Mahomet had not been dead a hundred years before Arabic literature was enriched with translations of the world’s great works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Caliph after Caliph had done something towards setting learning on firm footing. Almansor (Caliph 753–775 A. D.) had established schools of medicine and law: Haroun-al-Raschid had ordered that to every mosque a school should be attached (786 A. D.) and Al-Manun (Caliph 813–832 A. D.) made Bagdad the center of science and collected great libraries. At Cairo, the Fatimite Library founded by Caliph Al-Manun contained a hundred thousand volumes and six thousand five hundred manuscripts on astronomy and medicine alone. In Spain there were no less than seventy public libraries founded by the Moorish conquerors and not only were there volumes for public reading on history, politics and philosophy, but also what we would call pedigree lists of famous horses and camels to the end that the breed might be kept pure.
I quote Gibbon in his reference to the patronage of learning among the Mahometans: "The same royal prerogative was claimed by the independent emirs of the provinces, and their emulation diffused the taste and the rewards of science from Samarcand and BokkKara to Fez and Cordova. The visier of a sultan consecrated a sum of two hundred thousand pieces of gold to the foundation of a college at Bagdad, which he endowed with an annual revenue of fifteen thousand dinars. The fruits of instruction were communicated, perhaps, at different times, to six thousand disciples of
