1 Early History

1. EAREEARLYLYY HISHHISTORYTORORY 5 1 Early History

The fijirst attempts to study Arabic in Europe occurred in the Iberian peninsula. There, after the Arab conquests in the eighth century, a flourishing culture developed which was primarily Islamic but in which Christians and Jews played an important part. With the reconquest of Toledo from the Muslims by Alfonso VI of Castile a translation movement came into being which is known as the ‘Medieval Renaissance,’ and which was based in the cathedral of Toledo. The translations, often testifying to an imperfect knowledge of Arabic, covered a selection of scholarly works in the domains of medicine, geography, astronomy, mathematics, physics and philosophy.1 A substantial part consisted of texts by Greek and Hellenistic authors such as Aristotle, Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy which were no longer available in the West in their original form but which had been translated into Arabic from the ninth century onward under the Abbasid dynasty. In addition to these there were the works of Arabic-speaking scholars such as Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’, c.980–1037), al-Ghazali (‘Algazel’ 1058–1111) and Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’, 1126–1198), translated directly from Arabic into Latin. In most cases the translators relied on the assistance of local Arabic speakers. One example is the surgical manual of Abu ʼl-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-‘Abbas al-Zahrawi from Granada (c.936–c.1013), whose name was transformed into Latin as Albucasis, Abulcasis, Alsaharavius or other variants. The Latin translation of the text was made by the best known translator in Toledo, the Italian Gerardo da Cremona (1114–1187). The illustrations of surgical instruments appear both in the Arabic manuscripts and in the Latin translations: the most attractive printed edition is the one issued by Johann Schott in Strasbourg (1532).2 The Andalusian translation movement produced a treasure trove of knowledge, which gave an important impulse to European learning and raised it to a higher level. At that time Arabic learning set the standard for various domains of scholarship. Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on the work of Aristotle had an immense influence on theology and philosophy. But the veneration for the indirect translations out of Greek via Arabic into Latin diminished in the course of the fijifteenth century when humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536) ‘rediscovered’ Greek. The increasing knowledge of Greek led to doubts about the quality of the old medieval translations via Arabic, but at the same time it prompted a desire for a greater knowledge of the original Arabic texts. For many years Europeans had little idea of the nature and the range of the scholarly texts which had been produced by the Arabic-Islamic tradition. This changed with the involuntary arrival in Europe of one of the most influential fijigures in the early history of oriental studies: al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan. He was born in Granada in 1494, two years after the Reconquista, or the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims. His family fled to Fez in Morocco, where he received a good education. In 1518 he was taken prisoner by the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes and brought to Rome. In 1520 he converted to Roman Catholicism and received the Christian name Johannes Leo de’ Medici after the pope, Leo X, but he was known above all as Leo Africanus. He owes his fame to the description of Africa which fijirst appeared in Italian in 1550, but which was published in Latin in Antwerp in

6 ARABIC STUDIES IN THE NETHERLANDS