Dan Snow's History Hit - Medieval Baghdad

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Today we find ourselves in 9th-century Baghdad, the beating heart of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate. This was a vast empire that stretched from North Africa through the Middle East, and all the way to Central Asia. At the height of the Islamic Golden Age, it hosted profound cultural and intellectual advancements that laid the foundations for our modern world.Dan is joined by Ali A. Olomi, a historian of the Middle East and Islam. Ali is one of the hosts of Echoes of History, a podcast by Ubisoft and they've just released two brand new series, Baghdad Soundwalks and Figures of Baghdad. In this episode, Ali delves into the stories of the key figures who shaped the city's golden age and appear in Figures of Baghdad.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On this episode of the podcast we're going to be talking about 9th century Baghdad, now the capital of Iraq, then the vibrant heart of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, a massive empire stretching from Central Asia right across North Africa through the Middle East. The 9th century has been described as an Islamic golden age. Baghdad hosted a cultural intellectual movement that saw profound advances across all areas of science and culture. We're going to hear about astronomers, poets, we'll be hearing about men and women who laid many of the foundations for our modern world. To join me on the podcast is Ali Alomi. He's a writer, historian, a podcaster of Middle Eastern Islamic history. He's assistant professor of history at Loyola Merriman University and

affiliated scholar at Rutgers as well. He is a host of Echoes of History, a podcast by Ubisoft. And to celebrate the launch of Assassin's Creed Mirage, Ubisoft has unleashed not one but two new seasons of its podcast series echoes of history worked them before on the crusade it's good to be working with them again now they're dedicated to explaining more about the setting of the new ubisoft original video game ninth century baghdad ali elomi was the academic behind the series he's going to talk to me about 9th century Baghdad. It's wild. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Ali Elomi, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I don't think many people will know about the wonders of the Abbasid Caliphate. Like, tell me about Baghdad in the 9th century. And would that be its golden age? Would that be its peak?

Yeah, it would be its golden age, though we historians always are a little iffy when we call anything a golden age, in the same way that we're iffy when we call things dark ages. But it definitely is one of the central renaissances of the Islamic world during this Abbasid period, and Baghdad was right in the heart of it. So it's an exciting time period. It's a time period of great intellectual developments, and it's a city none like anything we've seen in the world before. Okay, first of all, Abbasid stretching all the way to Spain in this period? So the Abbasids don't stretch to Spain. The Umayyads have taken

over Spain at this point, but they're all from North Africa through the Levant, Central Asia, and Northern India. It's a vast territory. It's an extraordinary empire. And it's not only a vast empire, people will have heard of those before, but it's the cultural, the educational, the artistic flowering that's so important. Given that, in my lifetime, some people have cast aspersions about the contributions of Islam to the human body of science, of art, of poetry. Give me some of the breakthroughs, some of the contributions that were made in that period. Yeah, I mean, there has been a weird pushback in recent years about Islam's contributions to the intellectual history of the world, whether it's science, poetry, etc. But I tell my students that much of the modern world that we have come to accept and take for granted, from modern medicine to even the technologies that we use, can be traced back to this time period. Just to give you a real clear example of this, we're recording a podcast. This podcast relies on numerical sequences, ones and zeros. That comes directly from al-Khwarezmi in Abbasid Baghdad.

Without his invention of the sifar, which he adopts from the Indian world, without his algorithm technique, we wouldn't be having this conversation today. So we're looking at a moment that really is life-changing. It changes the very course of history. And we all, in many ways, live in the technological scientific advancements from the Abbasid period. Yeah. You try broadcasting this podcast using XXV11, not going to work. Right. Not going to work. Now, why this flowering of knowledge? I mean, if you look at Renaissance Italy, a lot of it is sort of rich patrons pursuing beauty, but it's very competitive, right? Militarily and artistically competitive between these little micro-states. This is a

