Islamic golden Age

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The flowering of knowledge under the ‘Abbasids

As we have seen, the establishment of the ‘Abbasid caliphate entailed a geographical shift away from Syria, with its strongly Byzantine associa- tions, and an ideological reorientation away from the Umayyads’ Arab- centrism towards a more universal Muslim sense of identity. In the religious sphere, the ranks of non-Arab scholars began to grow, while in the domain of secular knowledge and culture, translations from Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi Persian and even Sanskrit nurtured the development of areas of scientific enquiry neglected for centuries. Although it is tempting to consider reli- gion and science separately, in the ‘Abbasid case it makes more sense to see them as existing on a social and intellectual continuum with a distinct over- lap between theology and philosophy, where friction sometimes occurred. Moreover the limited numbers of scientists or philosophers should not automatically be taken as a sign of disparagement for their professions. Professional philosophers are hardly a large group in any society, nor were scientists before the modern age, and the fact that Ibn al-Qifti (72–248), author of a biographical dictionary of scientists, could find 44 names to mention is therefore rather impressive. The question is the degree to which their learning penetrated society as a whole, and in the ‘Abbasid case one can see scientific and philosophical influences at work in many domains, despite the concern some religious scholars later felt about engagement with knowledge of non-Muslim provenance. In the realm of religion, there was no dramatic break between the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphates but rather a diversification and formali- zation of earlier trends, and a great deal of cross-fertilization from other religions and bodies of knowledge. During the early ‘Abbasid caliphate, the scholars of religion came to be collectively known as the ‘ulama’ (those who sought and disseminated ‘ ilm), an amorphous group subdivided into numerous categories of varying prestige of whom some of the most influ- ential were the collectors of hadith who, as we discovered in Chapter , became vocal critics of the caliphs’ wish to determine doctrine, a right and duty which they believed was their own. The scholars of hadith, often called traditionists, were the successors of those who had attempted to guide the community using the custom of Medina as an indicator of the sunna of the Prophet, with the difference that they preferred to write down previously oral testimonies and trace them back to the Prophet himself rather than to Medinese practice. Oral reports were replaced by a new written corpus of information, the hadith or traditions of the Prophet, in a move which coincided with a rise in conversion to Islam, Arabic literacy and paper production. ‘Abbasid culture was becoming a book culture and the early Islamic oral tradition could only

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maintain its credibility in that format. A written hadith consisted of two parts: an actual saying, known as the ‘content’ (matn), and a list of people who had conveyed the content through the generations from the time of the Prophet, known as a ‘chain’ (isnad). A typical hadith ran as follows:

‘Abd Allah b. Yusuf reported to me that Malik reported on the authority of Nafi‘ on the authority of ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Umar – may God be satisfied with them both – that the Messenger of God – peace and blessings be upon him – forbade the muzabana which was the purchase of date palms with a dry measure of dates and the sale of vines for a dry measure of raisins.7

Or in a more political vein:

‘Ali b. ‘Abd Allah reported that Yahya b. Sa‘id reported that Sufyan said Mansur reported from Mujahid from Ta’us from Ibn ‘Abbas – may God be satisfied with them both – that the Messenger of God – peace and blessings be upon him – said: There is no migrating after the conquest [has begun], only jihad and the intention [to wage it] and when you go to war, hasten forward.8

By the early ninth century huge numbers of hadith were circulating on every imaginable topic, some of very dubious veracity, and it was the self- appointed task of hadith scholars not only to collect them but to examine them and weed out obvious fabrications. This process led to the compilation of several canonical collections of hadith still widely used by Muslims today, of which the most renowned are the two Sahihs of al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 875). The first function of the hadith was to enable scholars to formulate the legal opinions which directed people’s everyday lives, but command of the Qur’an and hadith also enabled the ‘Abbasid ‘ulama’ to pronounce on religion more generally, sometimes at the caliph’s expense, and to develop the text-based approach to higher truth which became char- acteristic of Sunnism. While the traditionists concentrated upon gathering hadith and verify- ing them, jurists (fuqaha’) specialized in theoretical law and its methodol- ogy, applied that law in real cases as judges and legal advisors, and trained younger generations of jurists. It thus fell to them to develop more system- atic approaches to law than simply using the Qur’an or early Muslim prac- tices as examples to be applied elsewhere. This was partly necessitated by the fact that neither the Qur’an nor the sunna covered every eventuality, but it also reflected the maturing of Islamic law in an imperial context where it was no longer feasible to consult a pious Muslim from Medina every time a query arose. The scholar credited with effecting the systematization of Islamic law is Muhammad al-Shafi‘i (d. 820), who studied with Malik b.

