Part I
Baghdad, the capital of the “Abbasid Caliphate”, was established after a careful search for the most suitable place to establish as the basis of the new administration and the new army. Al-Mansur (754–775), the second Abbasid Caliph, selected a fertile and strategically convenient place on the main routes of communications with various parts of the empire.1 The historical growth of Baghdad, beginning with a magnificent, round city constructed by al-Mansur in 145/762, suggests a rather different type of urban development. The round city, or Madinat al-Salam (the city of peace), as it was also called, was not a prefabricated military camp given permanency by a growing sedentary environment, but rather the product of consummate planning and execution.2
The advent of Islam and the Arab conquests brought to an end the old divisions that separated the civilized world for a millennium since the time of Alexander the Great. Egypt and the fertile crescent were united with Persia, Central Asia, and India under central political authority based in Baghdad. This led to the free flow of goods, knowledge, and ideas. It was the agricultural revolution of the first centuries after the Arab conquest that provided much of the wealth of the early empire and benefited all social strata.3
The earliest settlers of Baghdad were undoubtedly the followers and supporters of the caliph. They were the Abbasid family, the companions, the client (Mawali), the commanders, the army, and the masses. The quick growth of the population and of economic activity led to the expansion of a Baghdad as a whole, until it became the greatest city in the empire and the largest in the world. The capital of the Abbasid Empire was a real metropolis, and better representative of the Islamic Empire than semi-nomadic Medina or quasi-Byzantine Damascus. Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, and Turkish cultures were living together as early as its foundation, and the scantiness of the Greco-Byzantine elements was compensated for by the active translation of the Greek intellectual heritage into Arabic.4
The population was nevertheless linked together by the common bonds of the Arabic language, the Islamic religion, and their allegiance to the caliph who stood above racial divisions. The army and the officials formed the majority of the population of early Baghdad as they did in the amsar (garrison towns); but whereas the amsar were dominated by a population of almost purely Arabic nomadic stock whose relations with the government were not always smooth, the population of early Baghdad had good relations with the ruling Abbasid Caliphs. The non-Arab elements were many, but the caliph’s support of the nomadic culture and the Arabs created a balance and a peaceful process of establishing a cosmopolitan civilization into which were integrated the numerous different cultures that already existed in the Middle East.5
Baghdad, as Ira M. Lapidus observes, was the product of upheavals, population movements, economic changes, and conversions of the preceding century; it became the home of a new, heterogeneous, and cosmopolitan Middle Eastern society. Under the Abbasids the empire no longer belonged to the Arabs, though they had conquered its territories, but to all those peoples who would share in Islam and in the emerging networks of political, social, economic, and cultural loyalties which defined a new cosmopolitan Middle Eastern society. The Abbasids continued the Umayyad effort to centralize political power in the hands of the caliph and the ruling elite.
Many of the scribes in the expanding Abbasid bureaucracy were Persians from Khurasan, who had begun to enter the central government under the late Umayyads. Nestorian Christians were powerfully represented, while certain smaller minorities such as Jews were active in tax and banking activities. Under the Caliphs al-Mahdi (r. 775–785) and Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), the members of the Barmakid family were actively engaged in bureaucracy. The Barmakids who were often described as Persian but were more precisely central Asian Iranian, descended from Buddhist priesthoods of the city of Balkh. Shortly after the foundation of Baghdad, Khalid al-Barmaki became the chief minister for al-Mansur. They played an outstanding role in the first half of the Abbasid rule. Though powerful, the Barmakids were not chiefs of the whole administration. The empire was tolerant and inclusive rather than monolithic.6
The upper class of Abbasid society was formed by a coalition of provincial and capital city elites, who agreed on a common concept of the dynasty and the purposes of political power and who were organized through bureaucratic and other political institutions to impose their rule on the population of the empire. The bureaucracy mobilized the skills and social influence of prominent persons throughout the empire and put these assets at the disposal of Baghdad.7
Arabic was the mother tongue of the Arabs, the religious language of the Muslims, and the cultural instrument of the scholars who began to flock to the flourishing new imperial capital, enjoying the freedom of thought and non-interference of the state. Those scholars were scattered in the various quarters of the city, and they did not have one academic center, but preferred to teach in the mosques.
