Talk:House of Wisdom

message: the first sentence of the history section is 'The preservation and development of human knowledge was a cherished tradition of the Eastern Christianity.[4]'. I dont think that the citation given for this sentence actually says this. 
The citation says:
“It was in the Near and Middle East and North Africa that the old traditions of teaching and learning continued, and where Muslim scholars were carefully preserving ancient texts and knowledge of the ancient Greek language.”
So the citation refers to the continuation of 'old traditions of teaching and learning' without explicitly identifying those traditions with eastern Christianity. In fact the citation refers to 'ancient texts and knowledge of the ancient Greek language' and the citation is from a book on Pythagoras and his legacy  (Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe by Kitty Ferguson) so I don't really get how someone got Eastern Christianity from this.
I think this first sentence should either be removed or changed to more accurately reflect the citation eg 'The preservation and development of human knowledge was a cherished tradition of the Greek thinking', because otherwise this sentence is just shifting credit for the House of Wisdom, a major intellectual centre of the Islamic golden age, to Christianity - which feels like POV pushing to me.
I'm gonna remove the sentence in the meantime because I think its misleading but feel free to replace/improve it if it can be more accurately reflect the reference as I think having a more general sentence before getting into the denser history makes the section read well.
Best
212.56.121.8 (talk) 23:27, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Womp womp 83.110.1.233 (talk) 04:52, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: 'cherished tradition of eastern Christianity'

message: Article] by Owen Gingerich
--ragesoss 18:00, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: possible sources

message: I removed this:
* The "'Bite ul-'Khikma" in Mawarannahr (Uzbekistan): In the 8th century the armies of the Arab caliph invaded Mawarannahr ('The Land Beyond River') south of the Amudarrya river and brought in Islam from Saudi Arabia (see Uzbekistan History). The House of Wisdom called Bite ul-Khikma, founded by an order of the caliphate ruler Mahmud, engaged in the great task to translate the books of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes and other ancient Greek scientists and philosophers from classical Greek into Arabic. The Mawarannanahr's brilliant young scientists, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, Achmad Al-Fergani, Al-Marvazi, Javkhari, Marvarudi and others performed with distinction. This time in history is known as the Oriental Renaissance.  At Khorezm a new research center was opened dedicated later to Khorezm-Shakh and it became the first Academy in Central Asia.
... because obviously, most of the text is referring to the Bayt al-Hikmah in Baghdad. I googled for something in Mawarannahr, but only founds info from copies of the wikipedia article. So I'll take it out until someone comes up with a better source for this. In the meanwhile, no info is better than wrong info. flammifertalk 03:46, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed bit on Uzbek house of wisdom 

message: A recent edit by user oneeyedboxer changed "house" to "adobe" throughout the article. I think that "abode" was the intended change.
While "House of Wisdom" seems the correct translation to me, we'll need a person with a thorough knowledge of Arabic to translate or make changes. Since the semantic difference between "House" and "Abode" is very slight, I think it ought to stay "House" until an expert deems otherwise.
"House of Wisdom" also sounds better. It's less pompous, more eloquent, easier to understand, and sounds grander. "Abode" is a vaguer term for "a place of residence," but it can also mean "a sojourn."
My two cents,
Auranor (talk) 19:17, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Abode or House? (or Adobe?)

message: The article mentions 'enormous quantities' of books in the House of Wisdom. Have any scholars provided a figure or an estimate of the actual number? This would be a nice addition to the article.
KBurchfiel (talk) 03:04, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: A place to start would be to track down data about Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist which was an index of Arabic language books. It's likely that all of these plus Greek, Persian, and Hindu books were in the House of Wisdom library. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:27, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  how many volumes? 

message: There was NO such "Bait al Hikma" - those are alllll legends here.
Dimitri Gutas (an Arabist and Graekist scholar, Yale University)   meticuously researched that - only to point out that there are only 2 mentions (!) of such a "bait" and one is only very, very brief.
My friends - go and read literature first before writing legends as facts - a problem that haunts Wikipedia in this area espacially.
Try D. Gutas "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture" for a starter ...
Udix  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Udix2 (talk • contribs) 10:17, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you: the position of Dimitri Gutas is not represented in the article and it should, but it's not so easy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia made of non-original material and with a neutral point of view and in my opinion in this particular case it's very hard to balance different sources. I would like to contribute personally, but since I am not enough expert about the other argumentations about bayt al-hikma and I don't know which are the current academic positions, I will abstain. I hope somebody else, more informed than me, will do it. Nedanfor (talk) 12:58, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  legends 

message: Can we have a source for this claim?
: These shops doubled as bookshops, the largest of which, al-Nakim, sold thousands of books every day
It sounds very dubious, given that they would all need to have been copied by hand. Wardog (talk) 20:57, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thousands of sales per day? 