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Anas of Medina and the followers of Abu Hanifa of Kufa before producing his definitive methodology for Islamic law in his famous Risala or Epistle. Although some of al-Shafi‘i’s ideas were rejected by later jurists, his Risala attempted to bring together conflicting views about the law, smooth over the contradictions evident in the Qur’an and hadith and produce a theoretical method for deriving legal norms from sacred texts. At the heart of his theory lay his concept of bayan, which he defined as a statement from God in the juridical context. It was the jurists’ task to identify such state- ments using four main sources or tools in combination with each other. Naturally the Qur’an was the primary source, followed by the Qur’an and hadith when they expressed the same rule. Then came situations in which the hadith explained a Qur’anic statement, followed by statements which appeared in the hadith alone. This was the area where contradictions abounded, a problem al-Shafi‘i resolved with a number of methods, includ- ing scholarly consensus (ijma‘). Finally, in situations without precedent in either the Qur’an or hadith, jurists should use their rational faculty (ijtihad) to draw analogies (qiyas).9 In other words, the primary source of law was the Qur’an, but in cases where the Qur’an was vague or silent, authenticated hadith should be used to clarify Qur’anic statements and supplement them, with the preferred solution being one on which a reasonable number of jurists were able to agree. One of al-Shafi‘i’s students, Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 855), whom we have already encountered vigorously opposing al-Ma’mun’s efforts to impose the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an in Baghdad, became the father of the fourth canonical Sunni school of law, the Hanbali school, famous for its devotion to the hadith and their literal application. In this era, however, there were also countless other legal specialists, many of whom founded shorter-lived schools which had more or less disappeared by the end of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in 258, such as the Jaririyya school associated with the historian al-Tabari, and the Zahiriyya school, one of whose champi- ons was Ibn Hazm in Spain. Although it has become common amongst modern Muslims and non-Muslims to see the Shari‘a as a code, in actual fact it developed as a common law system in which numerous different opinions and interpretations offered great flexibility and adaptability to the varied circumstances of individuals and communities. Consensus was never absolute, and diversity of opinion (ikhtilaf ) was as much a part of legal life as agreement, especially in its more theoretical dimensions where jurists indulged in highly intellectual problem solving using logical tools of Greek origin, which translators and scholars were rapidly making available to an Arabic-speaking audience. The pre-eminence of the Islamic east at this time drew students from

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as far away as Spain to Fustat and Alexandria in Egypt, Medina, and then the cities of Iraq to study with such luminaries as al-Shafi‘i, al-Bukhari and Muslim. As a result, the study of hadith arrived in Spain at almost the same time as the great hadith collections were being compiled in Iraq. Baqi b. Makhlad (d. 889), a Cordoban scholar educated in the east, produced the first known Andalusi hadith compilation in the hopes of weaning his Maliki compatriots off their reliance on a narrow range of books explain- ing the works of Malik to a more flexible source-based approach. This was something of a reversal of the situation in Iraq, where the hadith schol- ars appeared as radical conservatives opposed to juridical rationalism and theology. Baqi b. Makhlad’s hopes were dashed when he fell foul of the Maliki scholars who resented the sidelining of Medinese custom which acceptance of the new science of hadith entailed because of the close asso- ciation between Malik, the founder of their law school, and his hometown, Medina. Another Cordoban scholar who studied abroad, Ibn al-Waddah (d. 900), solved the problem by making Malik’s own collection of tradi- tions, the Muwatta’, a canonical hadith text alongside the eastern ones, and retaining the enduringly popular Mudawwana of Sahnun, a legal work based on Medinese custom, as a compromise. The hadith as a scriptural version of the sunna thus came to stay across the Islamic world. While the hadith and related materials provided Muslims with a dense quasi-historical account of the origins of their community, the challenges to Islam that arose in the early ninth century, from sophisticated Chris- tians of a Neoplatonic persuasion in particular, obliged Muslims to engage with theology and develop a more philosophical understanding of their core beliefs in God’s eternal oneness, the prophetic mission of Muhammad and the relationship between the ‘religions of the book’. Muslims called theol- ogy kalam, literally ‘speech’, and its practitioners defined it as ‘the science which is concerned with firmly establishing religious beliefs by adducing proofs and banishing doubts’.0 It was also sometimes called the science of tawhid, the Arabic term for oneness, unity and, by extension, monotheistic belief, of which Islam was seen to be the perfect example, a designation which hints at kalam’s function to assert Islam’s place against Christianity and Judaism. This naturally took Islamic learning into abstract areas such as the nature of man and God, the status of the Qur’an, prophecy, predestina- tion and human responsibility. For theologians these questions had to be addressed using ‘aql, human reason, to provide answers in harmony with the Qur’an, but they could not be answered by reference to the Qur’an and sunna alone as the hadith scholars would have it. The masters of kalam justi- fied their approach as a response to the Qur’an’s own injunctions that man

