Pleiades Dust

[Part I: Thinker's Slumber]

(With the weakening of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the fifth century

Western Europe slipped rapidly into what is now known as the Dark Ages

From which it would not emerge for a thousand years

Jim al-Khalili - The House of Wisdom)

Scornful dogma

Withering era

Silence in sight

Treasures of cognition

Have ceased to be

Destructive minds

Turning life to ashes

Relentlessly

Despotic hands on recollection

Restraining man from recollection

[II. Wandering Times]

(Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing; knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance)

Wandering times

Crawling thoughts abandoned at dusk

Thinker's dream

Lost in doubts

Streams of lore

Concealing in drought

Wandering times

Scripted thoughts emerging at dawn

Scholars' dream

Starts to blink

Streams of lore

Submerging with ink

Glimpse of light in sight

Dazzling minds are turning the page

On darker times

[III. Within the Rounded Walls]

(Like the city of Alexandria, founded a thousand years earlier by Alexander the Great

Baghdad grew from nothing to become the world's largest city just fifty years after the first brick was laid

And just like Alexandria, it became a center for culture, scholarship and enlightenment that attracted the world's greatest minds)

Nightfall unfurls its sky

Whispers of waves

Mesmerized

Nightfall's canvas unfolds

Frame in time, the stars have told

Mighty circle of stone

Standing strong, on the sands, alone

Rounded walls

Once foreseen

Standing tall

To the thinker's realm

All roads shall lead

[IV. Pearls of Translation]

(The success of a spectacularly massive translation movement - a process that lasted for two centuries - during which much of the wisdom of the earlier civilizations of the Greeks, Persians and Indians was translated into Arabic

The translation movement owes its beginnings to the appeal of Persian culture [...] along with the development of paper-making technology they have learned from the Chinese

But once it began, this obsession with translating ancient texts sparked the beginning of a golden age of scientific progress

By the mid-ninth century it had evolved into a new tradition of original scientific and philosophical scholarship that further fuelled the demand for more translations, both in quantity and quality)

Enthralling thirst for ideas

Led by translation's quill

Searching the world with no fear

Paving the way for curious minds

Roaming the land for ideas

Led by translator's will

Reading the world becomes clear

Paving the way for golden times

[V. Compendiums]

(He (Al-Ma'mun) was well aware of the treasures to be found in the ancient texts of the Greek philosophers

He would send emissaries great distances to get hold of these scientific texts

Often, foreign rulers defeated in battle would be required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their libraries rather than in gold

Al-Ma'mun was almost fanatical in his desire to collect all the world's books under one roof, translate them into Arabic and have his scholars study them

The institution he created to realize his dream epitomizes more than anything else the blossoming of the scientific golden age

It became known throughout the world as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma)

By the middle of the ninth century the House of Wisdom would have become the largest repository of books in the world

Word by word

Scribing compendiums

Page by page

Crafting compendiums

Book by book

Gathering compendiums

Library filled with compendiums

Embracing texts from the past

Hints of knowledge are grasped

Concepts in fragments, scholars, will craft

Sheltered on paper, ideas shall last

[VI. Stranded Minds on the Shores of Doubt]

(By the end of the tenth century the translation movement was coming to an end, the Abbasid Empire was crumbling, less-enlightened caliphs were cracking down on freedom of speech and rationalist inquiry

And the great names associated with the House of Wisdom were already a distant memory

But to infer from this the golden age of Arabic science was on the wane would be utterly wrong, for the best was yet to come

It was during the second half of the tenth century that we saw the three most outstanding thinkers in the history of Islam arriving on the scene)

[VII. Besieged]

(It was in 1258 that the accomplishments of the House of Wisdom and the Islamic Golden Age were brought to a cruel halt

During the Mongol invasion of Baghdad the mosques, libraries, homes and hospitals of the great city were all destroyed

The family of the last Abbasid Caliph Al-Musta'sim, as well as thousands of the city inhabitants, were slaughtered, and the extensive collection of books and manuscripts at the House of Wisdom were thrown in the Tigris

It is said that for days afterward the river ran black with the ink of books and red with the blood of scholars

It was a tragic ending for one of the most advanced, diverse and progressive cities of the age, and an ending from which it would take Baghdad centuries to recover

Isabella Bengoechea - Iraq's Golden Age: The Rise and Fall of the House of Wisdom)

Winds of dogma

Have reached the rounded walls

The flame of lore has been blown

Arrows will, soon, be thrown

Darkened era

Will fill the land and souls

As life turns black as ink

A chapter starts to sink

Rising storm from the East

Circle of archers, intruding beast

Trampled furrows of memory

Seeds of invasion sowed by enemies

Blindly burning to decimate

Pages to ashes

Cognition's fate

Drowned in despotic waters

Treasures from minds are lost forever

Stream of lore destroyed at last

Running, for days, from red to black

Scornful dogma

Withering era