huge empire. So is there something else going on there? Why this great advance? Yeah, that's a really great question. There's really two things that are happening here. First is the obvious wealth of the Abbasids. Like in the case of the Renaissance that we find in Italy, we have wealthy patrons that are willing to invest in learning. And the second component here is Islam itself. Learning in Islam is a religious duty. Muhammad is quoted to have said, you must learn from the cradle to

the grave. Or in another famous saying, if you find knowledge in China, go and pursue it. So there's this very clear impulse to learning, an impulse to understand the world around you, which in turn is meant to religiously reflect the beauty of God. So they look at math, they look at science, they look at medicine, they look at science, they look at medicine, they look at the natural world, and they see God in it. For them, mathematical calculations is a way of understanding the universe of God. The developments in science and medicine are all ways of understanding the beauty of God and the beauty of the universe. So there's this religious impulse that is added on to the extraordinarily wealth of the Abbasids,

which in turn produces just an amazing abundance of learning and scholarship. And indeed, the transmission of what we in the West would call a classical scholarship, right, of the Mediterranean basin. It's a lot better. It's a lot better being a copy of Tassus' histories in Baghdad at this point than it would have been in Newcastle. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we see is a genuine appreciation of ancient knowledge. So we frequently see authors talking about the ancients. And when they say the ancients, they generally mean three people. They mean the Babylonians, they mean the Greeks, and they mean the Egyptians. And so anything that comes from those parts of the world is

going to be deeply cherished, whether it's Aristotle or Euclid, you are going to see that the Muslims at this time period, and not just the Muslims, but all the citizens and denizens of Abbasid Baghdad are going to have a deep appreciation of that. There's a preservation of knowledge, but at the same time, it's not just transmission. There is exploration, there's invention, there is innovation, there's commentaries. So for example, in medieval Europe and in the Renaissance, when people were reading Aristotle, they would be reading Aristotle and then what they called the quote-unquote the commentator, who's Ibn Rushd. So you're reading Aristotle and his translator at the same time and really putting their words in conversation to each other. So there's a deep appreciation of old knowledge and a desire to create new knowledge. And then this amazing kind of public library, this hub, it's up there with the great library

of Alexandria. I'll never forgive the Mongols for smashing this up, but tell me about the House of Wisdom. Yeah, the House of Wisdom. I always say that's my library of Alexandria. I always fantasize about it and what could have been had it not been destroyed. For those of us that are book nerds, there's a little bit of a pain that we carry with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the House of Wisdom. So, the House of Wisdom is this fantastic library. Isn't it crazy? It originally starts off as a sort of private library for the Khalif al-Mansur, roughly around 760 CE or so. But eventually, under his successors

by Harun al-Rashid, who really takes over much later in 786, it is expanded. It becomes not just a private library, but a public institution of learning. So that if you were a scholar in the medieval world, you wanted to be in Baghdad. You wanted to get hired at the House of Wisdom, where they would be translating ancient texts into Arabic, thus centralizing it, making it accessible. They would then create copies of these books that would then be put in bookstores so that if you were learned or literate in any way, shape, or form, you could read the latest theories that were coming out. They also funded experiments

so that they could explore new ideas, create engineering marvels, and it was an institution of teaching so that if you wanted to learn, you could come to the House of Wisdom and actually learn. So in many ways, it's like a modern research university of sorts right in the heart of Baghdad. Okay, so we got this House of Wisdom. Tell me about some of the individuals who, to my great shame, I'm not familiar with. But these people, we should place on the same kind of level, should we, as some of the great philosophers and scientists of the Western tradition? Yeah, I mean, I tell people all the time that this period is the most overlooked in sort of world history. I mean, even today, if you look at the podcasts that are available, you'll see a

