Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Borrowed Light: Al-Ma'mun, the Brother He Buried, and the House of Wisdom Built to Redeem a Caliphate

Borrowed Light: Al-Ma'mun, the Brother He Buried, and the House of Wisdom Built to Redeem a Caliphate

Hikma, Narin

Paperback

Historical FiguresIslamIraq History

ISBN13: 9798187024216
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 12 2026
Pages: 332
Weight: 0.98
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What do you build when the worst thing you've ever done is also the reason you have the power to build anything at all?

You know the feeling of carrying something you can never fully put down. A choice that got you exactly where you wanted to be - and cost someone else everything to get you there. You've told yourself you'll make it worth it someday. You're still not sure that's possible.

In 813, Abdallah al-Ma'mun became the most powerful man on earth the same week his own half-brother's severed head arrived at his palace gate - proof that the civil war fought in his name had ended exactly the way he'd told himself it wouldn't. He could have spent the next twenty years defending the throne he won that way. Instead, he built a library. He filled it with the era's finest scholars, funded translations of Aristotle and Ptolemy and Galen from a dozen languages, and turned a modest royal collection into the House of Wisdom - the intellectual engine of the medieval world, centuries before Europe's own age of learning caught up. He also, in the final year of his life, imprisoned and flogged scholars who refused to agree with him on a single point of doctrine, proof that even the most disciplined mind can mistake certainty for righteousness.

Watch what it actually looks like to convert guilt into something that outlives you, instead of something that just quietly poisons you

Also from

Hikma, Narin

View All

Also in

Historical Figures

View All