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should seek to understand creation and thus should be both scientist and theologian at the same time. Theology had existed in embryonic form during the Umayyad era, but its focus at that time was the issue of religio-political leadership – who should be caliph or imam – and, by extension, who should mediate man’s relationship with God and ensure the community’s well being not only on earth but also after death? However, theologians as a professional group adhering to a number of different schools only became a phenomenon in the ‘Abbasid era, which also, as a consequence, witnessed the steady crystal- lization of sectarian tendencies and the divergence of the Sunni and Shi‘i paths as their initial disagreements over leadership gained more detailed theological elaboration and religious depth. Soon the frequent Muslim taunt that Christianity’s division into endless sects showed how Christians had strayed from the path could be thrown in the opposite direction too. The most renowned theological schools were the Mu‘tazili school, which flourished during the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Ash‘ari school, established in the tenth century and influential well into the nine- teenth. Although necessarily Islamic, both drew on ideas and intellec- tual tools which the translation of Greek and Syriac materials (examined below) had brought within the Muslim purview. The amorphous Mu‘tazili school flourished in Basra, Baghdad and Samarra and had adherents across the Islamic world who upheld a wide variety of different beliefs, making it perhaps more appropriate to call Mu‘tazilism an ‘approach’ rather than a ‘school’. Sometimes called the ‘people of justice and unity’, Mu‘tazilis rejected predestination as unjust and asserted that people were responsi- ble for their negative acts, which could not belong to God because of his absolute goodness and transcendence, and would be rewarded or punished as appropriate. They, like many other ninth-century Muslims, believed in the createdness of the Qur’an, again on the grounds of God’s transcend- ence, which made it a nonsense to suppose that there could be anything of the same eternal, uncreated quality as God. For the same reason they also denied that God possessed such patently animal attributes as speech or sight which were co-eternal with him. The caliphs al-Ma’mun and al- Mu‘tasim patronized Mu‘tazili theologians because they were in favour of their rational and discursive approach to religion, but in later genera- tions they did not find such overt favour. In a society where sons followed their fathers, however, Mu‘tazilism continued on through the generations. There were also Mu‘tazili preachers who spread the movement beyond the cities into the countryside, preaching the message of God’s ineffable goodness. As a result, Mu‘tazilism as a worldview and a theological school existed until the end of the ‘Abbasid caliphate and, despite its own demise,

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influenced Shi‘ism, Sufism and some branches of Judaism. Interestingly, there is currently a revival of liberal Muslim interest in Mu‘tazilism as a form of indigenous Islamic rationalism which has much to offer Muslims in today’s world. While Mu‘tazilism gradually decreased in popularity over the centuries, its offshoot and rival Ash‘arism became the mainstream theology of Sunnis across Islamic lands. Named after its founding father, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Ash‘ari (d. 935), who was originally a Mu‘tazili, Ash‘arism asserted that God did have certain eternal attributes, such as knowledge, power, sight and speech, in contradiction to the Mu‘tazili position that God’s transcend- ence prevented him from possessing any such attributes. In a similar vein, Ash‘ari theologians believed that the Qur’an, God’s speech, was eternal and uncreated. They also believed that God willed all human acts, good and bad, by empowering men to commit them, thereby moving much closer to predestination than the Mu‘tazilis without completely sacrificing the notion of human responsibility. Ash‘ari theology appealed to the Sunni scholars of the Qur’an and hadith and became the orthodox Sunni theological position. It achieved this in part by side-stepping awkward issues by ‘not asking how’ on matters that should be accepted on faith alone because it was beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp the truth of them. Alongside the Mu‘tazilis and Ash‘aris, various groups of Shi‘i Muslims also elaborated their theology, concentrating on the central status of the imams and then the challenging matter of their disappearance from earth. As we saw in Chapter , early Shi‘ism grew out of what some Muslims perceived as the usurpation of the religious and political rights of the Prophet’s family, particularly ‘Ali and his descendants. Most Shi‘i Muslims doubted the legitimacy of the three Rightly Guided Caliphs who preceded ‘Ali, and all considered the Umayyads to be completely abominable owing to Mu‘awiya’s opposition to ‘Ali and Yazid’s culpability in the massacre of Husayn and his relatives at Karbala. Several failed rebellions later, the fifth imam, Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 733), began to develop a specifically Shi‘i law and theology by asserting that the imams were recipients of divinely inspired knowledge, albeit of a lesser degree than prophecy. His position was taken up and elaborated by his son, the sixth imam, Ja‘far al-Sadiq (d. 765), who asserted that the imams were infallible guides and that one would rise up in the future as the mahdi, a term often translated as messiah. Prior to the occultation or disappearance of the imams from earth they remained the living guides for the community in law, doctrine and the pursuit of inner truth. However, after the occultation of the Isma‘ili and Twelver imams in the ninth century, these duties were gradually delegated to their representatives on earth, the Shi‘i religious scholars. Although

