House of Wisdom

The House of Wisdom (Arabic: بَيْت الْحِكْمَة Bayt al-Ḥikmah), also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, was a major Abbasid-era public academy and intellectual center in Baghdad. In popular reference, it acted as one of the world's largest public libraries during the Islamic Golden Age, and was founded either as a library for the collections of the fifth Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) in the late 8th century or as a private collection of the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) to house rare books and collections in the Arabic language. During the reign of the seventh Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (r. 813 – 833 AD), it was turned into a public academy and a library.

It was destroyed in 1258 during the Mongol siege of Baghdad. The primary sources behind the House of Wisdom narrative date between the late eighth century and the thirteenth century, and most importantly include the references in Ibn al-Nadim's (d. 995) al-Fihrist.

More recently, the narrative of the Abbasid House of Wisdom as a major academic institution akin to a university, with specialised departments and organised scholarly debate, has been challenged by some historians, who argue this image was constructed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Orientalist scholars through translation errors and retrospective projection, and propagated into later scholarship and nationally oriented works until more recent re-examination of the primary sources.