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Lyons, Jonathan. The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Reviewed by Connie Lamb
This is a fascinating book which covers a vast amount of subjects over a long historical time and wide geographic space. Written almost like a novel, it intertwines the stories of rulers, religious leaders, great Arab philosopher-scientists and Jewish, Christian and Persian scholars who lived in the Islamic Empire. It is a lively discussion of how a few Westerners traveled to Islamic countries in the 11 and 12 centuries; there they discovered a wealth of scientific writings which they recognized to be of great value.
While Europe had languished in ignorance, superstition, and Christian religious restrictions during the Middle Ages, the Arab world witnessed a dynamic flowering of scholars, libraries, and scientific advances in mathematics, astronomy, geography, navigation, medicine, philosophy and agriculture. The Arabs had obtained much of their learning from knowledge left by the Greeks, Romans, and Persians, which was discovered as the Islamic empire spread through Iraq and Central Asia. The Arabs translated and synthesized this material and used it to further advance scientific understanding. Arabic replaced Greek as the universal language of scientific inquiry. Arab knowledge passed into Europe by way of the Crusader kingdoms, Sicily, and Spain and helped prepare the groundwork for the Renaissance and greater scientific advances in the Western world. Much of the transmission was accomplished by scholars such as Adelard of Bath, Michael Scot and Stephen of Pisa who found and translated significant Arabic language scientific texts and translated them into Latin.
The author, Jonathan Lyons, served as a foreign correspondent, mostly in the Muslim world, for the Reuters News Agency for more than twenty years. His posts included Moscow, Tehran, Turkey, and Jakarta. He left this work to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and has since become an author and professor, teaching at Monash University, George Mason University, and at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. His first book, Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21s' Century Iran, co-authored with Geneive Abdo, was published in 2003 and his latest is Islam through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. His website...