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the Qur’an and those hadith acknowledged by the Shi‘is were important sources of law, Shi‘i clerics retained the right to exercise their own judge- ment. Moreover Shi‘ism absorbed a great deal from Islamic philosophy, Mu‘tazili theology and Sufism, making it intellectual heir to many of the trends apparent in the ‘Abbasid age, which is somewhat ironic given the Sunni character of the caliphate itself. The Buyids and Fatimids, for exam- ple, were great patrons of all the sciences and the latter made Cairo a vital centre for the study of philosophy and mysticism after Baghdad had lost that role. The early ‘Abbasid caliphate also witnessed the start of Sufism’s long development from its ascetic beginnings in Basra into a meditation on the mystery of man’s relationship with God and the soul’s aspiration to return to its source, influenced by Zoroastrianism and Christian Neoplatonism. Unlike law with its communal focus or theology with its abstract meta- physical deliberations, Sufism became a highly individualistic enterprise which eschewed Islam’s increasingly powerful public edifice in favour of a personalized approach in which men and women sought God by following the example of Muhammad and other exemplary characters. At this stage, Sufism was pietistic and easy to understand in its call for Muslims to live in simplicity, do good works and contemplate God, and there was little differ- ence between those later labelled ‘Sufis’ or ‘scholars’ beyond the former’s otherworldliness. In Iraq the ascetics of Basra were succeeded by such retiring characters as Harith b. Asad al-Muhasibi (d. 857), a pietistic hadith scholar who was perhaps unfairly said to have been the son of a Zoroastrian by those keen to suggest that his religious approach was tainted by un-Islamic influences. Although a native of Basra, like so many others of his generation al-Muha- sibi migrated to Baghdad, where he taught Junayd, one of the most famous of the so-called sober mystics who combined their personal search for God with respect for the outward rituals of Islam propagated by the legal schol- ars. Nonetheless al-Muhasibi fell foul of Ahmad b. Hanbal, who disliked his pietistic ways intensely, probably because he saw him as a rival for the support of the Baghdad crowd. In many areas, especially Iran and Khurasan, early Sufism mediated the transition ordinary people made when they converted from Zoroastrianism or Christianity to Islam. In many of these cases it took quite another form from the sober, self-mortifying approach of Rabi‘a or al-Muhasibi, gaining it the label of ‘ecstatic’ or ‘drunken’ Sufism. The experience of Abu Yazid Bayazid al-Bistami (d. c. 874), son of a Zoroastrian Persian, instructed in the mystical way by a mystic to whom he taught the Qur’an in return, is representative. Al-Bistami became notorious for claiming to have achieved

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union with the divine and for uttering blasphemous statements such as ‘glory to Me’ which implied that he and God were indistinguishable. His ecstatic approach to mysticism, however, bore some resemblance to Zoro- astrian ritual, in which the priest would drink sacred mead to become one with the deity, and thus he made sense to converts from Zoroastrianism and their children, among whom memories of the old faith persisted. Another famous Sufi of this ilk was Abu’l-Mughith al-Husayn al-Hallaj (d. 922), known as the ‘carder of consciences’, a Persian who grew up in Iraq where his father had moved in search of work. (This is a pun on al-Hallaj’s name since hallaj is the Arabic term for a wool or cotton carder who combs the fibres to remove impurities, just as al-Hallaj was believed to cleanse the consciences of his adherents.) He was a devout man but only became a fully fledged mystical preacher after performing the pilgrimage and spending a year praying and fasting in the Meccan sanctuary. He then returned to southern Iran and began to preach to growing crowds how they could find God in their own hearts. He attracted some followers in high places and was able to move his family to Baghdad where he gathered the same mass following as in Iran, arousing great consternation among government offi- cials and scholars alike. Al-Hallaj increasingly presented himself as ready to die for the sake of his fellow Muslims while also entering into trances in which he asserted, ‘I am the Truth’. The parallels with the passion of Christ are unmistakable, and when al-Hallaj was eventually arrested and a warrant for his execution issued, it is said that he prepared for martyrdom sure of his resurrection. For the common people, the ‘amma, ecstatics like al-Hallaj and pious scholars busy compiling hadith collections provided more satisfying guid- ance and leadership than the theologians whose subtleties meant little to them. That is not to say that the rich corpus of knowledge circulating among the elite had no impact at a popular level, since the ways in which tradition- ists and early Sufis thought were shaped by the intellectual trends current in Islam’s great centres of learning, but there was nonetheless an intellec- tual hierarchy. The theologians, although not men of the people, stood on the cusp between the teeming population of Baghdad and other cities and the cultural elite surrounding the caliphs and those who emulated them. While they addressed some of the same matters as the traditionists, they also adopted rational methods of proof similar to those used in philoso- phy, and were among the assortment of intellectuals, scholars and scientists patronized by the caliphs and their courtiers who constituted the vanguard of the ‘Abbasid intelligentsia. It is to this eclectic intellectual elite, whose hallmark effort was the translation movement which so signally shaped the ‘Abbasid cultural matrix, that we now turn.

