Researchers
The House of Wisdom
The House of Wisdom in Baghdad: the Abbasid caliphs' library and the ninth century's great translation centre. Under al-Ma'mun it became the scholars' seat: al-Khwarizmi wrote his algebra there, copyists carried Greek, Persian and Sanskrit into Arabic, observatories measured the sky, and translators like Hunayn ibn Ishaq were paid the weight of their books in gold. Out of it came the translation movement that preserved Greek learning for the world while Europe slept, joining the sciences of India, Persia and old Egypt in one language. So the House of Wisdom was Islam's first 'university' — not just a law school but a house of knowledge open to every science. Thus it became Islam's emblem of scholarly tolerance: that every tongue is a tongue and every science a science of God — for the House was a house of the whole community in its widest sense.