric functions (cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant and cosecant) were Arab discoveries, engineered on the basis of the Hindu knowledge of sine; these were the building blocks for mathematical astronomy.
The Arabic translation of the second-century Almagest of Ptolemy was seminal for astronomy. Mapmaking and navigation progressed apace, proving that the Indian Ocean was not landlocked and thus indirectly fuelling Europe’s Age of Exploration. Astronomical data, which were still read in Roman fractions in Europe, were calculated far more accurately by the Arabs in degrees, minutes and seconds. Abbasid science was fostered and encouraged by the state. The Arab search for the laws that governed nature was also a religious quest, stemming from belief in a divinely appointed order that could be studied, understood and harnessed to the religious needs of the state – from helping pilgrims with directions on the hajj to the tenth-century scholar Abu Bakr al-Anbari’s fabulous 45,000 pages of hadiths.
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Improved access to paper as a writing and reading surface aided standardization, spurring improved systems of notation in mathematics, geography and genealogy. In this growing complexity, it advanced the capacity of written communication too, aiding clarity. Paper even transformed metalwork, ceramics, textiles, pottery, weaving and architecture, since it allowed designs to be drawn out first as well as for them to be sent on to fellow artisans thousands of miles away. (It has been argued that Persian miniatures, oriental rugs and the Taj Mahal could probably never have existed without this cultural exchange that paper allowed.66) In short, paper helped to create an empire-wide network of knowledge and learning that became the engine-room of Islamic civilization, and its availability cemented Arab Islam’s adoption of the page as its storehouse of knowledge, where in the past it had simply relied on oral tradition. If the late eighth century saw the rise of paper across the Caliphate, it was the ninth century that saw its potential increasingly realized in Islamic civilization’s great crescendo of learning.
To the north, the Byzantine empire only adopted paper after the Caliphate: paper may have seen some use in the ninth century but it was certainly not widespread before the eleventh and the re-use of parchment in palimpsests continued, even in Constantinople. The Byzantines viewed themselves as the preservers of ancient Greece’s literary heritage but they were only partly successful; there is no evidence their libraries ranked with the largest of the ancient world. Instead, several hundred books were viewed as ample for a major Byzantine library, while the great Abbasid libraries’ stock could be counted in the thousands or tens of thousands. The Byzantines tended to import their paper, initially from the Arabs, later from Spain, and still later from Italy, and even after the eleventh century, paper was used in state archives and not for religious manuscripts. Paper slowly became more common in Byzantium during the thirteenth century, but only came to dominate Byzantine writing in the fourteenth. By then, book collections had been severely reduced as a result of the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. By 1453, when the Turks conquered the city, there were very few texts left.67 It was only at this point that a paper mill was established (by the Ottomans) in Constantinople itself.
To the south and east of Byzantium, however, papermaking developed a far more impressive momentum, one that would ultimately drive it into Europe. From Baghdad, it was able to travel through Egypt and the Maghrib with ease. Indeed, southern Europe would show a strong interest in Islamic paper before the Byzantines, and Syrian paper became famous in Europe as charta damascena. Constantinople was, at least in terms of the Mediterranean, the end of one of paper’s many trails.
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While European libraries still counted their books in the hundreds for most of the mid and late Middle Ages – even as late as the fourteenth century the Vatican Library held only 2,000 volumes (largely on parchment or vellum) – Islamic lands built libraries in all their major cities. In Baghdad, a theological school founded in 1065 cost 60,000 dinars to build but had an annual expenditure of 60–70 million dinars. Its books numbered in the tens of thousands. In 1228 a new institute was built in eastern Baghdad and 160 camels were needed to transfer its rare and valuable books from the Imperial Library. It used an open-shelf system and students could even access rare manuscripts. It had taken six years to build and it included lecture rooms for teaching astronomy and other sciences, as well as the teachings of Muhammad. At its peak, it held 140,000 volumes.
In North Africa, a royal library was founded in Cairo late in the tenth century. By the twelfth century, under the Fatimid dynasty, it was counted as one of the wonders of the world. It had forty rooms and 1,600,000 books and booklets; 600,000 of these dealt with theology, grammar, tradition, history, geography, astronomy and chemistry. There were 12 copies of al-Tabari’s seminal history and 2,000 copies of the Koran written by famous calligraphers. Meanwhile, also in Cairo, the Al-Azhar Mosque Library held a stock of some 200,000 books in the late tenth century. A record of the royal library’s annual budget breakdown has survived, proof that paper, though far less expensive than parchment or papyrus, was still not cheap:
275 dinars
Librarian salary 48 dinars
Paper for copyists 90 dinars
Paper, ink, pens 12 dinars
Torn/damaged book repair 12 dinars68
In 1068, as political and economic instability plagued the Caliphate (following several decades during which the Abbasids’ control was on the wane), twenty-five camel-loads of its books were sold for just 100,000 dinars to pay soldiers’ wages. A few months later Turkic soldiers plundered and destroyed the rest, burning some and throwing others into the Nile (although some manuscripts would be rescued). They tore up the leather bindings to make shoes and discarded much of what was left at a site they later dubbed ‘Book Hill’ – biblioclasm, usually in the form of bookburning, is as old as the book itself.
