Greek Thought, Arabic Culture

"Gutas is very keen to flag up the role of the caliphs as patrons committed to an intellectual project. He looks at the Translation Movement and looks at what was happening in the 9th century in Baghdad. He sees the Abbasid caliphs as being important in patronising the translation of scientific knowledge from Greek into Arabic and its further development by Arabic-speaking scholars and researchers. Saliba sees the Translation Movement as beginning earlier, and being, not exactly generated from the bottom up, but a movement that was initiated by people working within the bureaucracy, who were trying to get the edge in employment terms. A lot of what they were doing was mathematical and astronomical, in terms of working out the correct taxes for times based on the harvest. For people who wanted to keep ahead in the civil service, translating information of this kind from Greek into Arabic was a way of improving their employment opportunities. Either way, the term Translation Movement is a rather humble name for a phenomenon that is as culturally important as the Renaissance but that isn’t much known about outside the Arab world. “The Koran says, ‘For every disease, Allah has given a cure.’ It was this belief that there is a cure for every disease that encouraged early Muslims to engage in biomedical research.” The one thing both Gutas and Saliba are keen to point out is that it was not an unreflective borrowing of materials. Muslims seemed to be quite focused in what they wanted. They had their interests – for instance, no Greek literature was translated. They had no interest in Homer. But they did target the particular areas of science that they wanted to see developed. Both scholars point out that when translation stopped that doesn’t mean Islamic science stopped. That’s an assumption that Muslim scholars were doing nothing with it, that they were just translating it and passing it on, but the point is that they were developing it. So they naturally got to the point where they surpassed the Greek heritage, they didn’t need it any more."

"Yes. In fact, I should say that he has published two very important books that I was tempted to choose. But I thought if I can only choose five books, I shouldn’t choose two by one person. He also published one of the most important books on Avicenna, who we will be getting onto soon. This book is from 1998, so it’s almost 20 years old now, which is hard to believe. It wasn’t the first study of the Translation Movement. This book represents the culmination of Gutas’s own work on this area. He and some other scholars had already been working quite a bit on the Greek-Arabic translations. And there had been work done even earlier by people like Rosenthal, who was Gutas’s teacher. In a way, this is Gutas stepping back and saying, let’s think about this whole movement: Why did it happen? What were they doing? What was the social context? We’re talking about an enormous movement when Greek works of science and philosophy were translated into Arabic. It was the high point of the ninth century, though it started towards the end of the eighth century and kept going into the tenth century. Here it might help to have in your head that the Islamic empire was huge, but came up against the borders of the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines were what was stopping the Islamic empire from spreading West, into the European heartlands. The Byzantine Empire was Greek-speaking; the eastern Roman Empire in general had always been Greek-speaking. For example, in Syria there was a culture of speaking Greek and also in Egypt. When the Muslims conquered these areas, they didn’t completely destroy the Greek-speaking intellectual culture. In particular, there were a lot of Christians who preserved the thought of Aristotle and other philosophers in Greek. And, around the beginning of the late eighth century and peaking in the ninth century, you had an enormous investment by the Muslim elite in translating these works into Arabic. “Around the eighth century and ninth centuries, you had an enormous investment by the Muslim elite in translating these works into Arabic” Sometimes they translated first from Greek into Syriac, and then from Syriac into Arabic. That shows how important these Syriac Christians were in the process. What Gutas tried to do was to explain how and why they did this. He actually has some calculations about how much it cost and how much they had to pay translators to do the work. It was fabulously expensive to have these books translated. He also has a lot of information about who the patrons were: who did it and why. It was ordered from the very highest levels: the Caliph’s family was involved in having this done. Being someone who has an interest in the practical concerns of the Translation Movement, he wanted to know not just how they did it and what they translated—he does talk about that—but he wanted to know what the political motivation was. He gives a complicated answer. You can accept part of his story without accepting all of it, because he gives several independent reasons why they may have wanted to do it. One that I think is very compelling is that they were basically engaging in cultural competition with the Byzantines. The Byzantines were their main military and political rivals in this period. There was actually quite a bit of warfare between Byzantium and the Islamic world in the ninth century. To oversimplify, it’s a case of the elites of the Islamic world saying: ‘you guys are Greeks and we understand Greek philosophy better than you do. And the reason we understand it better is that you’re Christians—and Christians are anti-intellectuals.’ There’s all this polemic about Christians refusing to study all of Aristotle: ‘As soon as Christianity came along, they stopped doing proper philosophy and science. And now, we, the Muslims, will recapture this original Greek wisdom and do it in a way that the Byzantines are failing to do.’ So there’s a kind of oneupmanship there. Gutas also talks about how they traced some of this wisdom back to pre-Greek sources, which were originally from the Middle East, and were, in a way, saying ‘this is originally our wisdom which was taken by the Greeks and now we’re taking it back .’ That’s another kind of polemic. Something else he argues—which I think is more controversial—is that because the Abbasids, the ruling caliphate, were coming into a situation where there was a very powerful Persian-Iranian culture that involved translations, they turned to Greek philosophy as way of showing that they were the political heirs to that culture. This is a very interesting idea, which I personally am persuaded by, though it is admittedly harder to prove. “They wanted to have the same kind of logical weaponry that the Christians had access to” Then, in addition to that, he points out a lot of the practical benefits that you would have got from the Translation Movement. One thing he mentions, for example, is that both Greek and Indian texts gave them access to astrology. Astrology could legitimate the rule of certain political rulers. Just as an in the Roman Empire you had figures like Augustus turning to astrology to legitimate themselves; the Caliphs did the same thing. Another point that Gutas mentions is that there were inter-religious disputes between Christians and Muslims, for example, and Aristotle’s logical works gave them the tools for arguing well against each other. Actually, some of these Christians knew Aristotle very well. So they wanted to have the same kind of logical weaponry that the Christians had access to. He mentions, for example, that one of earliest works to be translated was on dialectical argumentation, for exactly that reason. There are some works of ancient philosophy that are only extant in Arabic, but they’re not by the most famous figures. There are no works by Aristotle or Plato, for example, that are extant in Arabic but otherwise lost. Sometimes people say that the Latin medievals got access to certain texts through Arabic. Although that’s true, they then later on got access to the same texts through Greek. For example, they would take an Arabic commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics , and perhaps the first time they could ever read Aristotle’s Metaphysics was in a Latin translation of this commentary, because the commentary included the original text. So they had a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of what was perhaps a Syriac translation of the Greek. But then, once they got more interested in Aristotle, they made a concerted effort to start doing translations based on Greek manuscripts. On the other hand, there are fairly significant figures like Galen—the most important ancient doctor, along with Hippocrates—and Alexander of Aphrodisias—a famous commentator on Aristotle—whose works are only extant in Arabic. “If you lived in tenth century Iraq, you could pretty much read all of the Aristotle we can read” Consider someone like Aristotle, who was translated very extensively into Arabic. If you lived in tenth century Iraq, you could pretty much read all of the Aristotle we can read. That doesn’t mean that everybody read all of it, but it was an incredibly successful undertaking. In a way, the most powerful thing that comes out of Gutas’s book is an appreciation of the sheer enormity and success of the Translation Movement, in addition to all these issues about why it was done. A translator would make a translation, and then you would hire scribes to copy that. In fact, there is a book called The List —in Arabic, the Fihrist —by a tenth century bookseller who worked in Baghdad. It’s incredibly useful because he lists all of the books that he knows about that are available. He goes through the translations, telling you who translated what. You can read through that and get a vivid sense that some of the philosophers also made a living by copying the texts that they were working on. They would charge you a certain amount of money per page, and then it was disseminated. One other interesting thing to mention here is that this sort of dissemination of texts was, in part, possible because these were the first generations that had access to paper rather than parchment. This was a much cheaper and better technology that they got from China. They were able to produce enormous amounts of literature very quickly, in part just because they had this material that they could write on that was a lot cheaper to produce than parchment was."