lot of history podcasts about a lot of the world, but the Islamic world in the Middle East is pretty scarce. There's only a handful of stuff out there. So it remains an understudied and under-researched area, but the impact, the cultural impact is absolutely vast. I mean, we have people like Al-Khorezmi who are scholars of mathematics. They bring in the numbers from the Indian world, fuse it with Greek mathematics, and really produce an entirely new field of study, advancements in trigonometry and geometry, the birth of modern algebra as we know it. And he, in many ways, is indebted to a more mysterious figure, al-Mahani. And al-Mahani is born, we know that he's in the 9th century. We don't know too much about his origins other than he

was a Persian speaker who was obsessed with Euclid. And so he translates Euclid and is one of the first translators along with al-Hajjaj and makes that mathematics possible and available for the medieval world. And from there, you'll see people like al-Khorezmi and others really take it to the next level. And it's really sort of a fascinating moment in which you see Greek, Indian, and Arab knowledge mixing with this sort of Persian culture, Arabic culture, and it produces some of the most fantastic works of literature and works of science. There's another figure who I'm particularly fond of, Al-Jahez, who's also living in the ninth century. Al-Jahez has a sort

of silly name. It's his nickname. It means bug-eyed. So unfortunately, he may have been a slightly disconsidered looking figure, but he really epitomizes in many ways the learning of this moment. He starts off as incredibly poor. He lives in Basra, where he really works as a fisherman. He's this young guy fishing in the canals in order to feed his family. But he starts to listen to lectures at the local mosque, and that inspires him to then start to pick up some books, which are being made available in Basra, thanks to the transmission from the House of Wisdom. And so he has his own version of a podcast, if you will, the podcast bros of the medieval era, because him and his friends would

host public debates in the streets and people would just sort of gather around and listen to the latest theories. And that catches the eye of the Khalif al-Ma'mun who invites him to Baghdad where he begins to learn at the House of Wisdom. And by the end of his life, he has written somewhere in the number of 200 to 300 books, one of which is Kitab al-Haywan, the Book of Animals. And it puts forth one of the world's earliest theories of evolution, the idea that animals produce over a series of generations and those traits are then passed down through interbreeding, through survival, through killing each other, even produces one of the world's first ideas around race being fundamentally environmental and not being a source of a sort of religious

curse. He talks about, for example, the people of the Bil de Sudana, the Zanj, African peoples. And he says the reason their skin is black is a climate issue. It's entirely to do with the sun, with the soil, with the temperature. And it is not a mark of their immorality or their morality. There's no religious connotation to it. So we have these early scientific theories around evolution and race. And it comes from this guy named Al-Jahiz who most people don't even know about. It's wild, isn't it?

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We should quickly nod to the fact that in Europe next door, this is not a time of superb advancement of the sciences or of engineering and literature, is it? I mean, this is a pretty difficult time that Europe is undergoing. Europe is dealing with a lot of real serious political crises. And it's not that learning suddenly halted in Europe, but you don't have the same centralization of learning like a house of wisdom does, nor do you have the same stable empire that the Abbasids do. And so whatever learning is happening in Europe is generally happening in enclaves. And those or who are transcribing on vellum, but then they would be kept in that monastery. Or they'd be part of the private collections of the king, which is a measure of the king's wealth. There wasn't the same impulse to learn about the world and then share it with everyone else. I always say that there's really two impulses in

this time period that make the Abbasid world so different from what's going on in Europe and the rest of the world. And that is that there is an encyclopedic impulse and an experimental one. They see God in the world and so they want to categorize everything. They want to write everything down. Al-Jahez's book of animals, it's encyclopedic. He's got 350 species listed in there because he sees the diversity of the universe and the world as a sign of God. And so he wants to categorize all of it. But then you have people like Mahani who are not encyclopedic, but are experimental. They want to apply the knowledge and they want to see, do the mathematic theories of the Greeks, does it stand up? Does the ideas of the Indians,

