Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

2. The Islamic Scientific Tradition: Question of Beginnings II

The detailed critique of the classical narrative, in the preceding chapter, was undertaken for the sole purpose of liberating the historical and scientific sources from the stronghold of presupposed ideas. And now that we have seen the inadequacy of this classical narrative, I think it is time to abandon it altogether in favor of an alternative narrative that can explain the texts and the facts of history slightly better. In this, as throughout this book, I will rely more heavily on the discipline of astronomy to illustrate its progress in light of another narrative that could explain its various phases more appropriately. I choose astronomy, not only because this discipline was invariably held as the queen of the sciences in almost every culture, but because this field continued to witness a steady progress from its very beginnings in early Islamic times till the sixteenth century and thereafter. I presume that the narrative that could account for the history of astronomy could ultimately have its effectiveness tested when it is also used to account for the history of other disciplines. One may continue to re-examine the alternative narrative in light of the evidence that the other disciplines may bring forth, and repeat the process until we reach the day when we can hopefully construct a narrative that can truly help us understand the fundamental role of science in Islamic civilization. Only then could we securely and more confidently relate the role of Islamic science to the role played by other sciences in other cultures.

I am aware that what we now know of individual Islamic scientific disciplines still represents the very tip of the iceberg, and thus this tip may yield a defective picture when taken to represent the whole iceberg. But I do believe that we know enough, at least in the discipline of astronomy, so that we can use it as a template through which we can build a more accurate narrative regarding the place of science in Islamic culture. I invite colleagues who work in other disciplines of the same culture, especially those disciplines that experienced a sustained growth over the centuries, to test this new narrative against the facts that they can gather in their own disciplines and to commence a dialogue on how best to explain the role of the various aspects of Islamic science. I firmly believe that it will be very difficult to speak of one Islamic science that had this or that characteristic, but much more feasibly speak of various disciplines experiencing different trajectories throughout the long history of Islamic civilization. And it is the latter story that we should attempt to detail.

The roots of the alternative narrative that I propose here should be sought in the historical sources themselves. This, despite the fact that one cannot find many such sources that theorize about the beginnings of scientific activities per se. Yet we still find some who did something close to that or others from which we can cull such elementary attempts at theorizing. It is those sources in particular that I would like to interrogate, and to emphasize at this point, in order to keep the historical context as close as possible to the events we are trying to disentangle.

The foremost theoretician of the early Islamic period is a man whose personal biography is slightly obscure, but whose work, which has survived almost in its entirety, is filled with nuggets that seem to have escaped the attention of modern students of Islamic intellectual history as well as the modern historians of Islamic science. The person in question is Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad b. Abī Ya'qūb Isḥāq al-Nadīm, also known as al-Warrāq, the paper and/or bookseller. From the evidence of his name alone we cannot tell whether Abū al-Faraj himself was the one who acquired the title al-Nadīm (boon companion), or whether the title had already belonged to his father Abū Ya'qūb. I opt for the first, since we know nothing about the father. Moreover, the kind of work Abū al-Faraj himself had produced, in which he combined anecdotal and serious narrative history, amply qualified him to the companionship of any caliph. Yet, one can still find many people referring to him as Ibn al-Nadīm (the son of the boon companion). We do not know much about his birth or death dates, but what interests us here is his remarkable work al-Fihrist, a book that he completed, according to his own statement, in the year 377 A.H. = 987-988 A.D.[78] In it, al-Nadīm tries to explain the intellectual history of Islamic civilization, up to his time, by surveying the intellectual production, in all conceivable disciplines that were known in early Islam, that he himself had come across or about which he had already heard. The book is arranged in ten treatises (maqalas), each devoted to one of the distinct intellectual fields that were recognized in his time. The seventh of those treatises, which concerns us directly here, deals with the subject of the "ancient sciences", or in his own words "contains the accounts of the philosophers and the ancient sciences and all the books that were composed in those domains." And it is in this treatise that we find the following accounts about the origins of the scientific activity in early Islam.

I give these accounts as a prelude to the introduction of the alternative narrative because I wish to claim that this alternative narrative was already proposed in a round-about elementary way by al-Nadīm himself. Only that up till now no one has gone through the pain of developing it further. This exercise does not only promise to yield a better understanding of al-Nadīm's work itself, but can give us the tools with which to understand the scientific developments that were only narrated by al-Nadīm and by bio-bibliographers who followed him later in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

Ninth-century sources, and then more elaborately tenth-century ones, spoke about such phenomena and offered their own explanations of them. But the most sophisticated account of the rise of science in early Islamic civilization and the motivation for it, that I know of, is this very account, given in the Fihrist of al-Nadīm.

In the introductory section of the Seventh Treatise of al-Nadīm's Fihrist,[79] a treatise devoted to the "ancient sciences" and their importation into Islamic civilization as we just said, al-Nadīm tries to survey the various opinions that were commonly held on the subject during his own time. Here he acts more as an intellectual historian who tries to explain historical events rather than a historian who simply records them. In his own style of holding the reader's attention, he arranges those accounts in the form of anecdotes, more like short stories (he actually calls each of them a ḥikāya (story), but in each case he reports the transmission of science from one culture to another as if he was trying to lay down the theoretical foundation for the phenomenon of the transmission of science in general. Without explicitly saying so, he certainly hoped to use these various stories in order to explain the introduction of the "ancient sciences" into Arabic.

The first two stories are attributed to the scientists themselves, that is, those who made a living from their knowledge of the "ancient sciences." By scientists, al-Nadīm seems to indicate those professionals who made a living from the "ancient sciences", and who were most likely to know the history of their profession better than anyone else. In itself, that was a very reasonable assumption, one would think. But unfortunately al-Nadīm gives no indication that he knew that the assumption itself was open to the internal party biases of the professionals. In al-Nadīm's opinion, those scientists deserved the lion's share of the interpretive narrative that governs the history of their discipline.

Because this part of the discussion touches upon the interpretive aspect of the rise of science in Islamic civilization, at least as far as al-Nadīm was concerned, and because it is both theoretically, as well as historically, very important for our discussion, I will therefore quote al-Nadīm's account in some detail at this point.

Al-Nadīm takes his first story from a book called Kitāb al-Nahmaṭān. The book itself is no longer extant in full, and seems to have survived only in fragments, such as the one quoted here by al-Nadīm.[80] Its author was Abū Sahl al-Faḍl b. Nawbakht, simply called Abū Sahl by al-Nadīm. He was apparently the same Abū Sahl who was the astrologer of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and the son of Nawbakht who participated in the casting of the horoscope of Baghdad during the time of al-Manṣūr, as we saw before. While we know that Nawbakht, the father, may have died at the end of al-Manṣūr's reign in 775, we do not know how much longer the son Abū Sahl outlived, if he did, Hārūn al-Rashīd, who died in 809. In any event, in al-Nadīm's account according to the text of al-Nahmaṭān is quoted as such (with some paraphrasing to avoid the flowery language):

This story indeed exhibits the stuff of legends. But it is easy to detect its intent and the reason why Abū Sahl recounted it in the first place. Besides taking a jab at the possible conflicts between kings and prophets, Abū Sahl obviously sought to highlight two main issues: 1) the antiquity of the science of the stars, that is, astrology, which was his profession, and 2) he wished to relate the origins of all sciences to Babylonia, and by extension to Persia which ruled over Babylonia for long periods of time. He may have done that in order to boast of his Persian origins—and here one may detect a subtle racial boasting that formed part of the shu'ūbīya (anti-Arab) sentiment of the time—or of his control of his discipline of astrology, or both.

