Princes of All Learning

by Grace Halsell

In Bukhara, Uzbekistan, I felt lucky to be in the home town of Ibn Sina, born in 980 and known in the West as Avicenna, a philosopher and the greatest physician of his time–indeed, the greatest name in medicine until about 1500. He wrote The Canon of Medicine, a systematic encyclopedia based on the achievements of Greek and Arab physicians: The work was translated into Latin and used as a textbook in medieval Europe.

For centuries considered the “prince of all learning,” Avicenna’s works are still studied in theological, philosophical, pharmacological and medical circles.

Walking around modern Bukhara, a city of half a million people, I reflected on the library where Avicenna studied. Now obliterated, it urns one of several private libraries in the city that were open to public use at a time when manuscripts were “published” only through the tedious labor of copyists. Writing 1000 years ago, Avicenna reports on the free use of a sultan’s royal library in Bukhara:

I found there many rooms filled with books which were arranged in cases, row upon row. One room was allotted to works on Arabic philology and poetry, another to jurisprudence and so forth, the books on each particular science having a room to themselves. I inspected the catalogue of ancient Greek authors and looked for the books which I required; I saw in this collection books of which few people have heard even the names, and which I myself have never seen either before or since.

I tried to imagine what life was like back in the days of al-Biruni, born near here, in Khiva, in 973, who searched into every branch of human knowledge: history, law, sociology, literature, ethics, philosophy, mathematics and science.

It was al-Biruni who anticipated the principles of modern geology and laid the foundation for astronomy. He composed an astronomical encyclopedia and made vital contributions to geometrical problems. Al-Biruni gave an accurate way to determine latitude and longitude, investigated the relative speeds of sound and light, and – 600 years before Galileo – discussed the possibility of the earth’s rotation around its own axis.

In Vestiges of the Past, written in the year 1000, he urges, “We must clear our minds from all causes that blind people to the truth-old customs, partisan spirit, personal rivalry or passion [and] the desire for influence, in order to be able to record historical events with objectivity and accuracy.”

Bukhara is full of impressive architectural gems, many so old that 1 felt transported back in time a thousand years. I was especially impressed by a mausoleum built by Ismail Samani, a ninth-century ruler, for his father. Both Ismail and his father are buried in this “tomb of the Samanids,” which, though small, is striking in its simplicity and beauty.

I stood in awe of the free-standing Kalyan minaret, built of honey-colored bricks that, laid in protruding and receding patterns, produce a unique texture. The minaret, rising 45 meters (150 feet) – and the tallest structure in Bukhara -stands in a small square near the massive tiled portals of a mosque and the Bukhara theological school or madrasa. In architectural perfection and beauty, I believe that nothing in our modern cities can surpass this 12th-century gem. The minaret is on UNESCO’s list of historical monuments that should be preserved as part of the world’s cultural heritage.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Bukhara had 360 mosques. Today it has only 120 mosques and madrasas, most no longer in religious use, but still preserved as monuments.

Bukhara’s sister city, Samarkand, is equally a center of learning and history. Beyond that, however, it is a gem of early city planning. Here Timur (Tamerlane) created a series of royal gardens so numerous, wrote Clavijo, a Spaniard who visited Samarkand in 1404, “that a traveler who approaches the city sees only the mountainous height of trees, and the houses embowered amongst them remain invisible.”

Timur, born near Samarkand in 1336 back to the city armies of craftsmen and artisans from the extensive lands he conquered them put to work embellishing his capital.

But it was Timur’s grandson, Ulugh made his grandfather’s capital into what had dreamed: “Samarkand the Golden, of Muslim civilization. An artist himself, Ulugh Beg enriched Samarkand with superb building such as Shah Zinde, a honeycomb of 60 mausoleums and mosques, of which 20 remains today. Domes and arches and other Islamic architectural splendors glisten with intricate Arabic calligraphy and geometric design must have dazzled the early caravan travllers just as they amaze today’s visitor.

An artist and scholar and, above all an astronomer, Ulugh Beg created an observatory in Samarkand that was one of the wonders of the world. He sought to verify and correct Ptolemy’s computations, and in so doing wrote his own Catalogue of the Stars, an encyclopedia containing the knowledge of time, the course of the stars and the position of fixed stars. His calculations, translated into Latin, were widely studied in Europe his remarkably accurate calendar brought him posthumous honor in the West when it was published in 1652 at Oxford.