Sailing from Byzantium (18 page)

The author best represented in Hunayn's translation work was Galen, and Hunayn kept a record, the
Risala,
of his Galenic translations that records 129 of them, and is thought to be incomplete at that. Some three-quarters of the translations were from Greek into Syriac, often with a student such as Ishaq or Hubaish later performing the easier task of rendering the Syriac into Arabic. The
Risala
shows that the Syriac versions were made for Christian patrons and the Arabic versions for Muslim ones, which gives an idea of how Nestorians dominated the medical profession. All but a few of the Syriac versions have been lost.

The
Risala
constitutes an invaluable resource for modern scholars, since Hunayn's notes on each Galenic work include insights and information on topics such as the quality of earlier translations, the availability of manuscripts, the desires of patrons, and much else besides. In particular, many of the entries illuminate Hunayn's methods with richness and immediacy. Here he records his work on one text, Galen's
On Dissection,
over a span of many years:

I translated it [into Syriac] when I was a young man … from a very defective Greek manuscript. Later on, when I was about forty years old, my pupil Hubaish asked me to correct it after having collected a certain number of [Greek] manuscripts. Thereon I collated these so as to produce one correct manuscript, and compared this manuscript with the Syriac text and corrected it. I am in the habit of proceeding thus in all my translation work. Some years later I translated it into Arabic for Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa.

The biggest problem the translators faced was generally not the difficulty of the Greek itself but the scarcity of good, accurate Greek manuscripts. Perhaps this helped give rise to
the later myth of Hunayn's supposed journeys to Byzantium in search of texts.

Altogether, Hunayn and his group produced the most significant body of work in the translation movement. In addition to the medical books of Galen and others, they also accounted for the vast majority of important philosophical works, including those of Plato
(Sophist, Timaeus, Parmenides, Crito, Laws, Cratylus, Republic, Phaedo,
and
Euthydemus)
and Aristotle
(Categories, Hermeneutica, Analytica Priora, Analytica Posteriora, Sophistics, Topics, Rhetoric, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorologica, Book of Animals, On the Soul, On the Plants, Metaphysics,
and
Nicomachean Ethics).

Hunayn's spectacular success as a translator may actually have lain partly behind the major setback in his career. This occurred during the reign of al-Mutawakkil, and it has traditionally been chalked up to the jealousy of Hunayn's Nestorian colleagues. Apparently Hunayn held views that were sympathetic toward the Iconoclast movement, which was just coming to a close after more than a century of dominating the Byzantine Orthodox Church. In this, he would have differed from the official Nestorian line, which supported the veneration of icons. The story goes that a few of Hunayn's fellow Nestorians somehow persuaded him to spit on an icon, which, as they no doubt anticipated, outraged the Nestorian patriarch when he heard about it, which of course they made sure he did. With the caliph's approval, the indignant patriarch had Hunayn flogged and imprisoned for six months, with the added punishment of confiscating both his fortune and—worse—his precious library.

After his release, the loss of his books hindered Hunayn's work to some degree. He refers to it repeatedly in the
Risala.
In the entry for the year 856 he explains to his patron Ali ibn
Yahya, who commissioned the
Risala
and who had asked him for a list of Galen's translated works, why he had been unable to comply with the request:

I continued to refuse your demand (viz. to write a list of all the translations of Galen's books) and put you off till a later time, because I had lost all the books which I had gradually collected during the course of the whole of my adult life in all the lands in which I had travelled, all of which books I lost at one blow, so that not even the … book in which Galen enumerates his works remained to me.

