Scholars
Four Muslim Cities Before 1500
Four cities: Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo and Timbuktu — beacons of Islamic civilisation in four directions. Baghdad on the Tigris with the House of Wisdom and paper; Cordoba in al-Andalus with her Great Mosque and million-volume libraries; Cairo on the Nile with al-Azhar teaching for a thousand years; Timbuktu on the Niger with Sankore's colleges and the Sahara's manuscripts. Four cities joined by trade and Hajj routes: desert roads carrying Timbuktu's salt and gold, sea roads carrying India's spices, and the Hajj gathering all their scholars in Mecca to swap books and ideas. Around 1500 this network was the world's greatest web of learning — four points of light on one map. So the network reads: not four isolated cities but four heads on one body — whenever one region breathed, all profited from the others.