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The ‘Abbasid translation movement

In addition to the importance of religious learning and the sway of the ‘ulama’ and mystics over the hearts and minds of the populace, Muslims of the elite showed a firm appreciation for the knowledge of the older cultures of the Mediterranean, Middle East and India, which were described as the ‘rational sciences’ (al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya), the ‘philosophical sciences’ (al- ‘ulum al-falsafiyya) or the ‘natural sciences’ (al-‘ulum al-tabi‘ iyya). Inter- est in this body of knowledge stimulated the translation movement, two centuries of feverish intellectual activity during which Muslims and non- Muslims worked together to seek out ancient sciences, make them acces- sible in Arabic, elaborate on them, apply them and circulate the resulting knowledge across the Islamic world. These sciences included mathematics, physics, metaphysics and philosophy, medicine, astronomy and what are now considered pseudo-scientific pursuits such as astrology, alchemy and magic. Astrological works written in Pahlavi Persian were the first to be trans- lated, along with a few Sanskrit texts, but the Greek heritage was the most significant in proportion and included almost all the works of Aristotle as understood by Greek commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, and the sixth-century Christian philosopher John Philoponus; digests of Plato’s works, for the most part via the great Neoplatonists, Ploti- nus, his disciple, Porphyry, and Proclus and maybe a few Platonic political works in close to their original form; the complete works of the physician and philosopher Galen, which included much from Hippocrates; math- ematical works by Euclid; in addition to Ptolemaic astronomy and an array of other materials. Some works were readily available in Christian monas- teries and academic libraries now in Islamic lands, others had to be sought in the storerooms and archives of Byzantium, and a fair proportion were not in common circulation by the eighth century. Their retrieval and translation was therefore a directed effort promoted by Muslim society over a period of 200 years. As well as being of inestimable value within the Islamic milieu, this corpus of knowledge was of universal significance in two intertwined ways. Firstly, by seeking out Greek, Persian and Indian learning, Islamic civiliza- tion acted as a vital link in the developmental trajectory of human civiliza- tion as a whole. Secondly, by engaging with earlier traditions and taking them in new directions, Muslims simultaneously made their own unique contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Although the process by which Hellenic knowledge passed to medieval Europe is often described as transmission via the Arabs, this downplays the innovative and path- breaking additions made to the body of knowledge which eventually passed

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on to other civilizations and peoples, and the extent to which factors in early ‘Abbasid culture and society drove scholars to seek out and translate more and more arcane scientific materials which were by no means easy to find in either Byzantium or the Sasanian Empire prior to the Islamic conquest. It is a fact that some works or versions of them would have been totally lost if it were not for their survival in the Arabo-Islamic environment. This process, commonly known by the rather humble title of the translation movement, ranks with other major cultural movements in our shared history in terms of its impact. When translation began in earnest in the mid-eighth century, three general categories of knowledge or science were most prominent. On the one hand, the young ‘Abbasid administrative service which had to levy revenue from agriculture, among many other tasks, needed a range of mathemati- cal and astronomical skills to apply in land surveying, revenue assessment, the calculation of harvests and the maintenance of irrigation systems. On the other hand, the ‘Abbasid caliphs themselves showed a keen interest in astrology, which served state purposes by providing auspicious dates for important public undertakings, and medicine, which was necessary for their personal well being. Dialectical and philosophical texts joined them as Muslims found it necessary to develop arguments to support Islamic beliefs against non-Muslim ridicule or attack. As we shall see, the order in which works were translated was not haphazard and works of sustained utility and application in ‘Abbasid high society were re-translated several times as research agendas matured and shifted. Two questions have exercised scholars of the translation movement: first, whether the movement was a top-down process initiated by the caliphs themselves or a bottom-up one triggered by a combination of governmental utility and an intensification of competition between administrators; second, the related question of who should take the credit – the Arabs or those of Persian and Christian origin? Such questions are not without their agendas and the answers are sometimes politically motivated. Even at the time of the translation movement, its coincidence with the Shu‘ubiyya encouraged the Persians to vaunt their contributions in contrast to the paltry cultural capital the Arab bedouin brought to Islamic civilization. Persian promi- nence at this time, and their claim to be possessors of a much greater level of civilization than the uncouth Arabs of the desert, has encouraged the assumption that most aspects of ‘Abbasid culture, including the translation movement, can be attributed to Persian influence. Early studies of the movement such as De Lacy O’Leary’s How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, published in 948, pay astonishingly little atten- tion to the translation movement at all and see the Arabs as lucky and

