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1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to speak in the target language about a community and what it has given the world. The museum offers one scholar, al-Khwarizmi, and the city where he worked. Other contributions, and the speaking itself, your class brings. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- B3.1 communicate information orally in the target language about communities where the target language is spoken, including aspects of their cultures and their contributions to the world, and make connections to personal experiences and their own and other communities […]
2 Before you start
A thought to carry into the lesson.
3 The lesson
What will you ask the scholar?
Plan an interview: decide what you ask about his city, his patron, his books and how his work travelled. Mark which answers the museum's record gives and which need another source.
Go deeper
Before he built Baghdad, al-Maqdisi relates, al-Mansur asked about the site's winter and summer, rains and air, and had men sleep there through the seasons 2. He reports that al-Mansur summoned men learned in law and geometry, among them Abu Hanifa, had the city laid out and its foundations dug in 145 AH, and that it was finished in 149 AH 3. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says he chose Baghdad for military, economic and climatic reasons: a fertile plain on both sides of the river, the Khurasan road, a meeting place of caravan routes with monthly fairs, a net of canals that could serve as ramparts, a central position in Mesopotamia and a temperate climate 4.
How do we know?
What is known of al-Khwarizmi goes back, the Cairo editors say, to Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist 5, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam says very few other biographical details are known 6. For the city, al-Maqdisi wrote in a book he completed in 375 AH, and noted that Madinat al-Salam itself lay ruined in his day, its mosque still used on Fridays 7 8 2. The biography of al-Khwarizmi reports that an Indian astronomical text reached the court in Baghdad around 770 CE 9. Ask of each source who wrote it and how near the writer was to what he reports.
Think about it
What we know of al-Khwarizmi comes from the Fihrist and an encyclopaedia article, and what we know of the choice of Baghdad's site comes from a geographer's book. If you presented the scholar and his city in an interview, which source would you mention first, and why?
Into the museum
- Baghdad: the founding by al-Mansur, the Round City and the reasons for the site, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam gives them.
- Al-Khwarizmi: what Ibn al-Nadim and the Encyclopaedia of Islam say of his life and books.
- The House of Wisdom: the library in Baghdad, with Ahmad Amin's account of al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun.
- The Round City of Baghdad: its plan, with palace and mosque at the centre and four roads to four gates.
Try this
Read the record on al-Khwarizmi. Prepare three questions and the answers the record supports, then act the interview with a partner in Arabic.
4 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Baghdad have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
The city of the court. The biography of al-Khwarizmi reports that an Indian astronomical text reached the court in Baghdad around 770 CE. Baghdad was founded by al-Mansur in 762 CE and was the seat of the caliphate until the fall of the Abbasid state in 1258 CE. Before you present a scholar, where did his city stand?
In your own words: what does al-Khwarizmi have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Al-Khwarizmi in an interview. The editors of the Cairo edition of al-Khwarizmi's algebra quote Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist that he came from Khwarazm and was attached to al-Ma'mun's Treasury of Wisdom. They hold that his name became Algorithm in English and Algorismus in Latin, and that Indian reckoning, with its use of zero, reached the West through his book on arithmetic. How would you explain his work in an interview?
I can now
Notes
- 1. Ontario Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum: Classical Studies and International Languages
- 2. Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma'rifat al-Aqalim of al-Muqaddasi, p. 107
- 3. Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma'rifat al-Aqalim of al-Muqaddasi, p. 108
- 4. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2008), 13 volumes, vol. 1 p. 954
- 5. al-Khwarizmi, Kitab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala, ed. Mosharafa and Ahmad (Cairo, 1939), p.22
- 6. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2008), 13 volumes, vol. 4 p. 1111
- 7. Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma'rifat al-Aqalim of al-Muqaddasi, p. 12
- 8. Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma'rifat al-Aqalim of al-Muqaddasi, p. 106
- 9. Al-Khwarizmi — MacTutor History of Mathematics, Astronomy paragraph