Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Had it not been for the meddling of the ruler and his interference in what does not concern him, I would have dissected alive this son of mine, just as Galen used to dissect men and monkeys. As a result of dissecting him I would thus come to know the reasons for his stupidity, rid the world of his kind, and produce knowledge for people by means of what I would write in a book: the way in which his body is composed, and the course of his arteries, veins, and nerves. But the ruler prohibits this.

  Offering scarcely more tolerance to the young Hunayn, whose endless questions irked him, Yuhanna in fact soon ended up angrily dismissing Hunayn from the medical school.

  Hunayn is depicted in the sources as having spent the next few years traveling and studying Greek. His exact whereabouts during this sojourn are uncertain (this is when he is reported to have gone “to the land of the Greeks”), but when he reappeared in Baghdad, he'd got a good start in gaining the mastery of Greek that would eventually make him famous, to the point where he could supposedly recite passages of Homer from memory.

  He was soon reconciled with his former teacher Yuhanna, who demonstrated the sincerity of both his change of heart and his anatomical curiosity by commissioning Hunayn to translate Galen's On the Anatomy of Veins and Arteries and On the Anatomy of Nerves, plus seven other Galenic works. Still, just to be on the safe side (and to avoid potential vivisection), Hunayn records that with these translations especially he “took pains to express the meaning as clearly as possible; for this man likes plain expression and urges constantly in that direction.”

  After studying Arabic in Basra and finishing his medical education at Jundi-Shapur, Hunayn returned to Baghdad, where he eventually won appointment to Yuhanna's old position, that of court physician, under one of al-Mamun's successors, al-Mutawakkil. All the time he continued with the translations, which were in high enough demand that professional translators like Hunayn could charge very handsome fees for their work. The demand came from the Abbasid court and its courtiers, from state and military officials, and from doctors, scientists, philosophers, and scholars. Like the translators themselves, many of the wealthiest patrons were members of dynasties whose patronage spanned generations. One such clan, the well-known Banu Musa or “sons of Musa,” is recorded as paying 500 dinars a month “for full-time translation,” which one scholar has worked out to about $24,000 in today's American dollars. At such rates the translation movement could and did attract the best talent, and the Banu Musa reportedly favored Hunayn, introducing him to al-Mamun and helping advance his career.

  Hunayn is credited with literally hundreds of translations, from disciplines that included medicine, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, magic, and dream interpretation, and even a highly praised version of the Old Testament. He also wrote around a hundred works of his own, many summarizing his translations. Modern philologists have found Hunayn's techniques almost unbelievably advanced— essentially the same as those used today, though reinvented in the West nearly eight hundred years later by Lorenzo Valla and his successors. Textual critics have used many of Hunayn's translations to help restore the original Greek text in cases where no Greek manuscript survives.

  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.

  *Iconoclasm was officially in force in Byzantium from 726 to 787, and again from 815 to 843.

  *The Cilician Gates, a narrow pass in the rugged Taurus Mountains, offered the only easy route between Arab-controlled Cilicia and Byzantine-controlled Asia Minor.

  *This reinterpretation of the evidence is p
resented by Professor Dimitri Gutas in his 1998 book Greek Thought, Arabic Culture.

  *Galen, a Greek who lived in the second century, was the greatest medical authority of the ancient world. In On Demonstration, he emphasizes the importance of logic in “demonstrating” medical truths.

  *Ibn means “son of,” so that Hunayn ibn Ishaq amounts to the Arabic version of “John, son of Isaac,” while Ishaq ibn Hunayn means “Isaac, son of John.” Sons were often named for their grandfathers.

  Chapter Eight

  The Arabic Enlightenment

  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.

  Falsafa

  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 rea
son.

  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.