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chance recipients of other people’s knowledge, mostly that of the Chris- tian communities who had preserved Greek learning in their libraries and monasteries in Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa and Gundeshapur. More recent books by Dimitri Gutas and George Saliba, in contrast, celebrate the active and creative way in which Muslims sought, translated and inter- rogated knowledge from other civilizations. They, however, differ in their depiction of the motivating forces behind the movement. On the one hand, Dimitri Gutas sees the caliphs themselves as heavily involved in direct- ing the movement, encouraging the court to follow their lead and person- ally commissioning translations, in emulation of the Sasanian monarchs who preceded them as rulers of Iraq and Iran. On the other hand, George Saliba sees translation as being triggered by social change and competition among officials and administrators. He therefore attributes a much more passive role to the caliphs themselves, whom he sees as supporting a more purely Arab movement already under way in the Umayyad caliphate.2 At a distance of ,000 years, it is hard to assess the relative roles of the different players in the translation movement and to perceive whether it was a top-down initiative promoted by the ‘Abbasid caliphs as individuals or a more amorphous bottom-up process triggered by the specific social and cultural environment in ‘Abbasid Iraq, where both Baghdad and the Islamic intellectual centres of Kufa and Basra were situated, in addition to older centres of Nestorian and pagan learning such as Nisibis, Edessa and Harran. It was perhaps natural for historians of the day to personalize the phenomenon by linking it to various caliphs, most notably al-Ma’mun, but their actions did not take place in a vacuum and depended on a certain social and cultural environment which, even if it was not the original catalyst of the movement, certainly perpetuated it long after the caliphs had lost power to their Turkish commanders and the Buyids. Whoever takes the credit, the great achievement of the ‘Abbasids and the regimes which emerged in their shadow was to synthesize and build on the intellectual traditions which the early Islamic conquests had brought under their sway by not simply allow- ing converts to rediscover their heritage in an Arabo-Islamic idiom but also by creating an elite culture in which scientific knowledge and philosophy were actively sought out to be rigorously analysed and criticized in a new Arabo-Islamic environment. Two essential factors in creating the context for the translation movement were the Arabization of the administration of the empire by the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in the last decades of the seventh century, which initi- ated the process by which Arabic became the Muslim lingua franca, and the steady conversion of non-Arabs to Islam. Once the administration had shifted from local languages to Arabic, the participation of Persian, Greek

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and Aramaic-speaking groups in government service naturally entailed their application of their knowledge in Arabic. To some degree, then, the act of translating was incidental to the continuity which naturally resulted from the adoption of Arabic by non-Arabs. As the ranks of Muslims increased, however, Arabized non-Muslims in government service began to fear that their positions were no longer secure. Many such employees, or their children, therefore converted to Islam to maintain their positions, thus recasting their knowledge in the light of their new religion as well as their new language. In the first decades of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, Chris- tians, Zoroastrians and Jews were all to be found in the imperial service working in administrative, scholarly, scientific and medical capacities, but many of their descendants converted to Islam. For instance, the descend- ants of at least two of al-Mansur’s Zoroastrian Persian astrologers became Muslim, as did members of the originally Christian Bakhtishu‘ family of physicians, and the descendants of Hunayn b. Ishaq, the most celebrated ninth-century Christian translator of texts. It is George Saliba’s contention that these social changes created such a competitive environment that officials and state employees began to seek out texts which they could translate or have translated in order to keep ahead of the game by acquiring skills and knowledge superior to those of their colleagues. Texts on mathematics, astronomy, astrology and medicine all fell into this category, and the knowledge gained was not for the greater good of mankind but for the advancement of individuals or individual fami- lies.3 This rather Machiavellian reading of the situation probably has some truth to it but it was very hard to keep new knowledge under wraps, and the participation of courtiers, ministers, military commanders and some caliphs themselves in the translation movement ensured that no branch of learning could be monopolized by individuals or lineages in the long term. A coterie of highly talented and meticulous Christian and Muslim scholars, many bilingual or trilingual in combinations of Arabic, Pahlavi Persian, Syriac and Greek, made numerous manuscripts available in Arabic and, as a larger body of scholars, scientists and translators formed, scholars themselves made or sought out additional translations to comment on and criticize. A close analysis of the way these scholars worked indicates that they were actually operating in a research environment that strikes a modern note even at the distance of a millennium. Christian and Muslim research- ers developed projects related to the specific needs of the early ‘Abbasid governing class for astronomy and astrology, mathematics, philosophy and medicine, and then identified the Greek texts which could be relevant. Once translated such texts were used to enhance or develop ideas already