The shu'ūbīya sentiment, which may be lurking in Abū Sahl's account, does not preclude his attempt to explain other cultural phenomena at the same time, and to assert a special place for Persian culture to which he definitely belonged. By starting with the sciences originating in Babylonia, he followed that by taking a swing at Alexander the Great, the traditional enemy of Persia, for burning the Persian sciences. To Abū Sahl that could explain the disappearance of those sciences and the need to reclaim them later at the time of Shāpūr and Chosroes. In this manner Abū Sahl was in all likelihood also participating in the general literary traditions of his time as well: traditions best exemplified a few years later in the works of Jahiz (d. 869), who devoted special treatises to the virtues of various nations. Abū Sahl's insistence that the sciences were all gathered back into Persian under Shāpūr and Chosroes is almost a transparent attempt to glorify the Persian role in the preservation and transmission of science. But we only have his word for that, despite the fact that it is admittedly true that some of the Greek and Indian sciences, especially the elementary astrological sciences, were in fact translated into Persian during that time. But to generalize that account to include all the sciences pushes the story into the realm of legend.

It is also true that legends can also contain a kernel of the truth. And Abū Sahl's account may indeed contain some unintended facts that I do not think were sought by Abū Sahl, or even known to him at the time. Only now, we know that many of the observations of ancient Babylonia were certainly used by such important Greek astronomers as Hipparchus (c. 150 B.C.) and Ptolemy (fl. 150 A.D.)[85] and indeed formed the observational foundations of their work, as we shall see. Some of those Babylonian parameters that were adopted by the Greek astronomers were too subtle for Abū Sahl to recognize.

Abū Sahl's true intention, however, was not to relate all that, for I believe he was trying to assert the validity of his own discipline of astrology, and that this validity rested partly on the antiquity of the discipline. His last statement about the decrees of the planets and the zodiacal signs and how they controlled the fate of nations reveals after all his true intentions as an astrologer. That was the kind of belief that was also expressed by the other Persian astrologer, Māshā'allāh in his own history of nations.[86] In sum, one could easily assume that Abū Sahl would make the next logical assertion that his discipline was valid, and that he was the one most knowledgeable about it. Furthermore, by tracing the discipline to a specific person in each period and place, sounds very much like the story that was recounted by al-Fārābī[87] about the history of philosophy, which we have already cited, and where besides having a philosopher associated with a particular king in each period (just as Aristotle was associated with Alexander) Fārābī ended up tracing the history of the philosophical discipline so that he would come out as the major beneficiary of that discipline. Here again, each sage had a country to rule, and a planet to empower him. All these legends have to be contextualized within the prevalent astrological framework that was very well established in the first part of the ninth century, and which stipulated that all people and all nations were subject to the decrees of the stars, as was so cogently attested in the work of Māshā'allāh just cited.[88]

These legendary attempts, whether they were Fārābī's, or Māshā'allāh's, and now Abū Sahl's, denote a desire at all times to seek origins, irrespective of whether those origins were origins of science, origins of cultures, or even origins of legends and epics. That is, Abū Sahl's story could also be seen as a creation story in its own right, except that it specifically targets the creation of culture.

What concerns us more at this juncture is the reason why al-Nadīm used this anecdote in the first place. Without any further evidence, the question is difficult to answer. But from the perspective of al-Nadīm, here posing as the intellectual historian of his time, one could argue that he used this particular anecdote in an effort to present the narrative regarding the rise of science that was probably prevalent among the Persian community members of the Abbāsid Empire at the time of al-Nadīm. And as we shall come back to affirm once more, Abū Sahl's account may have also been used by al-Nadīm in order to share with his reader the prevalent stories about the transmission of science that were known in al-Nadīm's time. And since the story had some kernel of truth, as was just said, al-Nadīm may have felt that he could use it as a first plausible explanation of the transmission of science, an explanation that was obviously commonly adopted by the Persian community in early Abbāsid times.

Furthermore, beginning with Abū Sahl's story also gave al-Nadīm the chance to start from the beginnings, that is, from the origins of science in Babylonia, which may have been his own belief as well. The later stories, that we shall soon see take up the rest of the narrative from the point where Abū Sahl left it (that is, from the time when all the sciences were gathered back in Persia). From then on, al-Nadīm could follow their progression until they reached Islamic civilization, which was his trajectory from the very beginning. In order to illustrate this intention, we should stress first that in this story Abū Sahl said nothing about the history of the sciences of his own time, and ended the story as if all the sciences of Persia were still there to be had, which we know was not historically true. For al-Nadīm, though, all he had to do was to string this story together with others in order to bring those same sciences from Persian into Islamic civilization. The following anecdotes achieve that purpose excellently well, as we shall see.

Al-Nadīm's second story also comes from an astrologer, this time the equally famous Abū Mā'shar al-Balkhī, a one-time ḥadīth scholar who was distracted from his pursuit of pilgrimage and ḥadīth scholarship by studying astrology.

According to Tannūkhī he continued to study astrology until he became an atheist (ḥattā alḥada).[90] The reason for his switch from ḥadīth to astrology was reportedly caused by his enmity with the famous philosopher al-Kindī (d. 870) on account of Kindī's attachment to the ancient sciences, a fact that was first frowned upon by Abū Mā'shar. It was al-Kindī who convinced him to study geometry and arithmetic, apparently on account of their utility to religious studies, and that entry into the ancient sciences led Abū Mā'shar to pursue astrology. The story is indicative of the relationship of astrology to the religious sciences at the time, and reflects an early attempt to attack the ancient sciences on account of their relationship to the religiously condemned discipline of astrology. We shall have a chance to return to this dynamic later on. But it is significant to note here as well that Kindī used arithmetic and geometry here as entries to the foreign sciences and that they were apparently condoned by the religious people. We shall also have occasion to return to this topic as well.

For now, the importance of Abū Mā'shar's story to al-Nadīm was that it began where Abū Sahl's story had left off, and thus Abū Mā'shar's story had the potential of tracing the transmission of the sciences one more step forward before they were finally brought into the Islamic civilization. Abū Mā'shar's book in which the story appears is called Kitāb ikhtilāf al-zījāt (Book on the variations among zījes), and like Abū Sahl's book this one too is apparently lost, except for this fragment which is still obviously preserved in the work of al-Nadīm. For al-Nadīm's purpose the story is of special interest for the following reason:

At this point al-Nadīm inserts his own corroborating report from the stories that were obviously circulating in his own time. The text adds:

The intent of the story is to demonstrate the Persian Kings' love for learning and the efforts they spent to protect science. It was on account of them, that mean motions of the planets were preserved for the astrologers who could use such values for their casting of horoscopes and the like. The detailed account regarding the kind of material on which they were written and the places where they were kept, and the extra care spent to preserve them all indicate that such mean motions were trustworthy, and astrologers such as Abū Mā'shar himself should opt to use them. This obviously gave Abū Mā'shar an advantage over others, on account of his intimate knowledge of such parameters.

On the other hand, the story also stresses the fact that it was the astrologers who predicted the climactic disaster that was to come from the west, and it was they who urged the preservation of books, thereby acting as the guardians of the intellectual legacy. The morale of the story is that the astrologers' knowledge is to be trusted and appreciated on account of their ability to predict future events as they have done, apparently successfully according to the story, with the climactic disaster.

Other sources from a century later, as in the case of Bīrūnī (d. ca. 1050),[94] seem to corroborate the intention of the story: to highlight the care with which Persian kings attempted to preserve and treasure books in the land of Persia. The fact that such stories kept being repeated could only mean that they must have been circulated widely in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Their purpose however, as can be seen from this one, is to stress not only the antiquity of the science of astrology, but that its sources had been secured and well preserved across the ages, a major requirement for a discipline that had to depend for its validity on repeated events that by their very nature took centuries to recur.

