Women of Islam: Lubna of Cordoba - The woman who ran largest library the world (Part 6)

It is the 960s. In a palace carved into a hillside outside Cordoba, a woman sits under lamplight, annotating a manuscript of Euclid's geometry in elegant Andalusi script. Her name is Lubna. She was born a slave in this palace. The biographer Ibn Bashkuwal will later write of her: "No one in the palace was as great as her." Not the ministers. Not the generals. Not the khalifa's advisors. A woman born in chains -- and the biographer says nobody was greater.

This episode traces the full arc of Lubna's world. How a desperate prince swimming the Euphrates in 750 CE set in motion two centuries of civilization-building that culminated in the most extraordinary city in medieval Europe. How Cordoba's streets were paved and lit while London and Paris sat in darkness. How Khalifa al-Hakam the Second sent book-hunting agents to Baghdad, Damascus, and Constantinople, building a library of 400,000 volumes -- with a catalog that was itself forty-four volumes long. And how a freed slave named Lubna was put in charge of all of it, solving the hardest mathematical problems of her era and drafting the khalifa's diplomatic letters in her own hand.

You will meet Fatima, the fearless manuscript hunter who traveled the Islamic world buying rare texts. You will meet Aisha bint Ahmad al-Qurtubiyya, the freeborn poetess who told a suitor she was a lioness. You will hear what a German nun who never visited Cordoba called it after hearing travelers' reports. And you will learn what happened when a military strongman decided that burning philosophy books was the fastest way to prove his piety -- and what was left when the fires went out. Three books. Out of four hundred thousand.

Primary sources include Ibn Bashkuwal's biographical dictionary, al-Maqqari's historical chronicle, Ibn Hayyan's writings, and Said al-Andalusi, supplemented by modern scholarship from Maria Rosa Menocal, Maribel Fierro, David Wasserstein, and Maria Luisa Avila.

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