Hunayn got back into al-Mutawakkil's good graces by curing one of his courtiers of an illness. He records that the grateful caliph bestowed three houses upon him, “completely furnished and containing books,” although it's unclear whether this refers to the confiscated library. Nor is it known for certain whether Hunayn ever got his books back, though he seems to have escaped further unpleasant brushes with authority, carrying his translations on as best he could with or without his library. Reinstated to his old position of court physician after his release, he held the job until his death in 873. His lifetime bridged the reigns of ten caliphs, nine of whom he served with rare dedication and distinction.

n one of his Galenic translations, Hunayn ibn Ishaq makes an omission that perfectly captures the spirit in which the translators and their patrons approached the Greek legacy. The text he's translating, fittingly, is
On Medical Names,
and the omission is a brief quotation that Galen has made from the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, whose satirical observation of politics and social life in classical Athens has done much to round out (and enliven) our picture of the ancient Greeks.

As Hunayn explains in a note, he has two reasons for omitting the quotation:

I am not familiar with the language of Aristophanes, nor am I accustomed to it. Hence, it was not easy for me to understand the quotation, and I have, therefore, omitted it. I had an additional reason for omitting it. After I had read it, I found no more in it than what Galen had already said elsewhere. Hence, I thought that I should not occupy myself with it any further, but rather proceed to more useful matters.

Leaving aside the internal inconsistencies in Hunayn's explanation (if he could translate the quotation, what makes its difficulty per se a good reason to leave it out? Alternatively, if he couldn't translate it, how could he be sure that it held nothing useful?), his reasons are revealing in themselves.

The first one shows us that however competently Hunayn could handle medical and scientific Greek, his knowledge reflected a narrow slice of what was in reality a large linguistic pie. This won't be surprising to any student of the language, who will be used to the challenges that come with shifting authors within a genre, not to mention shifting from one genre to another. One can be getting along quite well in Herodotus yet be flummoxed when first turning to Thucydides, much less be able to glide effortlessly from either of these historians to, say, Aeschylus or Euripides. In addition to these challenges of newness to which Hunayn alludes, some writers are just plain harder than others. Thucydides, for example, is simply more difficult than Herodotus. Aristophanes is harder than Herodotus, too, but not as hard as Aeschylus or Euripides.

Compared with such belletristic works, scientific writing tends to be linguistically and stylistically more straightforward, which would have put Hunayn at a further disadvantage. Even Plato, renowned as a graceful and subtle Greek prose stylist, holds few linguistic obstacles if one is concerned with essence more than nuance. This goes double for scientific texts. Because they're aimed primarily at conveying practical information, the main challenge in reading them is their technical vocabulary, and the reader who has mastered that enjoys relatively smooth sailing. (That's why it's appropriate that the tract from which Hunayn omitted the Aristophanes quotation was one concerning medical
terminology.) Such considerations help to explain how the great Hunayn could be stumped by a quotation that, more than likely, any moderately gifted British schoolboy of the nineteenth century would have been able to get through in fairly short order.

Hunayn's second reason underscores the practical applications of scientific writing, and shows that the translators and their patrons magnified those aims to the virtual exclusion of all others. Why else leave out a quotation that doesn't contribute anything “useful” to the discussion?

The idea, in other words, wasn't to provide a faithful rendition of the original text as the author wrote it, which is how we conceive of the enterprise of translation. Instead, Hunayn and the others wished above all to provide access to the hard information that the text contained. Nothing else mattered, certainly not an intrusion by a comic voice whose sexual punning and profane satire would have been offensive and irrelevant to the Syrian Christians even had the language not been impenetrable.

This approach cut out huge swaths of what we think of as Greek literature, including (to take just two conspicuous examples) poetry and history, the types of writing that comprised the earliest interests of the Italian humanists. The Greco-Arabic translation movement of Baghdad stands about as far as it's possible to get from the obsessive, all-consuming classicism of quattrocento Florentines like Niccolò Niccoli.

The movement lasted well over two centuries, a convenient date for its end being the year 1000. By that time, most of the “useful” texts had been translated.

The translation movement confronted Islam with the imposing presence of Greek philosophy, which was part and parcel of the “useful” body of knowledge that the Syrians made available to the Arabs. Jews and Christians, of course,
had also had to face this legacy of free inquiry. But the Arabic philosophers were more successful in building on the rationalistic tradition that Greek philosophy embodied. Where others had stagnated, they moved forward.