does it stand up? So there's this two impulses, that encyclopedic and experimental. And that's really what makes Abbasid Baghdad so different from the rest of the world. And I guess, yeah, we should say comparing with Europe, Al-Jahiz, who we've just been talking about, he would have been alive during the famous Lindisfarne raid where the Vikings first came onto, well, the first infamous occasion on which the Vikings came onto British shores. And so there was, as you say, centers of learning, pinpoints of learning, but I guess there isn't this imperial protective umbrella where you're right, that learning can be networked and also people like him can live and work in peace and just pursue knowledge without worrying about their physical security as much. Yeah. For those of us that are scholars, this was like the perfect time to get a

job. You get the protection of the Khalif, nice cushy gig. You get to translate, read, and write for a living without worrying about the sort of dangers that come with it, whether it's economic issues or facing marauders and whatnot. So this is a combination of imperial protection, economic security, as well as these sort of intellectual impulses that makes Baghdad so unique, that allows people like al-Jahiz to go from being a fisherman to being one of the great scholars and bibliophiles of the medieval world. Is there evidence of female scholarship and participation in this enlightenment? Oh yeah, absolutely. Because there is this

religious understanding around knowledge, that knowledge is meant to be something that is God-given, we do see incredible advancement in women participating in scholarship. For example, Sutayet al-Mahmali is one of the scholars who studies under al-Khorezmi, and she becomes one of the leading theorists of algebra. In fact, al-Khorezmi, and she becomes one of the leading theorists of algebra. In fact, she develops the algorithm that's used to determine inheritance so that when someone dies, they can just plug in the amount into the formula and they know exactly how to divide that person's inheritance up. So she is sort of the practical application of mathematics there. But you also have people like Queen Buran, who is a famous

astronomer and astrologer applying the theories of Abu Masjid and Ptolemy. And then there's also women that participate in the literary world, like Aribal Ma'munia, who was a phenomenal lyricist. We call her the world's first medieval rock star because she is like an absolute celebrity. People love her. They come from around the world just to hear her sing. She starts off originally actually as an enslaved woman. She's probably from a noble family known as the Barmakids. The Barmakids fall out of political favor, and we don't really know what happens. But she begins her life as an enslaved woman that then captures the eye of Khalif al-Amin. And from then on, she becomes a patron

of the courts. Eventually, she buys her own release because she gains money and fame. She goes on to becoming incredibly, incredibly famous. She at one point brags that she slept with like 15 Khalifs at one point. She's like, I've slept with all of them. And her poetry is so legendary that eventually they actually have a poetry contest between her and another female poet. This is like the medieval version of pop idol, if you will, or The Voice. And the crowd is divided up into followers of Arieb and Sharia, who is this other poet. And each of them are throwing verses back and forth with each other, completing each other's sentences, demonstrating their width. And the crowd has to determine who wins by

clapping. And Arieb eventually wins. She becomes the victor in this contest. So we see women participating in the scientific arena. We see women religious scholars, and we see women in the literary world. Here are two dudes who love books and the historical record and poetry chatting about this. Did it bring hard benefits for the empire, do you think? Was any of this translated like Michelangelo dabbles in military matters? Was any of this useful in terms of the power of the state, either domestically or externally? Oh yeah, absolutely. That's a really good question because you always have to ask, these caliphs weren't just doing it out of the kindness of their heart supporting these scholars.

There's a benefit to them. Now, some of them fancy themselves as philosopher kings, like Khalif al-Ma'mun, who does genuinely, he rules from about 813 to 833 CE. He sees himself as a philosopher king. And so the caliphs were sort of interesting in that war prowess and martial prowess wasn't the only way that they legitimized their rule. They understood their legitimacy as their capacity to produce knowledge. And so they are in many ways philosopher emperors or an empire of philosophers. That's how they legitimize themselves. They said, we have all this power, we have all this wealth, but look what we have produced. We have made the world more beautiful through our learning. And that manifested itself in the various buildings that they created, in the ways that

they produced books and made it available to people. So in many ways, learning and knowledge legitimize the empire. This is sort of fascinatingly an empire of bureaucrats before the modern nation state. Now we imagine the technocrats and the bureaucrats as giving us the modern nation state, but the Abbasids were like that too. So you would have these viziers that would specialize in things like the formula to determine how much crop is yielded in a year. So they're very much interested in the practical application of knowledge. But it also was a feature of their diplomacy. It was a way of demonstrating their magnanimity. Look how great we are. So they would produce these books and then present them to people.