The early Abbasid Caliphs endeavored to encourage Arabic culture and chose Arabic scholars to educate their sons. They encouraged the collecting of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as well as the translation into Arabic of Greek and Indian works in medicine, astronomy, geometry, and mathematics. Many commanders and notables shared with the caliphs in their interests and thereby aided in establishing Arabic firmly in the new city as well as in the empire.8
There were no formal institutions of learning. Instead, intellectual activities were conducted in various places. Mosques were the seat of major scholarly and educational endeavors in the field of religious studies while most literary and scientific activities that enlisted the interest of the caliphs, including different aspects of writing and translation, were undertaken around the caliph’s court. No doubt, the homes of scholars and literati were the first incubators of their activities.
The court of the caliphs and the administrative and political elite contributed especially to Islamic art, architecture, philosophy, science, and Iranian and Hellenistic forms of literatures in Arabic. The court and the aristocratic milieu, while accepting the Islamic identity, stressed the aspects of belles-lettres, science, and philosophy to help define the authority of the regime and the legitimacy of the ruling classes. A common culture, shared values, symbols, and ideas were essential for the functioning of this elite. A literary and philosophic culture was needed to present a vision of the universe with a preeminent role given to the state and the ruler in the divine plan and in the functioning of human society, and a concept of the nature of the human beings and their destiny in this world and the next.
Thus, the Abbasid dynasty patronized Arabic poetry and the translation into Arabic of Iranian literary classics including works of history, polite literature, fables, political precepts and manuals of protocol, behavior for scribes, and the mythic and scientific lore of Persia and India. Similarly, Syriac and Greek classics in science, medicine, and philosophy were translated into Arabic.9 So the court served to propagate a pre-Islamic concept of the ruler and the empire. Interest in the secular aspects of Arabic literature, Persian Adab, and Hellenistic philosophies and sciences signified the appropriation of a cultural heritage which could be used to legitimize caliphal rule. They provided, in the Arabic case, an ethnic concept of political leadership, in the Persian case, a continuation of the heritage of ancient Middle Eastern kings, and in the Hellenistic case, a concept of the structure of the universe itself, in philosophic and scientific form, as the ultimate justification for imperial rule. The patronage of these several literatures implied ultimately that the caliph, though a Muslim ruler, was legitimized in non-Islamic cultural terms going back to the heritage of the ancient Middle East.10
Urban Islamic religious culture was ultimately the amalgamation of different orientations including Qur’anic exegesis, hadith (prophetic traditions), law, theology, mystical discourse, and the Shi’ite concept of Imamate. Meanwhile the heritage of Greece and Iran as well as Arabia was being incorporated into Islam. The historical religions of the Middle East were recast into a new, high cultural monotheistic vision.11 In the theological field some Muslim scholars came to realize that Greek methods of argumentation were a useful weapon against both Muslim opponents and non-Muslims.12
During this period, the sciences of the ancients (‘ulum al-’awa’il) also called foreign sciences (al-’ulum al-dakhila), rational or intellectual sciences (al-’ulum al’aqliyya), or philosophical sciences (al-’ulum al-falsafiyya, or al-’ulum al-hikamiyya or what is shortly known as al-hikma/wisdom) were transmitted from antiquity and formed an integral part of the new encyclopedia of knowledge. The integration of these sciences in the epistemological and educational structure was a long process which started in this era and was achieved in steps.
The diversification of literary and scholarly interests that developed in the early Abbasid era had its impact on wider segments of society. The introduction of paper as a writing material in the lands of the Abbasid Caliphate, after the Talas Battle took place in Taraz (in today’s Kazakhstan) between the Muslim and the Chinese armies (Tang dynasty) in 134/751, brought the art of papermaking to Samarkand from where it spread shortly after to the capital city of Baghdad and to the rest of the Muslim world. The establishment of the first paper mill in Baghdad around 795 transformed Abbasid culture from an oral tradition to a bookish culture. This revolutionary process in producing inexpensive books helped the credibility of the earlier oral tradition of Arabic and Islamic tradition and also helped the dissemination of these sciences as well as the foreign sciences to a larger audience of learned people. Thus, it was not only the limited circle of the caliph’s courtiers that admired and developed an affinity to foreign sciences but also a wider social milieu that developed a taste and interest in these sciences as a mark of civilized behavior. Acquiring and cultivating the knowledge of foreign sciences became a prerequisite for becoming an intellectual.
