Kutubna Cultural Center
The Mathematician, The Philosopher, and The Storyteller: How Muslim Thinkers Approached Knowledge in 10th-Century Iraq
The Mathematician, The Philosopher, and The Storyteller: How Muslim Thinkers Approached Knowledge in 10th-Century Iraq
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Date: Sunday, March 8, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm
Registration fee: Free for members
50 AED for non-members
How did people learn before the internet and ChatGPT? What does an encyclopedia look like if it was written a thousand years ago? What would it include? Who would it cite?
In this lecture we visit the intellectual circles of Abbasid Basra and Baghdad and examine the practices of collecting, classifying, and interrogating knowledge through the lens of Ikhwan al-Safa, also known as the Brethren of Purity.
Rasail Ikhwan al-Safa (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) are often described as an encyclopedia. Were these letters really written as an encyclopedia? What do they tell us about their time and authors?
Shatha Almutawa is a historian and the founder and director of Kutubna Cultural Center. She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago and for around a decade worked as a professor in the United States. She taught at American University and George Washington University in Washington, DC; Cornell College, Lake Forest College, and Willamette University, all in the United States. Her scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Studia Islamica, and other academic journals, and she has published book chapters in edited volumes and entries in encyclopedias. With Kutubna’s curator, she has organized nine art exhibitions including the works of notable artists such as Farid Aouad, Amine El Bacha, Saliba Douaihy, Farghali Abdel Hafez, Faek Hassan, Shaker Hassan, Emanuel Guiragossian, Saad El Khadem, Michel El Mir, Fateh Al Moudarres, Abdel Kader Al-Rassam, Georges Sabbagh, Najat Makki, Khaled Ben Slimane, and Ali Hassan.
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