I read these stories less as historical sources, than as desperate attempts by astrologers to validate their discipline in the face of the severe attacks they must have been facing at this time, as is so well documented in the major surviving work of the same Abū Mā'shar: his Introduction to Astrology, which comes from the same period.[95]

Such stories regarding the transmission of science could not have a historical validity of their own. Their only worth is that they symbolically signal the existence of books in the libraries of Persian kings, but they all concur that no one could know then what kind of books they really were. All this can be easily detected from the occasional treasure-hunt trope in which these stories were cast. The books that al-Nadīm came in contact with, like those reported by al-Bīrūnī a century later, were indeed very fragmentary, stinky as al-Nadīm spares no pain in telling us (and thus apparently not so well preserved as the story intended to imply), were above all still in Greek. Only specialists could read them, and when they were finally deciphered they turned out to contain only names of soldiers and their salaries. They may have contained, however, some tables of mean motions that one could use for the construction of a zīj such as the Shahriyār zīj. But that is all these stories could say.

These reports cannot be taken as serious accounts for the transmission of science from one culture to another, for it is not historically possible to have a viable transmission of scientific knowledge that depended on the hazards of finding treasures, and when those treasures were found they could not be read or used except by the very few. For science to flourish, there must be a general infrastructure for it, and a much larger number of people in the society must be able to participate in its production. Otherwise the story becomes a story of a secret magical, alchemical or talismanic science that even Ibn Khaldun, in the fourteenth century had already condemned as an unhealthy environment for the spread of science. While attacking the discipline of astrology Ibn Khaldun asserts that this discipline could not be valid because it could not be published and freely debated in public, and the astrologers had to practice their craft in secrecy and thus could not have a valid science, since all valid sciences have to be practiced out in the open and the full light of day, so to speak.[96]

With Abū Mā'shar's story we are once more confronted with a story similar to that of Abū Sahl in which the stress is on the antiquity of the discipline of astrology. But here Abū Mā'shar adds the twist that the astronomical parameters, upon which all astrological predictions must be based, should also be reliable and of secure authenticity. It brings to the front the importance of such astronomical values as the mean motions of the planets, and stresses the fact that astronomical tables recording these values were composed during the Persian period.

But, like the first legend of Abū Sahl, this one too has a kernel of the truth, for we know from independent sources that such Persian astronomical handbooks existed, and that they were translated into Arabic, or at least were widely used in early Abbāsid times. That there was a zīj, called the Shahriyār-i zīj, or zīj-i Shah, is no doubt true as it was attested and used by so many early Abbāsid sources.[97] There is no doubt, as well, that early Abbāsid astrologers used planetary mean motions that were already preserved in earlier Persian sources. But the question remains as to how these mean motions were obtained in the first place, and the story, I am afraid, does not shed much historical light on that account. Legends seem to indicate the direction of history, but are woefully deficient in explaining its important details. Abū Mā'shar's story is no different.

But it is legitimate to ask about al-Nadīm's intention in starting his own account of the history of Islamic science with these two stories. My contention is that he only wished to relate the opinions that were circulating in his time about the origins of Islamic science, legends as they were. The first story related the transmission of the Greek sciences back to their original home in Persia, and the second simply preserved them there, and gave hints as to how they were then transmitted to early Islamic civilization. In both instances, the discipline of astrology was used as the template for the general history of science, in a way similar to our own undertaking of the discipline of astronomy as a template for the later developments in Islamic science.

Taken together, and with their emphasis on what happened in ancient and more recent Persia, the two stories seem to reveal the eastern sources of the Islamic sciences, or at least point to the direction where such sources could be sought. In all likelihood, that was the intention of al-Nadīm in grouping the two stories together in this fashion. What we should then expect him to do is to move to the west, that is, to the land of Byzantium, in order to complete the western component of the sources of Islamic science. And that is exactly what he did.

The third story speaks directly to the issue of the transmission of the Greek sciences into Arabic. And that is the same story that we referred to before when we spoke of Fārābī's account of the origins of Islamic philosophy. In that account, the important issue was the emphasis laid on the conflict that existed between Christianity and Philosophy. In al-Nadīm's account he tried to confront the issue of the sciences in his own time, and there he posed as a true historian of science who wished to investigate the manner in which those sciences could have crossed from one culture to another. In it he raised very important issues that have to do with the societal factors that inhibited or promoted the transmission and practice of science. He went on to reflect, in a very insightful manner, on the relationship between Islamic civilization and the other civilizations it came in contact with. Al-Nadīm's account reads as follows:

In this account we clearly note al-Nadīm's intention to demonstrate how philosophy was persecuted in Byzantium, and as an afterthought he seems to indicate that some of the elementary books on logic and medicine had already been translated into Persian in ancient times. He concluded his story with the translations of Ibn al-Muqaffa' in order to give due credit to all those who did in fact translate old Persian books into Arabic. He did this in order to emphasize the role those people played in the transmission of science to Islam. Nevertheless, he still insisted in the previous sentence that when Christianity returned to Byzantium the prohibition of philosophy also returned, and the situation continued to be so till al-Nadīm's own time, that is till the end of the tenth century: "There resumed as well the prohibition of the books of philosophy and their treasuring of them as is the custom up till this day."[101]

When he was writing his Fihrist, toward the end of the tenth century, al-Nadīm, then posing as a historian of science of his own time, asserted therefore, that Byzantium of the tenth century did not encourage philosophy, and apparently used the philosophical books as trading treasures. He was apparently convinced that Byzantium had no appreciation for philosophy as such, despite the independent, but controversial evidence from the Byzantine side, which speaks of the rise of Byzantium's "first humanism" at that time.[102] Here again, it seems that the primary sources corroborate al-Nadīm's story as they did Fārābī's story that was mentioned before. In fact there are several "legendary" (and legends almost always have a kernel of the truth) accounts of missions sent by Muslim rulers to the Byzantine

Emperors seeking from them those very treasured books.[103] Some of those accounts would describe missions ending up in old temples, with restricted access, and would have great difficulties in acquiring the books that were treasured there. Such a science that continued to be locked up well into the tenth century, and which was being fought by Christian dogma, could not possibly produce a viable scientific tradition that could be passed on to another culture, neither through contact, nor through isolated pockets as was already argued before.

More importantly, the stories relating the mission of al-Ma'mūn to the emperor of Byzantium to request Greek books assert that al-Ma'mūn could not find such books in his domain, nor could the Byzantine emperor find them at first, until he was led to them by a priest who knew about the locked temple which had such books.[104] This should not be surprising, in light of the several accounts of the dearth of scientific books in Byzantium at the time.

The fact that such conditions, as the ones that were described by Lemerle, seem to have been prevalent in the Byzantine domain, especially during Byzantium's "dark ages" can be also confirmed when one considers the contemporary Syriac scientific material, which in my opinion was directly inspired by the Byzantine sources. And when one considers the extant Syriac sources, like those of Sergius of Ras'aina (d. 536),[105] Severus Sebokht (c. 661),[106] or George, the Bishop of the Arabs (c. 724),[107] or even the works of Job of Edessa (c. 817), especially in the latter's encyclopedic Book of Treasures[108] on the Syriac sciences in the early Abbāsid period, at the time when the translation movement from Greek into Arabic was at its apogee, one could easily discern elementary scientific books, very similar to the elementary logical and medical books that continued to be used in Byzantium and were translated into ancient Persian as we were told by al-Nadīm. Why should one expect otherwise? When we know that most of those who wrote in Syriac lived under Byzantine dominion, and were arguably persecuted by their Greek overlords. Echoes of this persecution are evident in the spontaneous remark that was made by Severus Sebokht, and which was already published by Nau, in connection with Sebokht's reference to the Indian numerals as an argument against the Greek claims that they were the masters of all the sciences and of all times.[109] What these sources very clearly demonstrate is that we could not possibly expect such Byzantine subjects to outsmart their masters and create a new science that was itself suppressed in Byzantium.

