The ninth century was a flourishing period for the Muslim civilization, whose center is in Baghdad, Iraq today. The caliph Al Mamun, son of the famous Harun al-Rashid, is an enlightened ruler who built a "House of Wisdom" (Bayt al-Hikma "), which is both a library, university, and a center for translations .
- Hunain Ibn Ishaq (806-873) is a Christian doctor who has undertaken the translation of Greek texts (Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and others) to the Syriac (his native language, a Semitic language derived from the Aramaic spoken by the Christians of the East) and to Arabic. Al Mamoun was so satisfied with his translations he gave him the gold weight of any book in Arabic!
- Al Jahiz (776-868) is the greatest writer in Arabic. He has written on all conceivable subjects (science, history, grammar, technical ...). A famous legend tells that he died in the collapse of their library.
I love these two stories, even if the second had a tragic consequence. At that time, a book was something: it is weighed, it is touched, it felt. It was not an ordinary paperback book that we forget the bottom of a bag is lost or in the subway, let alone an intangible "e-book! Today, Hunain have lived in misery. Jahiz and have been spared, but we all die anyway, and eventually death he had was it not the most beautiful?
0 comments:
Post a Comment