your bridge home
True Valor
The viziers who made Baghdad the intellectual capital of the world descended from the hereditary abbots of a Buddhist monastery.
The Barmakids were the most powerful family in the Abbasid empire, viziers to the caliphs, effectively running the state at its height.
Their name is a title. Barmak is the Arabic form of the inherited office held by the head of the Nava Vihara - the New Monastery - at Balkh, in what is now northern Afghanistan.
They were descended from Buddhist abbots.
Balkh was one of the great Buddhist centres of the ancient world, on the road between India and Central Asia, and Nava Vihara was a famous monastery with a famous library.
Its hereditary keepers turned Muslim after the Arab conquest, and rose within a couple of generations to the top of the Abbasid state.
And they brought habits of mind formed by a place that had spent centuries collecting, copying and translating Indian texts.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.