We shall have occasion to return to the role that was played by this community of Syriac speakers, who also mastered Greek at times for their liturgical needs, in the transmission of the Greek sciences into Arabic but not before the end of eighth and early ninth centuries. We shall see how important that role was, and attempt to pinpoint the causes that led to it.

But for now, I wish to return to the intentions of al-Nadīm and ask once more about the reasons he must have had in mind for recounting this third story about the transmission of science. In my opinion, he did not only wish to indicate that the position of the philosophical sciences were really endangered in Byzantium in his own time, but that the situation was as such for a long time, at least as far back as the time that preceded, and followed immediately after, the death of Julian (The Apostate). He wished to stress that Julian was the only one who allowed philosophy to be studied and pursued. But when we remember that Julian ruled for barely two years only, that is, between the years 361 and 363, then the picture, al-Nadīm was trying to paint, becomes very clear. That picture recounts the story of the continuous Christian persecution of philosophy, thus echoing the expression of al-Fārābī who claimed that philosophy was "liberated" only when it reached the lands of Islam.

Up to this point, the reader of al-Nadīm's text still cannot account fully for the transmission of the sciences from the ancient cultures into Islamic civilization. Such a reader is still entitled to ask: how could such sciences, that were persecuted in their original Byzantine domain, provided there were such scientific activities to be persecuted, be passed on to another Islamic culture that did not have any science of its own as well, as we are so often told?

Al-Nadīm had not reached this stage of his narrative yet. His preparatory anecdotes, which he used to introduce his treatise on the "ancient sciences", have not yet reached their conclusion. But we can almost begin to see where he was going. He had already indicated that there could not have been a direct transmission of science from Byzantium into Arabic, as the classical narrative so often asserted, if the conditions were in fact as they were described by al-Nadīm. And to answer the question of how could those sciences be brought into Islamic civilization, especially from Byzantium if the situation was as he described, al-Nadīm's answer would lie in the fourth anecdote that was apparently used as a climax for the earlier ones. Because of its importance, and as it will become the focus of the discussion that follows, I give here a close translation of this fourth anecdote, just as it appeared in al-Nadīm's Fihrist.

After making the crucial connection between the importation of science into Islamic civilization with the translation movement, al-Nadīm seems to have laid down a careful strategy for his own narrative. With the third story he had ruled out the possibility of science having come by sheer contact with Byzantium, once he had demonstrated the poor status of that science in the northern and western lands of Byzantium. The importation from the east was equally unlikely since the two stories he reports were more in the form of legendary astrological lore, rather than historical events. Besides, they were reported by two astrologers who had a vested interest in that kind of connection. Therefore, even al-Nadīm himself would probably judge them as historically equally unreliable. Al-Nadīm must have known that. And he must have also known that he still had to explain the origins of Islamic science.

At this point he could not escape from giving his own account of the origins of the scientific tradition in Islam. And it is then that he demonstrated his preferred methodology and thus allowed us to look through a small window at the thoughts he was entertaining. For that specific reason, his own narrative gains tremendous importance for our discussion. By starting the last story with the statement about Khālid b. Yazīd as the first translator, he obviously wanted the reader to re-orient himself and think of the introduction of science into Islamic civilization as a willful act of acquisition taken by some historical persons who had a vested interest in acquiring those sciences. With this introduction he was also saying that science did not come into Islamic civilization by some 'natural' process of contact with another civilization, as he seemed to demonstrate that there was no such civilization to come in contact with, nor through a mysterious legendary survival of books in vaults whose ceilings were falling apart, nor through some pockets of high learning of which he makes no such mention. Rather the whole phenomenon was the result of a direct willful acquisition process that he wanted the reader to consider.[114]

And as soon as he finished the first three sentences about Khālid's role in the acquisition of the sciences, and here, he did not seem to have had enough information about this Khālid other than that he had a personal interest in such an acquisition, he quickly ended that short introduction with the blunt statement that "this was the first translation in Islam from one language to another", as if to say that translation was itself the answer to the importation of the sciences. The problem remained as to which translation. He could have recounted the classical narrative, at this point, and told us that there were translations from Greek into Syriac, or that the Abbāsids brought with them the Persian ideology of re-claiming the Greek sciences back to their origins, which their legends had already claimed. Instead he went directly into what he thought was the crucial step in this translation process, the "translation of the dīwān", and quickly noted that this process was an Umayyad process and not an Abbāsid one. For that purpose he gave the great details that he did on how this dīwān translation came about. As if he was leading us step by step to painstakingly appreciate the social dynamics during the times of the Umayyads that required such a translation to be undertaken.

As soon as he finished recounting the intrigues and the social conditions that governed life in the dīwān, and after explaining how the problems of its translation were resolved, both in Iraq as well as in Syria, he quickly connected that to yet another account, this time raising the question about the spread of the sciences in Islamic civilization, rather than questioning their beginnings as he was trying to do in the previous four stories. When he came to explain the spread of science in Islamic civilization he duly titled this new account as such: "Recounting the reason for which the books on philosophy and other ancient sciences had increased in this country." Notice, he was not saying the reason these books 'came about in the first place' but the reason "they increased", thus their beginnings had, at that stage of the narrative, been taken for granted.

The account that followed gave only "one" of those reasons, as it was duly titled again: "one of the reasons for that [increase]." He then went on to recount the now most familiar and famous story about al-Ma'mūn's dream[115] in the following terms:

To make sure that the reader got the point, al-Nadīm gave an alternate report of the same dream:

This concludes the report of al-Nadīm as to why the books of philosophy and other sciences began to flourish in Islamic civilization. After this account, he went on to list the details of the process of translation, beginning with the names of the translators from the various languages.

The alternative to the classical narrative, which forms the core of this chapter and is here proposed for the first time, as far as I can tell, takes its inspiration from this very narrative of al-Nadīm. After we have seen him survey the stories of his day about the introduction of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization, and capping them with his own narrative, it became imperative to re-read the text of al-Nadīm in light of the problems that the classical narrative had failed to resolve as we have stated above. We can now assert, that the Persian element in the Abbāsid empire that was held responsible for the reclamation of the Greek sciences was based on a legendary story that was first proposed by al-Nadīm, but whose origin was the work of the Persian astrologer who obviously had a great interest in promoting that ideology in order to secure a job for him and for his descendants after him. In fact his ploy seems to have worked, although not for the same reason as we shall soon see, and early Abbāsid times witnessed the continuous employment of one Nawbakht or another as an astrologer at the highest level of the caliphal court for a period of 100 years or more.