After the second/eighth century and until the Mongol invasion, Baghdad was the center where arts and sciences were sought. In addition to some clues in the primary sources that enlighten certain aspects of intellectuality in early Abbasid period, we know also cultural image of Abbasid life mirrored in the partly fanciful tale of Arabian Nights where scholars, as well as simple people such as the chatterbox barber, are portrayed as an astrologer and learned in alchemy and white magic, syntax, grammar and lexicology, the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution, mathematics, arithmetic and algebra, astronomy, astromancy and geometry, theology, traditions of the prophet, and commentaries of the Quran.13
And not only were men, scholars, and barbers expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge, but young and beautiful slave girls were also expected to be, or perhaps dreamt of, as mines of learning and wisdom. In the story of “Abu al-Hasan and his Slave Girl Tawaddud”, the latter describes herself as one versed in syntax and poetry and jurisprudence and exegesis and philosophy, saying that
I am skilled in music and the knowledge of the Divine ordinance and in arithmetic and geodesy and geometry and the fables of the ancients. I know the Sublime Qur’an by heart and have read it according to the seven, the ten and the fourteen modes. I know the number of its chapters and verses and sections and words … I know the Holy Traditions … and I have studied the exact sciences, geometry and philosophy and medicine and logic and rhetoric and composition; and I have learnt many things by rote and am passionately fond of poetry. I can play the lute …14
These narratives imply the quality and amplitude of life in the city as well as the wide scope of scholars, combining interest and erudition in both indigenous Arabic and Islamic sciences, as well as in foreign sciences or the sciences of the ancients.
In previous studies, we have maintained that the classical sciences or sciences of the ancients ‘ulum al-’awa’il were first transferred through translations, encouraged by the help of official and semi-official patronage, personal intellectual inquiry, and exploration. This classical heritage became an integral part of knowledge, ‘ilm, as described theoretically in the epistemological models established by Muslim scholars, and as explicitly expressed in the different classifications of sciences and being an official component of teaching in some Muslim institutions of learning, including madrasas at a later stage. This process, which started with the personal interest of the Abbasid Caliphs in the eighth century, acquired an institutional character in the following centuries and found its formal shape in the fifteenth century, and by the sixteenth century it was well established in the Ottoman epoch.
Primary sources are unanimous on al-Ma’mun’s interest in knowledge and scholarship. The lengthy narratives of his legal, theological, and intra- and interconfessional debates, and his knowledge of theology and the law, enabled him to participate in intellectual and religious discussions and reflect on his personal involvement in his milieu’s scholarly debate. Out of genuine interest in scholarly matters, he held regular disputations in which literary, religious, theological, and philosophical issues were discussed. He not only encouraged research into ancient science and philosophy but also personally pursued research.15 Al-Dinawari (d. 896) noted that al-Ma’mun excelled among the Abbasids in learning; he acquired a certain degree of knowledge about it and had an active interest in every branch of knowledge.16 For example, he was involved extensively enough in astronomical calculations to verify, while in Damascus, conflicting observational results and to check the functioning of instruments for accurate measurement.
Meanwhile, it was in al-Ma’mun’s era that a divide emerged between religiously motivated scholars and those who adopted Greek philosophy and its instruments of disputation. This divide was intensified by the enforcement of mihna/inquisition by Caliph al-Ma’mun as will be shown below.
In al-Ma’mun’s (r. 813–833) attempt to consolidate his power, enforce his centralized administration and eventually get away with any legitimacy issues, he adopted what came to be known as Mihna (inquisition/ordeal). Al-Ma’mun’s new policy was based on absolutist interpretation of Islam, with the caliph as the ultimate arbiter of dogmas. This unpredicted, strange move was completely against the current decentralization of religious authority that had been gaining momentum until al-Ma’mun’s time. His policy when he returned from Merv to Baghdad in 819 was centered on controlling the religious discussions in the capital, and by extension in the Islamic world. A rising threat to his authority was that numerous religious scholars were perceived as the proper interpreters of Islam, thus taking power away from the central authority.17
Al-Ma’mun, in his adoption of the view of the “createdness of Qur’an”, forced religious scholars to conform to this doctrine of the Mu’tazila, otherwise they would be persecuted, punished, imprisoned, and even killed. This doctrine implies that the Qur’an was a worldly object, and thus not itself part of the divine being. This was in contrast with the idea that the Qur’an was uncreated, in other words eternal, and an emanation of and part of the divine being.