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being tested by ‘Abbasid scientists and scholars. Some scholars worked as individuals but there were also numerous research teams working in differ- ent areas such as medicine, optics and astronomy. This research culture explains the mutual interest of bureaucrats and caliphs in translation, the fact that many texts were re-translated for new purposes and the fact that translation ultimately became redundant in the late tenth century as Arabo- Islamic science outstripped its forerunners and translations from Greek ceased to be of scientific as opposed to antiquarian value.4 Before looking at the translations and the translators themselves we should briefly consider the institutional and technological framework that facilitated translation and other scholarly activities. An institution often considered integral to the translation movement was the famous but shad- owy bayt al-hikma, the ‘house of wisdom’, founded by the ‘Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. Although very little is known about its practical functioning, the bayt al-hikma has been variously described as a royal archive, a library and the nerve centre of the translation movement. Traditionally its founda- tion has been attributed to al-Ma’mun, the golden boy of the translation movement, but some chance references suggest that it was established at least 50 years earlier by al-Mansur or his Persian ministers who were actu- ally following the Sasanian practice of maintaining royal archives of dynas- tic chronicles and translated materials.5 This may well have been part of al-Mansur’s larger project to portray the ‘Abbasids as the legitimate succes- sors of the Sasanians in Iraq, Iran, Khurasan and Transoxania, a project equally evident in the design of Baghdad itself, discussed in Chapter 2, and al-Mansur’s public reliance on Jewish and Zoroastrian astrologers from previously Sasanian territories. By the reign of al-Ma’mun, the bayt al-hikma is said to have had a staff of translators – mainly Persians interested in astrology – copyists and book binders who assisted in the task of creating and maintaining the collection, but mention of it ceases a few decades later in the reign of al-Mutawakkil. Although al-Mutawakkil is often seen as a conservative who did not wish to promote ‘foreign’ sciences, it is equally evident that some important transla- tions were made during his reign. It is more likely that the apparent demise of the bayt al-hikma actually reflected a diminution in the state role which it could play after the caliphs moved to Samarra. Nonetheless, in creating an academic institute modelled on pre-Islamic libraries and academies of learn- ing from Gundeshapur to Alexandria, the ‘Abbasids set a precedent rapidly adopted by the Muslim elite around them. Even if the bayt al-hikma had a relatively short life as an institution in its own right, the concept of a library with a reading room for scholars to meet and study outside the confines of the mosques had come to stay. Wealthy private individuals began to set up

The Great Caliphs80

their own libraries, and rulers in Iraq and elsewhere competed to maintain the most splendid and varied collections, which complemented the more narrowly legal and religious titles held in mosque libraries. This sudden efflorescence of libraries was made possible by the Muslim acquisition of paper-making technology from China by way of Transoxa- nia, which made book production cheaper and easier than in the days of parchment. It also enabled authors and copyists to work more quickly, lead- ing to a dramatic increase in the availability of works and copies of them, alongside older, rarer and more expensive parchment manuscripts. This in turn contributed to an important shift from the oral culture of earlier times, in which memorization was valued as more sound than written and possibly altered materials, to a new ‘Abbasid written culture that cherished books as the repositories of true knowledge, a process we have already encountered in the religious realm with the committing of the hadith to paper. In the environs of Baghdad itself, a courtly lineage, the Banu Munajjim, established their own library, the khizanat al-hikma, ‘the treasury of wisdom’, which was open to scholars who were not only allowed to read the books but also offered free board and lodging in deference to their commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. In the tenth century the Samanids established a fine library in Bukhara where the philosopher and physician Ibn Sina, known in the Latin West as Avicenna, acquired his knowledge of Greek science. He described the library as:

a building with many rooms in each of which were chests of books opposite each other. In one room there were books on Arabic language and poetry, in another jurisprudence and each room was similarly [dedicated] to a single science.6

He adds that there was a catalogue for each subject, including the books of the ancient Greeks, and staff who brought the books to him when he requested them. In Mosul the governor Ja‘far b. Muhammad (d. 935) founded a library which provided free paper for readers to make notes on, and Basra, Hurmuz and Rayy possessed similar facilities. The Buyid ruler of Fars, ‘Adud al-Dawla (d. 977), set up a splendid library for persons of distinction in an upper storey of his palace in Shiraz, described in detail by al-Muqaddasi:

There is a manager, a librarian and a supervisor from among the people of good repute in the town, and there was not a book written up to that time, of all the various sciences, but happened to be there. It consists of a long oblong gallery in a large hall with rooms on every side. He attached to all the walls of the gallery and rooms bookcases six feet in height and three cubits long, made of wood and decorated. … For every subject there are bookcases, and catalogues in which are the names of the books.7

