Romance and Reason Islamic Transformations of the Classical
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© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. one Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past Samuel Thrope Raquel Ukeles 14 For general queries, contact [email protected] 39176_ISAW_IR_Chapter01_final.indd 14 18/12/17 14:24 © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. In the middle of the ninth century Ce, Hunayn ibn Ishaq world up to the dawn of modernity. This was not only a was hunting for Greek manuscripts. As he tells us, the Muslim project. Hunayn was one of many Christians Arabic translator was looking for, among other works, who were instrumental in translating Greek books first copies of books by Galen, the famous philosopher and into Syriac and then into Arabic. Jewish scholars such as physician who had lived over six hundred years earlier. Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, and Judah Ha-Levi, as well Hunayn writes: as others, were instrumental in incorporating Greek ideas, via their Arabic translations, into Jewish theology. None of our contemporaries has, up to this Jewish translators also rendered the Greek classics into point, come across a complete Greek manu- Hebrew via Arabic; one example of such a translation, script of De demonstratione, despite the fact Zerahyah ben Isaac ben Shealtiel Hen’s translation that Jibril [ibn-Bukhtishu] spent an enor- of Aristotle’s De anima (National Library of Israel Ms. mous amount of effort looking for it, just as Heb. 1108) is included in this exhibition. I myself searched for it most intensively. I The translation movement ended in the tenth traveled in its search in northern Mesopota- century not because of a shift in attitudes toward the mia, all of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt until I classical past, but rather because translation itself had reached Alexandria. I found nothing except become obsolete. Avicenna, al-Farabi, Averroes, and about half of it, in disorder and incomplete, other scholars, philosophers, physicians, and scientists in Damascus.1 had already moved beyond the classics, establishing a self-perpetuating intellectual culture that was free to This manuscript-hunting journey was far more than one challenge as well as elaborate the ancient sources. antiquarian’s idiosyncratic whim. A Christian physician born in 808, Hunayn was perhaps the most famous fig- The Exhibition ure in a revolutionary and far-reaching cultural moment: the translation of Greek into Arabic. The exhibitionRomance and Reason, jointly conceived by Over the course of a century and a half—from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and just after the nascent Abbasid dynasty’s conquest of the National Library of Israel, considers this unique cul- the reigning Umayyad caliphate in 750 to the end of tural interaction. The exhibition includes manuscripts the tenth century—nearly all extant classical Greek from a wide range of partner institutions and explores sources, including science, philosophy, medicine, magic, how Islamic thinkers and artists conveyed, conceived, astrology, and parables and popular literature were and reimagined—in words and in pictures—the ancient rendered into Arabic; the “high” literary genres of Greek classical heritage. poetry, drama, and history were the only exceptions. Bringing two aspects of this interaction into con- Through their philologically sophisticated translations, versation for the first time, the exhibition focuses in one Hunayn and others created an Islamic technical and section on the Islamic Alexander Romance, the Persian philosophical vocabulary that continues to serve Ara- and Turkish versions of the legendary account of the bic, Persian, Turkish, and other Islamic languages today. life and exploits of Alexander the Great. Muslim fasci- This massive project involved generations of translators, nation with Alexander derives from a cryptic reference commentators, and patrons, in fact most of the elite of in the Qur᾿an, further elaborated in early Islamic exe- early Abbasid society. gesis, particularly the genre of “stories of the prophets” Along with translations of Persian and some (qisas al-anbiya᾿). Alexander stories reached their fullest Indian sources, the incorporation of the classical Greek expression, though, in medieval Persian poetry and its heritage shaped the intellectual contours of the Islamic later Ottoman Turkish imitators. In the hands of the 15 For general queries, contact [email protected] 39176_ISAW_IR_Chapter01_final.indd 15 13/12/17 09:27 © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. poets Abu al-Qasim Firdausi, Nizami Ganjavi, Amir and Dioscorides—this aspect of the classical tradition Khusraw Dihlavi, and others, the Islamic Alexander— was of central concern to Islamic scholars. Based on Iskandar—is more than a military hero (fig. 1-1). The these translations of early sources, Muslim, Jewish, fourth-century-BCE Macedonian conqueror becomes and Christian scholars swiftly surpassed the classical a philosopher, a mystic, an explorer (fig. 1-2), and a authorities, adding to an expanding body of scientific paragon of just rule. The spectacular illuminated man- knowledge through theoretical discoveries, experi- uscripts of these works are some of the most beautiful ment, and observation. Leading figures were masters examples of medieval Islamic art (fig. 1-3). of, and contributed to, multiple disciplines that we now The exhibition’s second main focus is medicine, consider as separate and distinct; the eleventh-century the exact sciences, and philosophy. From the very beginning of the translation movement—as evidenced Fig 1-1. Khamsa. Folio 108 recto: Iskandar Fights the Zangi. Au- by Hunayn’s hunt for Galen’s lost works, but also by thor: Nizami Ganjavi. Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper, his Arabic renditions of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Iran, 1446. NLI: Ms. Yah. Ar. 1003. Checklist no. 6. 16 For general queries, contact [email protected] 39176_ISAW_IR_Chapter01_final.indd 16 18/12/17 08:27 © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. polymath Avicenna, for instance, wrote The Canon of a long-established Hellenistic tradition in Babylonia, Medicine (Al-qanun fi al-tibb), which became the stan- Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere. dard medical encyclopedia throughout the medieval world, as well as the philosophical treatise The Book A Manuscript Reunion of Healing (Kitab al-shifa᾿), and works on astronomy, alchemy, geography, psychology, Islamic theology, Aside from this mutually illuminating reunion, as it logic, mathematics, physics, and poetry. Surprisingly, were, of Alexander the Great and science and philos- as the exhibition shows, these wide-ranging explo- ophy, Romance and Reason is unique for a second and rations included subjects that we now consider to equally important reason. More than half the man- be pseudoscience and beyond the intellectual pale: uscripts in the exhibition, from Princeton, the U.S. astrology, alchemy, and catalogs of strange beasts and National Library of Medicine, and the National Library monsters (fig. 1-4). In this sense, Romance and Reason of Israel, owe their presence at these institutions to a sin- illuminates how the fluid definition of science itself has gle and singular manuscript collector, Abraham Shalom shifted over time. Yahuda. Yahuda was born in Jerusalem to a mixed Sep- Legends of a long-ago Macedonian conqueror and hardi and Ashkenazi family in 1877. Fluent in Hebrew, geometry, physics, and surgery: though on the surface European languages, and Arabic from a young age—the the two halves of Romance and Reason may seem unre- family spoke Arabic at home—Yahuda left Palestine lated, there are deep cultural and historical connections for Germany in 1895 to study Oriental Studies and between them. Alexander the Great was a pivotal figure Semitics with Ignaz Goldziher and Theodor Nöldeke, in the Islamic world not only because the poetic retelling both pioneers in the field. After completing his disser- of his life was didactic or diverting. Tutored by no less a tation on the medieval Jewish Andalusian mystic and figure than Aristotle, Alexander was seen as a philosoph- philosopher Bahya ibn Paquda in 1905, Yahuda taught ical hero, and philosophy proper was a crucial part of his at Berlin’s Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Juden- legendary biography in the Islamic tradition. Nizami tums (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies) and held the Ganjavi, the twelfth-century Persian poet whose Book first-ever professorship in Judaic Studies at the Univer- of Alexander (Iskandarnamah) established Alexander as sity of Madrid. However, soon after his appointment to a major epic and romantic figure in the Persian literary a position at the emerging Hebrew University in 1920, canon, devoted nearly half of that work to Alexander’s Yahuda had a falling out with the Zionist leaders in debates and discourses with Greek philosophers. Jerusalem and established himself in London.2 From a historical perspective, Alexander’s fourth- Over the ensuing