The Mu’tazilites were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. They insisted that the divine attributes such as knowledge (omniscience) had no-existence of any sort except in God’s essence. It followed that the Qur’an, if it was uncreated, was some sort of eternal existence besides God’s essence, and so an infringement of His unity and for this reason they insisted that it was created and not eternal; thus, it could be altered by the divinely inspired Imam.18 On the other hand, the advocates of hadith stood in contrast to the idea that the Qur’an was created and they maintained that the Qur’an was not created and it was an emanation of and part of the divine being. This position practically meant also that revelation (including Qur’an and hadith) was above all human authority. They organized a separate movement under the leadership of Ahmed Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), in resistance to the inquisition put forth by al-Ma’mun.
Al-Ma’mun’s policy toward createdness of the Qur’an widened the differences between the two forms of early Islamic culture and community: between the division of state and religious communities; between the court and urban ulema; between the cosmopolitan and religious forms of Islamic civilization. Al-Ma’mun declared himself as Imam al-Huda, the guide inspired by God, and the Caliph of God (Khalifat Allah).19
The term Hikma seems to have undergone a semantic evolution since it meant wisdom and classical sciences, which was then associated with “heretical” beliefs and came to refer to vulgarization of the teaching of the Isma’ili doctrine as such.20 The Durus al-hikma, sama’ al-hikma or majalis al-hikma as described by Qadi al-Nu’man (d. 974) were destined to diffuse the principles of Shi’ite (and Isma’ili) fiqh.21 After al-Mutawakkil (r. 842–861) put an end to the inquisition (in 850), the term “hikma” started to imply heavy Mu’tazila or even Sh’ite connotations, and so the appellation was carefully avoided and “Bayt al-Hikma’s” heirs or successors were named “Dar al-’Ilm” (The House of Science/Knowledge). Could it be also the reason why the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim’s “Dar al-Hikma”, an institution that oscillated between Sunni Islam and Isma’ili propaganda and was first named “Dar al-Hikma”, became known as also “Dar al-’Ilm” (The House of Science/Knowledge) in order to hide its Shi’te-Ismaili tendencies and enhance its Sunni facade?
It is against this diversified background that the Abbasid palace library was born and established and was attributed with different names and appellations. So, in revisiting the House of Wisdom in attempt to clarify the ambiguities and to correct the depiction of caliphal library, we should keep in mind this panoramic frame of the social and cultural factors in the capital of the Abbasid Empire.22
A Revisiting the Abbasid House of Wisdom
The emergence of institutions of learning and their continuation or decline will be better understood when they are considered in their sociocultural context. Elitist institutions only survive by royal patronage and seldom endure the demise of their patrons unless their foundations are in harmony with the social dynamics or are adequately endowed with the means of survival. Thus, the durability and sustenance of any institution will not depend on the patronage of its founder but on the stance of the society that it belongs to, its cultural mission and the need for the continuation of its mission, and the intellectual approach of its scholars and whether it is in harmony with the values of the society. Overlooking the historical context of these institutions, reading modern models into classical texts, and idealizing their structures and functions according to the ambition of the scholars who study them, can only serve to create more confusion in the objective rewriting of their history. The similarities between institutions belonging to consequent civilizations constitute another difficult aspect in the study of these institutions. Whether the new institutions were inspired or influenced by previous ones or emerged as a natural development in answer to certain demands and needs which led to their formation in such a way that they reflected similar characteristics that could be considered as the result of inspiration, imitation, or amelioration, are other interesting questions.
All these issues pose problems in studying these institutions and attempting to readdress and rewrite their history objectively. For scholars, this task will be more intriguing particularly in the absence of sufficient historical reports and narratives and due to the fragmented and scattered nature of the surviving accounts.
Readdressing and rectifying the image of any institution created by generations of scholars because of misunderstanding of certain texts or due to anachronistic, and historicist maladies is not an easy undertaking; the most difficult aspect of such reconsideration would be the lack of enthusiasm in welcoming the new realistic and rather modest results as compared to the established and glittering images.
The historiography of the Abbasid House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) seems to be a perfect example of all the above and more. The ninth-century palace library of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad acquired a strange image during the twentieth century, because of the abovestated reasons and with additional exaggerated concerns due to national and emotional aspirations, which dominated a significant part of the scholarship.