From the Byzantine side, al-Nadīm's several accounts about the persecution of the philosophers in that land, the treasuring of books of the ancients in closed temples and the like, all the way till the middle of the tenth century, as he reported, only reflected the actual historical circumstances, as we have already seen, and further affirmed that the contact theory could not have worked, for there were no knowledgeable Byzantines who could master the classical Greek sources themselves in order to pass them on to the neighboring Islamic civilization.[119]

When the time came for him to introduce his own narrative, al-Nadīm, did not produce another legend of his own. Rather, he went directly to the historical phenomenon of translation. And he properly started with the report about the earliest translations that were known to him (the translations of Khālid b. Yazīd), rather than the translations during his own Abbāsid period, as the classical narrative would have wanted to argue. Al-Nadīm definitely wanted to return to the historical facts, and had no intention of arguing from the ideology that came later to frame the interpretation of those facts. He certainly wanted to emphasize the fact that the translation activity had already started during the Umayyad period, and with Khālid b. Yazīd in particular. What he failed to report, though, was the real reason for Khālid's actual interest at that time in classical Greek texts dealing with alchemy. Instead of delving immediately into the social, the political, the economic and administrative history of the period, so that he could locate the motivating forces for that translation activity, he only prefaced all that with the frequently repeated description of Khālid that he "was enterprising and full of love for the sciences (lah^u himmat^un wa-maḥabbat^un li-l-'ulūm). If one were to read history in essentialist terms, one could simply stop at this preface and attribute to Khālid all sorts of desires and intentions.[120] But not al-Nadīm, for as soon as he concluded the three sentences about Khālid with the phrase "this was the first translation in Islam from one language to another", he immediately went on to the subject of the translation of the dīwān, as if to say that, in his mind, those two activities were organically connected. What that connection meant to al-Nadīm was straightforward. He apparently understood the process of acquisition of the ancient sciences to have started with the attempts of Khālid b. Yazīd which was contemporaneous or immediately followed by the translation of the dīwān.

As for Khālid's interest in those ancient sciences, of whose motivation al-Nadīm remains silent as we said, we have other sources to fill that motivational gap. We are told by Abū Hilāl al-'Askarī (c. 1000) in his kitāb al-awā'il, among others, that

If this anecdote is taken together with Khālid's expressed interest in alchemy we can see why such books on alchemy may have come very handy to someone who was interested in striking new mint of gold coins. Who but the alchemists would be better prepared to identify pure gold, from other metals? And who but the alchemists would be the expert who could judge alloys and the like? That is, they had the kind of knowledge that a new mint master would desperately need.

Once we also remember that 'Abd al-Malik's reforms did not only include the arabization of the dīwān, that is the internal administrative reforms of the empire, but that he went beyond that to create the new currency of the nascent Arab empire, which was up till that time still using the Byzantine coins of the realm in the west, and Sasanian coins in the east. Under such historical circumstances, Khālid's interest in the rules of alloying gold, which could be gotten from alchemical books, was definitely not only an academic interest. The fact that 'Abd al-Malik would consult with him on such matters further affirms his reliability and the kind of answers he was supposed to supply from his alchemical books.

Going back to al-Nadīm's last story about the reasons for the spread of philosophical and scientific books in Islamic civilization and the relationship of that spread to the dream of al-Ma'mūn, all we need to remember is that although the story was of the legendary type, it still spoke to the spread of those books, and not to their coming to being in the first place. Nevertheless, the orientalists who created and championed the classical narrative in the first place harped on to that account, and made the direct connection between the expressions that were enunciated by Aristotle in that story like "reason", "tawḥīd", the two specific Mu'tazilite key words, to derive from it that feature of the classical narrative that connected the importation of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization with the Mu'tazilite leanings of al-Ma'mūn, as we already saw before. And as we have also said before this connection is still frequently repeated in the sources dealing with Islamic science. Those who repeat the story neglect to stress al-Nadīm's reason for recounting the dream, namely to give the reason for the spread of books and not their coming to be.

The same orientalists also gave the story another twist. By connecting Aristotle to the Mu'tazilites through the dream, and then by connecting the whole movement of translation to the Greek philosophical and scientific thought, concluded that the Mu'tazilites, who were the archenemies of what was then called ahl al-ḥadīth (people of tradition who later became ahl al-sunna wa-l-ḥadīth), or what they called the traditionalists, were the ones who were responsible for the importation of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization, much to the dislike of the traditionalist Muslims. In Rosenthal's words: "It is probably no accident that the Mu'tazilah should have flourished during the decisive years of Greco-Arabic translation activity, that is, from the last decades of the eighth century until the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mūn (813-833) and his immediate successors. Rather, Mu'tazilah influence on the Abbāsid rulers ought to be regarded as the real cause of an official attitude toward the heritage of classical antiquity that made impressive provisions for its adoption in Islam."[122]

In this manner, the already established conflict model that had been propagated in Europe since the age of reason, as a conflict between science and religion, was now transferred to the Islamic civilization in the form of Mu'tazilites versus traditionalists. With this "spin" people forgot the reasons behind al-Nadīm's account of that dream.

Once we strip this dream of this facile interpretation, tempting as it is, and if we understand it in its right context, we can then go back to the preceding paragraph where al-Nadīm's historical scholarship is best demonstrated. There we see al-Nadīm giving his own opinion of the story of the appearance of the sciences in Islamic civilization as a result of the administrative needs of the empire at the time of 'Abd al-Malik, and not as a result of legendary stories told by self-serving astrologers who were struggling to keep their position at the Abbāsid court. That's why al-Nadīm began his own account by the stories of Khālid and the dīwān translations, and not by another legend like the dream of al-Ma'mūn.

We still have to determine what was on al-Nadīm's mind when he connected Khālid's translations of alchemical books and the administrative translations of the dīwān to the spread of philosophical and scientific books in the Islamic civilization. What was the connection between the translation of the dīwān and the translation of books on philosophy and science? If we are to gain some insights regarding these questions we must pursue the subtle hints that were already supplied by al-Nadīm himself.

The reason why those hints do not readily seem to connect the dots for us between the translation of the dīwān and the philosophical and scientific texts, and thus have deprived us so far from appreciating the real input of al-Nadīm on this matter, is to be sought in al-Nadīm's particular use of the word "dīwān" in this account. The term itself was also used in several earlier and later sources without ever specifying what was meant by it. The word is still used in modern Arabic, but has now come to designate a completely different entity, such as a government office (e.g., dīwān al-muḥāsaba) or a personal royal office (e.g., al-dīwān al-malakī). In some sense the word is at times still used in the classical sense when it referred to administrative offices that handled the affairs of the army as in dīwān al-jaysh, taxation bureau as in dīwān al-Kharāj, chancellery as in dīwān al-rasā'il, etc. If we restrict ourselves to those common meanings of the word, we then find it difficult to connect such government offices to the translation of philosophical and scientific books.

But when we return to the story of the arabization of the dīwān itself, we find that both al-Nadīm, in his Fihrist, and the earlier tenth-century author al-Jahshiyārī (d. 942) in his kitāb al-wuzarā' wa-l-kuttāb,[123] both tried to guide us to the correct meaning of the dīwān by giving us examples of the kind of activities they knew were taking place in it. The only example that they give, which has been slightly distorted in al-Nadīm's version that has come down to us, denotes that both authors intended the dīwān operations to mean the dīwān accounting procedures that Zādān Farrūkh was bragging about when he claimed that he was the only one who could carry them out. On the basis of that specialized knowledge he could assert that al-Ḥajjāj needed him more than he needed al-Ḥajjāj. The example of the kind of accounting both authors give obviously required handling arithmetical operations carried over fractions and the like, the kind of arithmetic that is still slightly complicated by our modern-day standards. Therefore the dīwān that needed translation was the dīwān in which such complicated operations were performed, and not as most people thought the government office in which records of personnel and their salaries were kept.

The second kind of dīwān, where salaries were meted out, did not need any translation for it was in Arabic in the first place. We are explicitly told by al-Jahshiyārī: "There were always two dīwāns in Kufa and Basra: one in Arabic, in which records of people and their grants were kept, that is the dīwān that was instituted by Umar [b. Al-Khaṭṭāb], and the other was for the purposes of revenues (li-wujūh al-amwāl) which was in Persian. The situation was similar in Syria, where there was a dīwān in Greek and another one in Arabic. Matters persisted in this fashion till the days of 'Abd al-Malik."[124]Therefore, the dīwān that al-Nadīm was talking about was the dīwān of revenues, and revenues were the backbone of any government then, as now.