Baghdad ’s ‘Golden Age’ 8

Meanwhile in al-Andalus the Umayyad caliphs ‘Abd al-Rahman III (d. 96) and his son al-Hakam II (d. 976) built up their own royal library to rival those of Baghdad. To such major collections must be added countless small private libraries which sometimes held unique works. Avicenna mentions that an otherwise unknown jurist of Khwarazmian origin, Abu Bakr al- Baraqi, commissioned two books on philosophy from him for his personal library but that these were not commonly available because Abu Bakr never lent them out for copying.8 He was an exception, however, and Cordoba alone was reputed to have 70 libraries and a thriving trade in book copying and selling which enabled wealthy collectors to acquire all the bestsellers of their day, including the translated Greek classics. Such libraries reached their apogee in Egypt, where the Fatimid caliphs established a vast library and study centre in their palace with 40 rooms containing as many as 2 million volumes, including 8,000 on the knowl- edge of the Greeks. It was only surpassed by the caliph al-Hakim’s great dar al-hikma or dar al-‘ ilm founded in 005. As in Baghdad, ‘state’ libraries were accompanied by private foundations, an example of which was the academy of the minister Ibn Killis. In the case of the Fatimids and their courtiers, the great Hellenic academies in Alexandria, which had not been destroyed by Muslims despite the myth to that effect, provided as much of a model as the ‘Abbasid libraries further east. Sadly the Fatimid dar al-hikma suffered many vicissitudes in the turbulent last century of the Fatimid caliphate and was finally closed by Salah al-Din after he assumed power in Egypt in 7, its books sold, destroyed and dispersed forever. The other institution which underpinned Baghdad’s Golden Age was the salon or majlis, a word which denoted both a place and the gathering which took place within it. The idea of gathering together scholars, intel- lectuals, poets and other interesting types on a regular basis for a session of stimulating conversation and witty repartee was hardly new to Islam but it came to take very diverse forms under the ‘Abbasids, from ribald poetic recitations with slave girls to extremely intellectual debates about religion and reason. While the Umayyad caliphs had patronized poets and culti- vated an interest in the religious sciences, intellectual salon culture was the product of the ‘Abbasid court in Baghdad, and temporarily Samarra, in the ninth to tenth centuries. The caliphs themselves presided over some salons, but soon the number multiplied as chief ministers and other court person- nel competed to hold their own such gatherings. It was understood that people of differing views would attend a majlis and that debates and even polemics might ensue. Christians, Muslims and Jews mixed at such gatherings and it is a measure of the academic free- dom of the time that individuals of very different backgrounds felt able to

The Great Caliphs82

express themselves. The Christian scholar and translator Matta b. Yunus was apparently attacked fiercely for his belief in logic at the salon of the minister Ibn al-Furat by Abu Sa‘id al-Sirafi, who was opposed to the infiltration of philosophical ideas into Islam, while Matta’s Christian student Yahya b. ‘Adi criticized the logical premises of Islamic theology in a different salon.9 The tenets of Mu‘tazilism too were debated in the salons. Attendance at a majlis resulted in patronage and was the consequence of it. Newcomers who entertained the host with their acuity could expect remuneration while those who already enjoyed the favours of the patron would be required to attend. It was therefore not simply a social and intellectual institution but also a way in which aspiring intellectuals and scholars made their mark and found patrons willing to pay them, offer them board and lodging or help them secure access to more permanent employment as ministers, physi- cians, librarians and ‘royal’ scholars.

Translations, translators and scientists

It is generally although not universally accepted that the first tranche of ‘Abbasid translations related to astrology and astronomy. Near Eastern society was saturated by astrology, which was used to write horoscopes and determine auspicious and inauspicious days for activities, and, although not condoned by Islam, such practices soon entered Islamic culture. It is related that in choosing the site of Baghdad and the date for the commencement of construction, al-Mansur consulted a team of Persian astrologers. Nawba- kht, a Zoroastrian astrologer, assisted by the Jewish astrologer Masha’allah and other members of the astrological team, provided him with an auspi- cious date. In the ensuing years, astrology took pride of place among the sciences patronized by the caliph, and several Persian astrological works, some translations of Greek originals, were duly translated into Arabic. Astrologers soon began to author new works, the best known of which is the Great Introduction [to Astrology] of Abu Ma‘shar (d. 886), a native of Balkh in Khurasan, which soon found its way to Spain, where the Umayyads had cultivated local astrology of Roman or Byzantine derivation from the early ninth century but eagerly added Arab-Greek works to that corpus. Although a pseudo-science, astrology depended on a firm astronomical understanding of the positions of the sun, moon and planets. Astronomical manuals, known as zij, provided this information for particular locations in the form of tables and explanation, and the ‘Abbasids eagerly sought out manuals such as the Sasanian Zik-i Shariyar and Zik-i Arkand and Ptolemy’s Almagest. Manuals of Indian origin may have been added in the early 770s when a scholar accompanying an embassy from Sind supposedly brought