The information related by historical sources about the palace library of the Abbasid Caliphs Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) and his son al-Ma’mun (r. 813–833) is very limited. This scanty information is scattered in historical sources and comprises few surviving anecdotes and bio-bibliographical notes. Among them are a few anecdotes relating to their reigns, in addition to some references provided by al-Nadim (d. 990) for the first time in his book al-Fihrist, which is the main source of our information on the cultural life in the early Abbasid period and includes extensive bibliographic information on written and translated Arabic works produced in this time. This and the later sources, which divulge some information, do not go beyond referring to the existence of a palace or court library during the reign of the two caliphs and a late reference to the reign of al-Mu’tadid (r. 892–902), and the names of some scholars who were associated with this library. The few lines in these sources somehow constituted an inexhaustible source for the imagination of some scholars and their farfetched assumptions. Later, the resulting picture of the Abbasid House of Wisdom as an “academy” comprising various departments, including a school or bureau of translation, an observatory, and others, was developed into the myth of the first “university” in history.
As we shall discuss and refute these baseless claims in detail and try to deconstruct this inflated image, it is essential to indicate the nature and context of the handful of historical references that turned out to be inexhaustible sources for this historical concoction. The surviving anecdotes and short references, which we shall quote later in detail, refer to the caliphal library using different wordings. The palace library was the repository or storehouse (khizana) or the house (bayt) of books of wisdom (hikma), a word which in this context denotes that the subjects of these books were primarily foreign sciences, that is, non-religious sciences introduced from Greek, Syriac, Indian, and Sassanian sources.
A careful examination of al-Nadim’s few references clearly show that he refers to the palace library of the two caliphs with different combinations of the aforementioned words. It seems that some modern scholars have taken these variants as expressions of different institutions and the compound name “Bayt al-Hikma” was the appellation for a different institution which they thought was more than a palace library.
Modern scholars dealing with the different aspects of cultural life in the early Abbasid period tend to portray the court library known as the House of Wisdom as the pivot of all cultural and scholarly activities and religious and philosophical discussions, and they placed it in the middle of vehement controversy and depicted it as the arena of debates and disputations among the proponents and the opponents of al-Ma’mun’s enforcement of the createdness of the Qur’an. This is one of many other aspects related to the false picture of the Abbasid House of Wisdom that this book will address.
This book presents an attempt to scrutinize the available sources and to assess them far from historicist and anachronistic approaches. It discusses how the inflated picture of the Abbasid House of Wisdom was drawn out of a misunderstanding of some terms and words, the idealization of certain aspects, and later how emotional and national inspirations completely distorted the ninth-century caliphal library through unreasonable concoctions. Meanwhile, it tries to contextualize the available historic accounts and scanty information in a straightforward narrative.
B Short Note on the Proposed Origins of the House of Wisdom
The theoretically plausible idea that the Abbasid institution called the House of Wisdom was inspired from Greek or Persian institutions is an independent issue of research that lies outside the scope of this study. However, in the context of this study, we will content ourselves with one broad remark to enable the reader to grasp the wider background of this institution.
Despite the scarcity of information, some modern scholars claimed that common features can be found between Hellenic Athenian, Ptolemaic, and Sassanid institutions of learning and those institutions which were developed by Muslims mainly in Baghdad and later in Cairo. According to this opinion, “Hikma” foundations display elements of similarity with some previous educational foundations, such as the philosophical schools in Athens, the Museum of Alexandria, and Jundishapur.23 However, these scholars did not provide any convincing evidence in support of their opinion.
Islamic Hellenism was not solely the product of the conquests of Alexandria and Antioch; it derived largely from what was already present within the Sassanian realms.24 It is also plausible that the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun and Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim patterned their Bayt al-Hikma and Dar al-Hikma on the examples of Persian Jundishapur (Gundaysabur/Gondeshapur).25 George Sarton (d. 1956) suggests that Jundishapur truly flourished under Nushirwan the Just (r. 531–579), after the expulsion of Nestorians from Edessa in 489 and the banishment of Neo-Platonists from Athens in 529.26 It became one of the greatest cosmopolitan shelters for philosophy and science, be it Greek, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Persian.27 Jundishapur’s fame lies in its importance as a secular cultural center, reputed for its tradition of medicine, which was a source of inspiration for the intellectual activity in Islam.28 Its role seems to have been more important for the transmission of knowledge than creative scientific activities.29 No doubt that Jundishapur, through its physicians, was one of the main channels through which Greek science, medicine, and other sciences of the ancients were introduced into the Abbasid Empire. Jundishapur was not only a great bimaristan (shifakhane-hospital), it was also described as a center of medicine and philosophy, as well as a translation center where many Greek medical texts were transposed by physicians into Syriac. Many renowned physicians were gathered here, among them were members of the famous Bakhtishu family who had been Abbasid Court physicians for generations.
