Islam Creator of the Modern Age
1. Islam: Creator of the Modern Age
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Arabic. This work started under the patronage of
the state. In 830 Al-Mamun established in Baghdad
his famous Bayt al Hikmah, a combination library,
academy and translation bureau, and an
astronomical observatory. The work of translation
continued with such speed and on such a vast scale
that, within eighty years after the establishment of
Baghdad, most of the books in Greek had already
been rendered into Arabic.
During the Abbasid era, paper was being
manufactured on a large scale, so there was no
dearth of paper for writing books. There were more
than 400,000 books in the library of Cordova (Spain)
in the tenth century, whereas in Europe at that time,
according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, the library
of Canterbury was at the top of the list of Christian
libraries with 1800 books in the 13th century.
Al-Mamun’s astronomers performed one of the
most delicate geodetic operations—the measuring
of the length of a terrestrial degree. The object was
to determine the size of the earth and its
circumference on the assumption that the earth was
round. The measurement, carried out on the plain
