Most people who are even mildly interested in Muslim literature have no doubt read that the free lending library system originated in the Muslim world. All of the great cities of the Islamic world possessed wonderful libraries. At one time there were seventy public libraries in Muslim Spain, and one of Cairo's universities alone had 1,600,000 books on all conceivable subjects. It has also been reported that the Crustaders burned a library of 3 million books in Triploi, Lebanon (Tilfah;IX:112).
Along with all these manuscripts went a zeal for learning that impacted the whole of society. An educated slave, male or female, was far more costly than an uneducated slave. Compare that fact to the law enacted in America's South during the 19th century, forbidding slaves to learn how to read. (Slaves in the Muslim world had many other rights, almost equivalent to citizens, and their emancipation was encouraged if not explicitly ordered in the Qu'ran, for more reasons than I can name here.)
The traveler Ibn Jubair (540 A.H./1145 C.E. -- 614 A.H./1217 C.E.) reported seeing thirty colleges in Baghdad alone, each institution possessing thousands of students. Cairo at one time had 74 colleges, while Damascus had 73 and the city of Granada in Muslim Spain used to count 120 elementary schools without inclusion of its establishments of higher education. Colleges were often contained in mosques, as the traditional centers of learning.
However, some colleges were established independent of mosques, like the lanugage schools founded in Baghdad under the Abbasid reign. These schools were necessary in order to satisfy the great demand for translators(Tilfah, 116).
_________________
Tilfah, Khair-Allah. I am the Arab. (Beirut: Arabian Printing Corporation, 1979). Talal Eshmawi, Translator.
Along with all these manuscripts went a zeal for learning that impacted the whole of society. An educated slave, male or female, was far more costly than an uneducated slave. Compare that fact to the law enacted in America's South during the 19th century, forbidding slaves to learn how to read. (Slaves in the Muslim world had many other rights, almost equivalent to citizens, and their emancipation was encouraged if not explicitly ordered in the Qu'ran, for more reasons than I can name here.)
The traveler Ibn Jubair (540 A.H./1145 C.E. -- 614 A.H./1217 C.E.) reported seeing thirty colleges in Baghdad alone, each institution possessing thousands of students. Cairo at one time had 74 colleges, while Damascus had 73 and the city of Granada in Muslim Spain used to count 120 elementary schools without inclusion of its establishments of higher education. Colleges were often contained in mosques, as the traditional centers of learning.
However, some colleges were established independent of mosques, like the lanugage schools founded in Baghdad under the Abbasid reign. These schools were necessary in order to satisfy the great demand for translators(Tilfah, 116).
_________________
Tilfah, Khair-Allah. I am the Arab. (Beirut: Arabian Printing Corporation, 1979). Talal Eshmawi, Translator.
No comments:
Post a Comment