Notes
1. Salah Ahmed El-Ali, “The Foundation of Baghdad”, in The Islamic City A Colloquium, edited by A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, published by Bruno Cassiran, Oxford University Press and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970, p. 92
2. S. Lassner, “The Caliph’s Personal Domain the City Plan of Baghdad Reexamined”, in The Islamic City A Colloquium, edited by A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, published by Bruno Cassiran, Oxford University Press and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970, pp. 103–107.
3. For social and cultural background of the Greek-Arabic translation movement, see D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. 11–16.
4. El-Ali, pp. 95–99, and p. 92–97; S. Lassner, pp. 103–107.
5. El-Ali, pp. 99–100.
6. Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 71–73; and Bernard Lewis, The Middle East 2000 years of History, Phoenix, 2001, pp. 77–78.
7. Lapidus, pp. 79–80.
8. El-Ali, p. 99.
9. Lapidus, pp. 82–83.
10. Ibid., p. 97.
11. Lapidus, 2020 edition, pp. 114–117.
12. William Montgomery Watt, A Short History of Islam, One World Publication, Oxford, 1996, p. 104.
13. Richard F. Burton, A plain and literal translation of the Arabian Nights entertainments now entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, with introduction explanatory notes on the manners and customs of Moslem men and a terminal essay upon the history of the Nights, edited by Richard F. Burton, Benares, Kamashastra Society, 1885–1886, Vol. 1, p. 305
14. Ibid., “Tale of the Tailor”, Vol. 5, pp. 193–194.
15. See summary given by Hayrettin Yücesoy, The Messianic Beliefs & Imperial Politics in Medieval Islam, The Abbasid Caliphate in the Early Ninth Century, The University of South Carolina Press, 2009, pp. 116–135.
16. Al-Dinawari, Al-Akhbar Al-Tiwal, p. 400–4001 (quoted in the Yücesoy’s above mentioned study p. 116).
17. On this subject, see brief and balanced explanations, D. Gutas particularly Al-Ma’mun: Domestic and Foreign Policies and the Translation Movement, pp. 75–104.
18. W.M. Watt, pp. 111–116.
19. Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 3rd Edition, 2014, 6th print, 2020, pp. 104–105 and pp. 171–174.
20. A. M. Goichon, “Hikma”, EI2, pp. 377–378.
21. For Qadi al-Nu’man, Kitab al-Majalis, see Farhat Dachraoui, “Contribution a l’Histoire des Fatimides en Ifriqya”, Arabica Journal, Vol. 8, 1961, p. 191.
22. Against this background of the struggle between Hadith people and the Mu’tazila, G. Makdisi built his theory of emergence of Madrasa institution. See George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and The West, Edinburgh University Press, 1981. For critic of this theory and proposing a new approach on development of institutions of learning in Islam, see, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, “Institutions of Science Education”, in Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science and Technology in Islam, Editor Ibrahim Kalın, Vol I, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 386–397; Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, “Il Ruolo Delle Istituzioni”, In Storia Della Scienza, Vol. 3, Rome, Instituto Della Enciclopedia Italiana Fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 2002, pp. 110–139. For an enlarged text of this research see; Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, “Institutions of Learning in Islam During the Classical Period (Eighth to Sixteenth Centuries): A Critical Overview”, Edebiyattan Tıp Tarihine Uzun İnce Bir Yol: Festschrift in Honor of Nuran Yıldırım II, Journal of Turkish Studies / Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları, Harvard University, Vol. 56, 2001.
23. Y. Eche, is one of the first scholars to advance these claims, Ibid., pp. 48–55.
24. Francis E. Peters, The Harvest of Hellenism. A History of the Near East from Alexander the Great to the Triumph of Christianity. New York, Simon & Shuster, 1972, p. 568.
25. Halm Heinz, The Fatimids and Their Tradition of Learning,London, I.B. Tauris, in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 1997, p. 72–73; Aydın Sayılı, “Gondeshapur”, In Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, 1979, p. 1120; Ali Akbar Siassi, L’Université de Gond-i Shapur et l’etendue de son rayonement, in Mélanges d’orientalisme offerts a Henri Massé, Téhéran, Imprimerie de L’Université, 1963, p. 366–374.
26. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, Vol. 1, Huntingdon (NY), Krieger, 1975, p. 417.
27. Ibid., pp. 417–435.
28. Sayılı, 1979, p. 1120.
29. Sarton, 1975, v.1, p. 419.