Since operations dealing with revenues required arithmetical operations which in their turn necessitated at least other elementary operations such as the surveying of real estates, and the re-surveying when estates were passed on as inheritance, a dīwān officer, as a revenue collector should have the qualifications to carry out those procedures. Furthermore, the computation of time in solar years, when taxes should be paid, and as we know solar and lunar years are not always easy to coordinate without at least some elementary astronomical knowledge, that too must have forced the dīwān officer to learn some astronomy. Similarly, re-apportioning payments, especially after the distribution of inheritance, digging canals, trading, etc., all necessitated that the said officer acquire such operational skills for which Muḥammad b. Mūsā al-Khwārizmī had to compose a complete book on Algebra just for that same purpose.[125] Incidentally, that requirement seems to have led to the creation of the discipline of Algebra qua discipline,[126] which was not known to the Greeks in the fashion that was articulated by al-Khwārizmī.

All the operations a dīwān officer was supposed to perform were not easy, and there must have been some elementary texts or manuals that were used to train those who worked in the dīwān. It is rather unfortunate that no such documents seem to have survived from this early period, probably because they were thought of as simple enough to be learned and discarded, or because their contents were orally transmitted from father to son, and thus there was no need to publish them to the public. But we do have some slightly indirect information about their contents, and the kind of operations that were required in these dīwāns. For we do find in the work of Ibn Qutayba (d. 879), who preceded Jahshiyārī by a half a century and al-Nadīm by almost a full century, and who himself was a contemporary of the last period of translation that followed the translation of the dīwān, a short synopsis of the qualification of those who sought employment in the dīwān, or those who were then called kuttāb. Those kuttāb were undoubtedly the heirs of the dīwān employees whose functions we are now seeking.

In his book Adab al-kātib, he regrets in the introduction the neglect that had become the share of the Arabic sciences of his time. Ibn Qutayba went on to stress that the kātib must seek the following sciences, if he were to be worthy of the name kātib, and not be among those who are after the office of kātib in name only:

Working in the dīwāns of the non-Arabs, as far as Ibn Qutayba could ascertain, should include a mastery of all those sciences that were just quoted by Ibn Qutayba from the earlier sources. As we can readily tell, those sciences made no mention of army grants and the like. This must mean that the dīwāns that were translated must have included the elementary texts of those sciences. For it was quite unlikely that Ibn Qutayba would call on the kuttāb of his time to acquire these sciences if there were not any texts through which they could be acquired. After all, he was the one who participated in supplying such texts by composing his kitāb al-anwā' (Book of the Rising and Setting or Stars), which touches upon some of those sciences, and particularly the sciences that relate the rising and setting of the stars to agricultural (read revenue) needs.[128] I shall soon return to mention other books in this regard.

For now, the interest in Ibn Qutayba's statement is that it confirms the meaning of the dīwān, which I claim was the one intended by al-Nadīm and al-Jahshiyārī. If that meaning is accepted, then one could say that the translations of the Persian and Greek dīwāns into Arabic must have included a group of elementary scientific texts, which were in turn very much connected to the philosophical and scientific texts that were mentioned before. How could it be otherwise when we know that any government must acquire such elementary sciences in order for it to function in any sophisticated manner?

Another confirmation for this reading comes from another contemporary of al-Jahshiyārī and al-Nadīm who was also interested in the education of the kuttāb and government bureaucrats. Several of his books have reached us from about the middle of the tenth century. The author in question was the famous scientist, Abū al-Wafā' al-Būzjanī (d. 998), whose name was very closely associated with the Greek mathematical and astronomical works that were translated into Arabic. It was this Abū al-Wafā' who had left us two books which directly address the geometric and arithmetical needs of the artisans and workers (obviously including government employees), that were called: What the Artisans need by way of Geometry, and What the workers and kuttāb need by way of Arithmetic.[129] In both of these texts, Abū al-Wafā' takes up elementary mathematical problems, of the types that were obviously discussed in the dīwāns of his time, or among those who were employed in those government departments who were then learning how to carry out the new functions that required those new sciences.

Moreover, we need only take a glance at Keys of the Sciences (mafātīḥ al-'ulūm), a book by al-Khwārizmī al-Kātib, who lived some ten years or so after al-Nadīm and who himself was a dīwān employee, to appreciate the encyclopedic knowledge such an employee of the time needed to know.[130] Here we also see a direct connection between the kind of sciences that were practiced in the dīwān and the philosophical sciences, starting with logic. Most of the remaining sciences that were listed by al-Khwārizmī were in fact at the very core of the ancient sciences we are now discussing.

Even in the relatively later period, we see that those sciences continued to be practiced in the government dīwāns. This should not be surprising as we already know that most administrative offices are usually very conservative and tend to preserve practices for centuries at a time, practices that are usually inherited from one employee to the next, if not from father to son. From that tradition, we see in the work, kitāb qawānīn al-dawāwīn (The Book of the Rules of the dīwāns) of Ibn Mamātī (d. 1209) the many arithmetical and natural scientific material that the dīwān employee was supposed to know.[131] And Ibn Mamātī ought to know better, for he himself was the descendant of a family that worked in the Egyptian dīwān for centuries.

Similarly, later generations have left us several ḥisba (market overseeing) manuals which mention not only the scientific books that the market overseer himself ought to know, but the scientific books that he should use in order to test the various professionals and to control their products from forgeries and the like. These professionals included bonesetters, physicians, pharmacists, as well as others whose names have been summarily mentioned in the work of Ibn al-Ukhuwwa of Egypt (d. 1329) called Ma'ālim al-qurbā fī Aḥkām al-ḥisbā.[132]

For those who may object and say that this book is very late, and its contents may not apply to the kind of knowledge that the Umayyad worker was supposed to know, and the kind that al-Nadīm was talking about, I can only say: was it possible that there would not be in early Islamic times someone who would oversee the affairs of the public, their public health, their protection from deception, etc., and that these functions entered the Islamic administration in later times only? Was it not part of the duties of the administrator of the public treasury (bayt al-māl) to see to it that the right proportion of gold is cast in the minted dīnārs, together with what all that implies by way of managing alloys, composition of metals, and exacting weights and measures? Wouldn't such functions include some alchemy, or at least overlap with it, or what was then called al-ṣan'a, that was being sought by Khālid? Wasn't this ṣan'a also connected to pharmaceutical sciences, and the knowledge of weights and measures, as well as others?

In summary, despite lack of actual manuals that preserve for us a description of the actual operations that took place in the early dīwān, or of the contents of those early manuals or the sciences that were translated, this despite all the evidence that we have reviewed so far about the existence of those operations and sciences, we still cannot ignore the arabization of the dīwāns, which was tied by al-Nadīm himself to the process of the transmission of the ancient sciences to Islamic civilization. The consequences that can be drown from it can help us resolve some of the problems that were left unresolved by the contact or continuing pocket theories usually deployed as corollaries of the classical narrative.

From al-Nadīm's account, we note that the arabization process, including the restructuring of the foundation of the Islamic government, took place during the days of 'Abd al-Malik, the first caliph to mint Arabic dīnārs that were independent of the Byzantine ones, who also engraved on them Qur'ānic verses rather than pictures of emperors, as we have already seen.