Western scholars have often assumed that the translation movement ended because the Arabs lost interest in the subject matter, but clearly that's far from the case, since Arabic science and philosophy continued to break new ground long afterward. It seems quite apparent that the translation movement ended precisely
because
Arabic scientists and philosophers were breaking new ground: they had moved on, and the Greeks had nothing left to teach them. All the relevant works had been translated long since, and the Greek material that had sparked the Arabic Enlightenment was no longer on the cutting edge.

This movement is known in Arabic as
falsafa
—the Greek word
philosophia
transliterated into Arabic—and its practitioner was the
faylasuf
another transliteration, this time of the Greek
philosophos,
philosopher. The
faylasuf
was devoted to living according to reason, which was held to be the ordering principle of the universe. As proponents of reason, and of understanding the rational cosmos, the
faylasufs
held themselves apart from the other two influential groups in Abbasid culture, the religious scholars, or
ulama,
and the pleasure-loving poetic dabblers who surrounded the court, the
adibs
^∗

Unlike modern philosophy,
falsafa
was considered very much a practical pursuit. The professions that the
faylasufs
typically specialized in were the two leading “applied sciences” of medicine and astrology, the second of which incorporated both mathematics and astronomy.

In a rational cosmos, it was thought, the actions of the stars and planets clearly must have measurable consequences in our human lives here on earth, and the aim of astrology was to quantify and predict those consequences.
Faylasufs
also energetically pursued alchemy, another area of Greek wisdom literature that our modern outlook hardly associates with reason, though a figure such as Isaac Newton, viewed today as a paragon of Western reason, was deeply interested in both. It was partly for such wizardry and black arts, as well as for their other pursuits that we would recognize as rationalistic, that the
faylasufs
eventually incurred the
ulamas
opposition.

The first Arab
faylasuf
was the venerable al-Kindi, often called the “Philosopher of the Arabs.” He was a contemporary of Hunayn's, born into the Arab aristocracy at Kufa, where his father was governor, and educated at Basra and Baghdad, where he enjoyed the patronage of three caliphs. Al-Kindi idolized Aristotle, and his prodigious literary output reflects an Aristotelian breadth of interest: he wrote on logic, metaphysics, geometry, mathematics, music, astronomy, astrology, theology, meteorology, alchemy, and the soul, among other topics. His approach was encyclopedic, attempting to summarize known information in each of these fields, and incorporating learning not only from Greek sources but also from Indian and Chaldean ones. In his theological writings he championed the theme of God's unity. He upheld the validity of the Koranic revelation, using Aristotelian syllogistic logic in an attempt to demonstrate its truth, but insisting that revelation trumps reason.

This could hardly be said of the next major figure in Arabic philosophy, the radical freethinking Persian Platonist Abu Bakr al-Razi, known to the West as Rhazes. Born in Rayy, Persia (hence al-Razi, “the Rayyan”), Rhazes studied medicine there and in Merv before coming to Baghdad. He became a celebrated physician as well as a philosopher, styling himself another Hippocrates in medicine and another Socrates in philosophy. His rugged Platonism recalls no one so much as George Gemistos Pletho: Rhazes took a hard-line rationalist position that utterly rejected revelation as a path to truth.

The cause of reason was taken up in the generation after Rhazes by the imposing figure of Muhammad al-Farabi, called Alpharabius in Latin. Reportedly a Turk whose father served in the caliph's bodyguard, al-Farabi studied with leading
faylasufs
in Baghdad before moving to Aleppo, Syria. There he served in the court of the warrior-poet-prince Sayf al-Dawla, a leading patron of Greek philosophy and a military scourge of the Byzantines. Al-Farabi, too, upheld the supremacy of reason, but left room for revelation, which, al-Farabi suggested, offered a digestible version, in symbolic form, of truths that were more meaningfully if less easily explored by the pursuit of reason. He attempted to prove the existence of God, adumbrating the famous ontological proof later articulated in the West by St. Anselm.
^∗
If, like Rhazes, al-Farabi put reason first, he had less confidence than Rhazes in the ability of the masses to deploy it, and so he found revelation more suitable for everyday consumption.