message: Hello, I am trying to improve this article. As it was asked before, does anyone know of a source for the claim that "The activities of the library was supported by a large number of stationery shops. These shops doubled as bookshops, the largest of which, al-Nakim, sold thousands of books every day"?
I wasn't able to find references to this. If no one knows where this comes from, I guess I will remove the sentence. Thanks!
Maxisi (talk) 07:49, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Claim without citation

message: The same institution was also found in Ottoman times for a similar purpose.
I don't know much about it and don't have time for that know, but somebody can research and include it here. Thanks. rinduzahid(talk) 23:01, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  House of Wisdom of Ottoman times 

message: the first 'algorithm' could be argued to be Euclid's method of finding factors, or it could be alot of other things. the first mechanical calculating device... atinkythera, or maybe some old chinese stuff,, who knows. and on and on. its all open to debate and hangs on the definitions of phrases. most secondary sources in history books would not use phrases like 'the first'. but they realize that new old texts are found all the time and our view of the past changes over time. it would be far, far more encyclopedic to just leave the word 'first' out of these articles. just because something wasnt first doesnt mean it wasnt important or valuable. its basically POVism  Decora (talk) 01:15, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  stop saying "the first" 

message: This is the text that has been deleted twice.
=== Decline under Al-Mutawakkil ===
The House of Wisdom flourished under al-Ma'mun's successors al-Mu'tasim (r. 833–842) and his son al-Wathiq  (r. 842 – 847), but considerably declined under the reign of al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–861).Al-Khalili, p. 135 Although al Ma'mun, al Mu'tasim, and al Wathiq followed the sect of Mu'tazili, which supported mind-broadness and scientific inquiry, al-Mutawakkil endorsed a more literal interpretation of the Qur'an and Hadith. The caliph was not interested in science and moved away from rationalism, seeing the spread of Greek philosophy as anti-Islamic.
It's source is Jim Al-Khalili who with the removal of the above is still used about 26 times in the article. He doesn't suddenly become an unreliable source because an editor disagrees with him. The statements can be attributed to him and/or material arguing against him can be added to the article, but we shouldn't be removing it just because an editor disagrees. Doug Weller talk 18:00, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion of sourced text from a reliable source 

message: This page is still a mess and I welcome any efforts to clean it up. The basic problem is that the main sources for the page (al-Khalili, Lyons) are popular books that retell the 'Rise-Decline' myth, and insist on treating the HoW as something like a modern research university. There are serious issues about whether the HoW existed at all, whether it was any more than a library for literature and poetry, whether any translation work was done there, and whether any work that would now be judged scientific was done or stored there (see in particular the book by Gutas (1998) 53-60, and Sonja Brentjes with Robert G. Morrison, "The Sciences in Islamic societies," in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol 4. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 569, referenced above). There is now a brief indication of these problems in the introduction to the article and a section on 'Dispute', but the rest of the article largely spins the old triumphalist stories. The issue here is emphatically NOT whether figures like al-Kwarizmi and the Banu Musa did important scientific work -- they clearly did. But we do the real achievements of Islamic science a disservice by pressing them into later Western patterns (e.g. turning the HoW into a translation center and research institute), because when Islamic science clearly fails to conform to later Western standards (e.g. in NOT separating science and religion) it will be discounted as unscientific (see, for example, almost everything written on Islam by Toby Huff). The fundamental problem here is to separate what is actually known about the supposed HoW from later myth making and the imposition of Western ideals of science. Perhaps a rewrite should start by explaining those issues, using earlier drafts of the page as examples. Voxcanis (talk) 11:55, 9 May 2018
:I agree that the article is still a mess, Voxcanis, and I'm all for your suggested changes. Is a rewrite a task that you would be up to yourself? I have expansions to several other articles I'm working on now, so not ready to tackle this article, but I would be happy to help with editing as time allows. Carlstak (talk) 17:41, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: This article https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2019/05/29/the-house-of-wisdom-is-a-myth/ also expresses the view that the "House of Wisdom" is mostly a myth, quoting sources stating "...The fact is that we have exceedingly little historical [emphasis in original] information about the bayt al-hikma. This in itself would indicate that it was not something grandiose or significant, and hence a minimalist interpretation would fit the historical record better."
Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 03:28, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Current status of 'House of Wisdom' page 

message: why often or always link the discovery of Muslims with Greece, Indian, chinese etc ?
you have to prove in detail not only such claims.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shatree (talk • contribs) 18:07, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  why  

message: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2019/05/29/the-house-of-wisdom-is-a-myth/  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.29.81.232 (talk) 08:51, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: It's a myth

message: Hello! I can't help but notice that the name of al-Kindi came twice in the list of notable people. The first one has an article attached to it, the second one doesn't. I checked the first one and it is same as the second one. So, I removed the second one. Ifteebd10 (talk) 08:40, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two 'Kindi's? 

message: The subsection "Al-Ma'mun" contains a seemingly unprofessional tone and needs to be cleaned up---for example, it says virtually the same sentence twice in the same paragraph, that Al-Ma'mun would often prefer scientific texts as spoils of war over riches. Quahog-with-a-fiddle (talk) 16:04, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-encyclopedic tone