He is also the one of whom the sources speak as being the first to reorganize the administration of Islamic government and to centralize its functions and streamline it, to use modern parlance anachronistically. He apparently did all that through the arabization of the dīwān. Weren't these administrative reforms of the government absolutely essential for the foundation of the new Islamic state, when we also see that the Abbāsids themselves, who came to power almost fifty years after 'Abd al-Malik, did not change back any of the reforms that 'Abd al-Malik had introduced? This despite the enmity that the Abbāsids harbored and demonstrated toward the Umayyads, and despite the claims made by the classical narrative and some orientalists that the main backbone of the Abbāsid Empire was the Persian "element." Had this racial categorization been true, wouldn't the Abbāsids have reverted the dīwān back to Persian? Wouldn't this mean that 'Abd al-Malik's reforms were extremely significant and cannot be simply bypassed in favor of focusing on the Persian "element" of the Abbāsids?

Now that we can better appreciate the importance of the administrative reforms of 'Abd al-Malik, after having stressed the need for relating them to the general translation movement of the philosophical and scientific texts, just as al-Nadīm had already done in his Fihrist, we should, at this point, go back to discuss the social conditions that paved the way for the importation of the foreign sciences into Islamic civilization. An importation that proved over time to be the most remarkable and unique achievement that was performed by the Persian and Greek speaking communities of the early Abbāsid empire. And by focusing on the social conditions we would be in a better position to answer the larger questions about the actual historical needs that were being met by the transmission of those ancient sciences.

Reading the texts that describe the translation of the dīwān, especially those that had been preserved by Jahshiyārī and al-Nadīm, give very clear indications of the serious social consequences of that activity. From among those consequences, the arabization of the dīwān seems to have led to the loss of the administrative jobs that were held by Persian and Greek speakers of the empire, who were mostly either Zoroastrian or Christian. Previous to this arabization, those early classes of bureaucrats must have felt so secure about their positions in the administration that they could afford the bragging of Zādān Farrūkh and the arrogance of Sarjūn.

We also saw that the Persian community was willing to bribe Ṣāliḥ b. 'Abd al-Raḥmān so that he would feign the failure of the dīwān arabization. We also saw in the report of Jahshiyārī a reference to a meeting that was held, at the time when al-Ḥajjāj had just come to Iraq, by the Persian notables (idahaqln), at the house of a man called Jamil, in order to discuss among themselves how to protect the community from al-Ḥajjāj. They were then told by Jamil: "You will fair well with him if you are not afflicted by a kātib from among you, meaning someone from Babylon. And they were in fact afflicted by Zādān Farrūkh who was a one-eyed evil man."[133] It was in that context that Jamil related his famous parable about the head of an axe that was cast in a forest. The trees then spoke among themselves saying it was not for a good reason that this axe was thrown here. "To which a simple tree responded, if one of your branches does not go into its end, then you have no reason to fear."[134]

Doesn't this anecdote of Jahshiyārī point to the sense of a collective anxiety on the part of a community, this time the Persian community, and the eventual attempt of its members to accuse each other of treason, as any sociologist could have predicted under such circumstances? Wouldn't it be natural for such things to happen in a community that suddenly found itself disenfranchised, after it had already happily monopolized the positions of power in the government for years, just because the members of that community could control one language or other, or some science or other? Doesn't the sentiment commonly referred to with the term shu'ūbīya (racial prejudices), which is so often repeated in the sources of the period, represent something of the sort as well? Didn't the translation of the dīwān produce such a group anxiety so that Zādān Farrūkh had to tell his friends, when Ṣāliḥ had succeeded in translating few lines of the dīwān, "go seek an abode other than this", as reported by Jahshiyārī?[135]

I am almost certain that all that took place. And that the often repeated references to the competition between those who were employed by the government with those who were seeking such employment only confirms this, especially when we all know that the government was always a flourishing market, as was already known to Ibn Qutayba and later on to Ibn Khaldun,[136] as it was usually the main employer at all times and in all places.

What could those communities do in response to those events? How could they awake from their first shock and try to reclaim their previous positions in the corridors of government? I think they did what most communities would do under such circumstances: go back and try to monopolize the government positions by other means. One such mean was to acquire the more advanced specializations in the very sciences that the government badly needed so that they would become once more indispensable to the running of the government.

How could that acquisition of advanced sciences happen when I have argued that there were no teachers and no experts to teach those disciplines? But if we stop to think that science does not always progress by the steady instruction of teachers, but rather by the leaps that are taken by very bright individuals who are capable of going beyond where their teachers had taken them, and who are usually inspired by an urgent need to do so, then the answer to this question would become slightly easier to comprehend.

Consider the following circumstances. The bureaucrats, who worked in the dīwān before it was arabised, were the very persons who knew the elementary sciences and used their linguistic and scientific skills to monopolize their positions at the dīwān, as we have already argued. Those same bureaucrats also knew that the very sciences that they mastered for their limited purposes were only introductions to more advanced sciences that they did not need to acquire as long as their positions were secure through the monopoly. I say this as I can almost hear someone like Sergius of Ras'aina, who died toward the middle of the sixth century, and Severus Sebokht of the seventh century, say in their introductory treatises on astronomy: "whoever wants to verify this or that problem, more accurately, he should seek the more advanced texts of Ptolemy called the Almagest, or the Handy Tables."[137] And those were the most advanced Syriac scientists of the period just before Islam or in early Islamic times. We note that they still used that kind of language about the Greek sources. Wouldn't their co-religionist and their community members, who were employed in the government, a few centuries later, share the same expectations from the Greek sources, and have at least the kind of knowledge that was similar to theirs? It is most likely that they too used to find in their own administrative scientific texts references similar to those that we can still find in the extant works of Sergius and Sebokht.

In order to be able to compete with the new occupants of the dīwāns, and go back to monopolize the high positions of government, members of these communities of bureaucrats had to make use of their knowledge of both the Greek language and the elementary sciences that they used in the dīwān, and try to educate themselves or their children in the more advanced sciences, to which their elementary sciences referred for higher precision and sophistication. They did all that in order to be able to deploy that new information and win their previous positions at the dīwān. Now that they had lost their jobs, they had an excellent motivation to go to Ptolemy's Almagest, that they knew only by name before, when they had no need for it, and to which they were referred by their co-religionists.

Under the new conditions, and with the pain of unemployment, these bureaucrat communities would go back to teach their children and their co-religionists and to urge them to acquire the more advanced sciences about which they were well informed by the Greek as well as the Persian classical sources. And since Arabic had by then become the language of competition they were obliged to demonstrate their competence both in the new bureaucratic language as well as in the sciences of the higher order. Again, all those difficulties had to be re-negotiated before they could re-establish the monopoly that they once had in the dīwān. Within one generation or two, the children of these two communities managed to achieve that, and under the severe competition they also managed to perform the unique and remarkable feat that they did. It is the children who surpassed their teachers in acquiring the new advanced sciences, because they were motivated to do so by the pressure of their mere survival.

That such a thing did in fact take place is also reported in the classical sources, when those sources report the return of whole families back to the highest positions at the Abbāsid court. Families whose members knew perfectly well both the languages and the sciences of the Greeks and the Persians. Those new families could now occupy positions that were much more sensitive than the old dīwān jobs; they could become the personal advisers to the caliph himself. Think about the Bakhtīshū' family, which produced several high-ranking physicians for the Abbāsid court and whose members passed those jobs from father to son for nearly 100 years. The same Nawbakht family, of whom we spoke before, also achieved the high status of court astrologers, and also for several generations of fathers and sons.

Think also of Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq, who managed to recruit his son and nephew, among others, into the court of the caliph as translators and physicians at the highest level of government. And to have a glimpse of the deadly competitive environment those new aspirants had to go through, think also of the very tough competition Ḥunain himself had to face from his own co-religionists and the speakers of his language, as he himself laments in an account that is preserved in the work of the thirteenth- century bio-bibliographer Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a.[138]

What is being proposed here is that the translation movement that is under discussion was generated by the desire of two communities to re-acquire jobs that their parents and co-religionists had lost in the government offices. And in order to do that, at that particular time, that is during the early years of the Abbāsid empire, they aimed to become indispensable to the government by their sheer possession of highly specialized knowledge. From those new posts, they tried to re-establish a new monopoly that the lower dīwān workers could not even dream of having as long as they stayed with their elementary sciences.