So the Carolingian dynasty is one of the dynasties that the Abbasids developed a very close relationship with. Harun al-Rashid sends over three big gifts. One is an elephant, a bulabas, a white elephant that we actually still see in medieval manuscripts used in sort of war maneuvers and whatnot. That's from Harun al-Rashid. He sends a mechanical clock, which was considered like practically sorcery because of how advanced it was at this time period. But also he sends a series of books. He sends a big collection of books, a treasure trove's worth of books to the Carolingians. And so, it was a way for them to legitimize domestically their power. Look how advanced we are. Look how efficient we are. Look

how learned we are as philosopher kings. And also, a way to really display their diplomacy. They would connect with the rest of the world through learning. This period strikes me as a real reminder that by encouraging everything, if that's not too much of a platitude, by encouraging everything, you end up with lots of different and sometimes surprising outcomes. But the lesson here seems to be encourage scholarship wherever it leads. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they saw these fields as intimately related to one another. So some of the great poetry that we get from this time period are written by mathematicians. Today we have our degrees and our majors and we're siloed off into our little areas, but the reality is that they didn't see it that way.

Al-Jahiz is writing about botany. He's writing books of grammar. He's writing books of jurisprudence. He's writing books of science. So you have this idea that knowledge all is connected to one another, that the person who could see the beauty of language produces poetry, but that person can also see the beauty of numbers through mathematics. So they see all of this is related to one another. We've briefly alluded to this, haven't we? But it must be very exciting and feel important talking about this and teaching this stuff now, does it Ali? I mean, is this something that too many people don't know about? And that is shaping impressions, even relations between the Islamic faith communities and others to this day.

Yeah, I mean, one of the exciting things about it is we can talk about the Islamic world as part of the shared heritage that we all have. More often than not, when we talk about sort of the geopolitics, we imagine a sort of Western world in opposition to an Islamic world, and that the two are in a constant clash, to use that horrible phrase, clash of civilizations, right? There's always this idea that these two just don't interact with one another. And when we look at the intellectual history, we instead not see a clash, but a sharing. The great thing about intellectual history is it talks about knowledge as shared, as collaborative. I mean, we talk about the Islamic world, but many of these thinkers are

Jewish. Many of them are Christian. Many of them are African. Some are Persian. Some are Arab. This is not an exclusively Arab or an exclusively Muslim time period. Hunyan ibn Ishaq, who is the head of the house of wisdom for literal decades, is a Syriac Christian. And there's no controversy around a Christian man being at the head of this learning center at the heart of the Islamic world. So what makes it so exciting is that it emphasizes the shared history of humanity. And that breeds a really interesting approach that has a lot of lessons for us today in this sort of fraught moment that we're living in. But it is also an under-researched area. It is an area that remains,

you're going to take a university class on it, and maybe you'll find a few episodes somewhere on YouTube or iTunes about it, but it's not one of those best-selling books that you're going to read every single day. But that also means that there's opportunities for more learning, opportunities for growing, and hopefully the public history that we all do, the history that you do, the history that I do, learning opportunities like this game that we worked on. All of these can be opportunities to really open up the conversation and sort of new approach to a forgotten area of history. You have opened up my mind and I'm so grateful. Thank you for your passion and mastery of this subject. It is infectious. Thank you for coming on the pod.

Thank you for having me. It was such a pleasure chatting with you. And after listening to this, you'll hear more about 9th century Baghdad and the fascinating historical figures we've discussed today. Follow Echoes of History podcast by Ubisoft and listen to the current series, Figures of Baghdad, as well as Baghdad Soundworks.