Libraries and paper mills often grew up together and the chief Islamic papermaking centres were often the heartlands of its literary culture and book trade too. To the east, of course, there were flourishing Islamic papermaking industries in Samarkand, Tabriz in Persia and Daulatabad, in north-west India. At the southern end of the Arabian peninsula, paper was made at Sana and Tihamah, both in Yemen. To the west, it was made in Xativa in the Caliphate of Cordoba, Tripoli and in Fez, where one Arab historian counted 472 paper mills in the twelfth century. To the north, papermaking centred on Tiberias in Turkey and Hierapolis in Israel, as well as on the inevitable centres of Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad.
The tenth-century Abbasid emir Adud al-Dawla built a library in Shiraz, in southern Iran, with one long, vaulted room flanked by store rooms and high scaffolds covered in shelves, each scaffold devoted to a different subject. He equipped it with catalogues for reference and a ventilation chamber to carry water around its pipes. This last invention was less impressive, as the damp seems to have done for the collection. Just to the west, at Basra in today’s southern Iraq, the city’s library held 15,000 bound volumes (plus unbound books and loose manuscripts). Rayy, Mosul and Mashhad held large collections too.
The Caliphate had become a bureaucratic behemoth, a repository of ancient knowledge, a forum for authorship and a patron of philosophers and scientists alike, and paper had become the currency of information and communication from India to the Maghrib.
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The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century forged fresh lines of communication and commerce across Eurasia. Moreover, the curiosity of a handful of pioneering and radical European scholars had already led them to study the books of the Arabs, and even to travel to Abbasid or Cordoban lands. As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, this slow stream of scholars increased. They brought back Arabic and Hebrew books to translate into Latin, among them the works of Averroes and Avicenna, whose natural philosophies would begin to unravel the Roman Church’s intellectual authority, while learning was gradually shifting from monasteries to universities. In The House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons writes that Europe even imported an ‘Arab Aristotle’, an Aristotle tailored to suit the needs of the monotheism shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. In other words, alterations made by Islamic scholars could later become part of accepted European knowledge.
Hints of where paper was headed next in its worldwide journey could be found in Muslim Spain, where eight centuries of Islamic rule and frequent prosperity brought untold treasures of knowledge to the European mainland. Forty-four years after the first Arab invasion of 755, the Emirate of Cordoba was founded. Until then, Iberia had been a backwater. Across the Mediterranean the Abbasid dynasty was in power, but the independent exile empire of the Umayyads in Spain began to compete with the Abbasids in literature as in science. In the tenth century, Hakam II’s library in Cordoba reportedly held 400,000 volumes. Even the library’s index of authors and titles ran to forty-four volumes of fifty folios each. In Cordoba in southern Spain, private libraries flourished, as did non-Muslim libraries – some Christians kept libraries but most of their books were in Arabic. The city of Cordoba had a lively book market and, unusually for its time, female scholars.
Al Andalus’s incorporation into the Pax Islamica made it the recipient of waves of people, arts, plants, inventions, recipes, ideas and foods from across the Mediterranean. Political division in early ninth-century Baghdad also brought a handful of fresh scholars to its shores. By the eleventh century, the Spanish had become Europe’s best farmers and had begun to study Aristotle in detail. Thus Spain under Hakam II was as prodigious in learning as in libraries. Moreover, from Umayyad Spain, as from the Abbasid Caliphate, translations, commentaries and scientific treatises began to seep into some of Europe’s first universities, in Bologna, Paris and Oxford.
Although the Umayyad Caliphate had begun to develop quite distinctly from the Abbasid Caliphate as early as the 750s, yet for the story of paper, its embrace of knowledge and learning was part of the same story that had begun in Baghdad. Despite its own paper spring, it would not be Islamic Spain which would transform Europe with its exported papers – that transformation would come much later than the start of Al-Andalus’s slow decline, which began in the eleventh century. Baghdad, however, remained the symbol of all that the Umayyids and Abbasids had achieved, a city which had gathered learning from around Europe and Asia – and put it to use. By the time the Mongol armies reached the gates of the old Abbasid capital in 1258, Baghdad boasted thirteen major libraries, including a madrasa library, founded in 1233, to which the caliph’s porters had carried 80,000 works.
For a week the Mongol troops burnt the city’s buildings, raped its women and ransacked its libraries. They threw Baghdad’s books into the River Tigris and the waters were said to run black with ink for six months. Baghdad would rise again and even relaunch its papermaking industry, but, just as its days at the pinnacle of a united Caliphate were gone, so its role as the engine-room of paper’s spread was finished too.
The ink and papers of its stored knowledge, science and ideas were swept downstream towards the Persian Gulf. Yet it would have been more apt had they flowed westwards instead, across Jordan and Palestine and into the Mediterranean Sea. For, after centuries in the Caliphate’s intellectual shadow, Europe was drawing closer to a great paper-made revolution of its own, one that sat solidly on the shoulders of what the Abbasids and Umayyads had achieved, yet which would soon far surpass it.