Most modern scholars have characterized al-Farabi's ultimate interests as social and political. Whereas al-Kindi
had summarized an eclectic but largely Aristotelian body of scientific knowledge, and Rhazes had based his individualistic (and virtually atheistic) thought mostly on the writings of Plato, al-Farabi brought the full power of the Neoplatonic synthesis to bear on the question of what would constitute the ideal Islamic society, which he described as “the virtuous city.” Al-Farabi essentially took Plato's famous ideal of the “philosopher king” and equated it with the monotheistic ideal of the prophet. The prophet (or caliph, or imam), at once the receiver of divine revelation and the possessor of the highest reason, is also the ideal ruler—a pat blend of Neoplatonic utopianism and Islamic theocracy.

The most influential
faylasuf
of all, Abu Ali ibn Sina, known to the West as Avicenna, built on al-Farabi's comprehensive working out of Neoplatonism, but was less interested in envisioning an ideal Islamic society based on it. Instead, he concerned himself more with how al-Farabi's Neoplatonism could relate to the particulars of Islamic society as it had actually developed, and especially with the
sharia,
Islamic law. Avicenna lived in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. He wrote close to three hundred works, yet it's not his productivity that sets him apart from the others. All of these
faylasufs
were awesomely prolific by modern standards. Avicenna's clear and elegant style gave his writings a literary appeal that transcended the narrow world
offalsafa,
and this wider readership meant that more of his work survived. It also meant that he became identified with Neoplatonism in a way that al-Farabi did not, even though Avicenna himself acknowledged his debt to his great predecessor.

In contrast with al-Farabi, about whose life only the bare bones are known, Avicenna left an autobiography that gives us a fairly full picture of the man. A Persian, Avicenna was born near Bukhara in Central Asia (today's Uzbekistan),
and by his own account he was recognized early on as something of a prodigy. His family moved to Bukhara when he was very young, and he studied religion, Arabic poetry, medicine, science, and mathematics there with a number of well-known teachers. He memorized the Koran by age ten, and by the age of sixteen, he tells us, he was being sought out for advice by older, established physicians.

Avicenna came of age in the twilight of the Persian Samanid dynasty, one of the many regional powers that sprang up across the Islamic world as Abbasid power declined over the course of the ninth century. The Samanids, munificent patrons of learning and the arts, made their capital at Bukhara, and Avicenna tells us that he took advantage of their superb libraries, reading everything he could get his hands on. Despite his brilliance, however, the one area that remained a blank to him was metaphysical philosophy, and he reports that he read a translation of Aristotle's
Metaphysics
forty times without making any headway. Only when he discovered al-Farabi's commentary on the book did its meaning suddenly fall into place. Al-Farabi would remain Avicenna's model, and by some assessments anyway Avicenna's most significant achievement was to refine and disseminate al-Farabi's ideas.

Avicenna had won the patronage of the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur by successfully curing him of an illness. However, when Avicenna was still under twenty, the Samanids fell to the rising power of the Ghaznavids, a group of Turkish slave-soldiers who rose and claimed power in their own right. After a period of wandering, Avicenna found a place in the court of a Buyid prince at Hamadan in western Persia. He remained there, churning out a huge body of work over a career that amounted to a roller-coaster ride of palace intrigue, becoming vizier (prime minister) twice between
periods of disfavor and even, once, prison. He worked out the tensions of this precarious existence by overindulging in drink and sex, dying at age fifty-eight after attempting an unconventional self-cure for stomach trouble.