Literature in the Abbasid Age
As several other fields (such as science, philoso- vizier’s daughter, Scheherazad, who chose to marphy, medicine and education), literature thrived in ry the king, when she started telling him of the
the Islamic Golden Age. Once the capital of the em- most fascinating tales every night to leave it hangpire was moved from Syria to Iraq, the blossoming ing at the climax every night. The king’s curiosity
of literature transformed the court at Baghdad into and interest in the stories led him to postponing
a center for literature and language. The empire the execution every morning, ending the curse of
had grown to become a “multinational Muslim em- the kingdom and beginning the classic literature of
pire” with travelers from Greece, Rome, Persia, Chi- the Arabian Nights. The stories of the compilation
na and India. This was reflected in the fast-paced are believed in legend to be the various stories that
development of the era as well as the literature pro- Scheherazad told the king every night. It was introduced at the time. The standardizing
duced to the western world by a
of Arabic as the language for all Mus-
French scholar Antoine Galland
lims owing to the Quran, Chinese pa-
who translated the original Ara-
per-making and the distribution and
bic text into French in the 18th
collection of literary work from Greek,
century including some stories
Roman and Sanskrit all supported the
that were not from the original
prosperity of Arabic Literature. The
Arabic manuscript. One of the
House of Wisdom was established in
best-known English translations
1004 and these scholarly texts from
is by Sir Richard Francis Bur-
across the world were retained, trans-
ton. Severa