The evidence that such things did take place come from all those sources that speak of the competition among the highest bureaucrats in the government and their various attempts to exclude others from the competition through casting doubt about their competence in the advanced sciences. Ḥunain's treatise which was just cited, and in which he recounts the attacks he had to suffer at the hands of the other Christian physicians, who would malign him by referring to him as "just a translator and not a physician", is a brilliant example of that activity. It also opens for us a small window at the court of the Abbāsid's of the early part of the ninth century, with the court bureaucrats attempting very earnestly to create the new monopoly that will secure their jobs.

The sources have also preserved for us the communal solidarities that began to appear among the Syriac and Persian communities, and at times even among the people of the same city. We know, for instance, that Yūḥannā b. Māsawayh refused to teach Ḥunain b. Isḥāq medicine because Ḥunain was from the people of 'Ibād (a group of eastern Arabian tribesmen) of Ḥīra, whose members made a living mostly from exchanging money. Yūḥannā, on the other hand, was from Jundīsāpūr that produced the famous Bakhtīshū' family of which we just spoke. According to Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a, "the people of Jundīsāpūr especially, and their physicians, shied away from the people of Ḥīra and abhorred introducing the children of merchants to their profession."[139]

We also read in the same classical sources about the new environment of arrogance that in the past used to characterize the life of the dīwān, as we saw in the cases of Zādān Farrūkh and Sarjūn in their respective dīwāns. In the new era, we now begin to see a new class of people, who managed to create, somehow, a new monopoly, at the highest levels of government. And those people seem to have been emboldened, as in the case of the same Yūḥannā b. Māsawayh, who, according to al-Nadīm, was "a venerable physician, given due respect by kings, a great scholar and author, who had served under al-Ma'mūn, al-Mu'taṣim, al-Wāthiq and al-Mutawakkil",[140] and above all dared to behave in the following fashion in the presence of the caliph al-Mutawakkil himself:

Al-Nadīm says: "I read in the hand of al-Ḥakīmī, who said: 'Ibn Ḥamdūn the boon companion [of the caliph] teased Ibn Māsawayh, one day, in the presence of al-Mutawakkil, to whom Ibn Māsawayh responded: 'if you had had as much intelligence as you have ignorance, and if that intelligence were distributed over a hundred beetles, then each of those beetles would have more intelligence than Aristotle.'"[141] If this is true, and there is no reason to doubt the veracity of al-Nadīm in this account, then we can say this competitive environment produced for the Abbāsid bureaucracy the finest class of servants, who had a remarkable competence, and who also tried to exercise their newly-found power by showing off at the highest positions of government. Those new highly qualified bureaucrats must have felt quite secure in their new posts, when they sat next to the caliph, and within his most intimate circles. Otherwise why would someone like the caliph al-Mutawakkil tolerate the behavior of Ibn Māsawayh when the latter dared insult the caliph's own boon companion?

This anecdote simply illustrates that this class of new bureaucrats had in fact managed to accomplish one of the most important feats in the history of Islamic civilization. They motivated and produced a translation movement, which was primarily an administrative movement in the first place, in which various competences were fighting over government positions, and in which many accusations of treason and the like frequently took place. That should not be surprising, for any sociologist could easily predict that such competition and behavior would be quite natural in cases of extreme competition.

As a by-product of this movement and the competition it engendered, the Arabic language, which had become by then the language of the new sciences, also managed to widen the circle of competition, and to open the opportunity for the Arabs, now working in the dīwāns, to join in the competition in order that they too could acquire the new sciences and preserve their new positions. Those Arab or Arabic-speaking bureaucrats now had their own reasons to hold on to power, and thus had to join the competition as well, either by accumulating knowledge directly, or by securing the services of men who could acquire that advanced knowledge for them. That was the case with many bureaucrats of the time. And for that reason we see that most of the translations, which were produced during the ninth century, were themselves patronized by bureaucrats, who were close to the center of power. Those translations were rarely patronized by the caliph himself, if they ever were. The caliph only got the best competent class of employees, but the employees sorted themselves out by their own sifting and competition. We all know that political power usually remains distant from science itself and occasionally even devotes itself to the exploitation of the scientists. Why should it be any different during Abbāsid times? Only at very rare occasions does one find a learned potentate, and if that person ever existed his influence could not have spanned the vast period of scientific activity that was produced during Abbāsid times and thereafter. Something else must have been at work, and our model predicts a continuous competitive environment at the bureaucratic level that kept those sciences alive and prospering.

In another extant treatise of Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq, about the medical books of Galen that were translated into Arabic, and whose account he was asked to give by one of those bureaucrats who was also close to the caliph, he related in great details the conditions that led to the translations of 129 books of Galen.[142] In it he tells us that most of those books were translated for the sons of Mūsā b. Shākir, and especially for Muḥammad and Aḥmad— the two brothers who had together patronized more than 80 books of the total—and not a single book had ever been translated for the caliph. This in addition to the fact that Ḥunain himself, who had the lion's share in those translations, was at the same time the caliph's physician.

Looking at this translation movement, which was responsible for the introduction of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization, from this perspective, allows us to open new windows onto Islamic intellectual history, and to begin to discern the motivation that gave rise to this movement. We can then see how certain members of the society, whose livelihood was threatened by 'Abd al-Malik's reforms, had to insure that livelihood by other means. They naturally resorted to higher specialization through the translation of the more advanced sciences. That in turn helped them gain an edge in the new competition. And as a result they could secure, as Ibn Māsawayh and some others tried to do, a new monopoly at the higher echelons of government. When we remember that those echelons were in fact the very top caliphal court itself, we can then appreciate the vast power those people managed to garner for themselves and often for their descendants. This "healthy" competition also led to a healthy increase in the acquisition of the more advanced sciences, only to produce further competition, and so on.

Therefore, the conditions that prevailed during the first century of Abbāsid rule seem to me to have been the healthiest conditions for competitive acquisition of science where caliphs had a whole group of highly qualified people who could compete for whatever projects the caliph dreamt of executing. Of course, the resulting spread of science on its own created the even healthier conditions for further developments in science. In fact, it may have been this very environment that created what came to be known later as the Golden Age of Islamic civilization, and which was celebrated by the classical narrative.

All this competitive activity apparently had nothing to do with the Persian "elements" of the Abbāsid Empire who were supposedly trying to recapture their own antiquity by reclaiming their sciences from the Greeks. On the contrary it apparently happened because the Abbāsids turned out to be the unwitting heirs to 'Abd al-Malik's reforms that preceded them by about one full generation. It was those reforms that set the healthy competition in motion in the first place, and through this competition the ever- increasing desire to acquire more and more advanced scientific books to keep the competition going.

All these conditions need to be investigated much more thoroughly. Various historians of varied scientific and philosophical disciplines need to re-examine these activities, which have only been scarcely touched upon here, before any more definite conclusions could be drawn. But this revision itself should hopefully make room for a better understanding of the dream of al-Ma'mun, the role of the Mu'tazilites, and the actual role of the Syriac and Persian-speaking communities. It was the members of those communities who needed to seek the Greek and Persian classical sources, which had been treasured in dark inaccessible temples for centuries, and to dust them off and re-deploy the information therein for their own needs in order to survive the deadly competition they were facing during the early Abbāsid times.

Most importantly, the revision, that this alternative narrative forces upon us, can now definitely demonstrate that this acquisition of the classical sciences, and especially those of classical Greek, was not simply an act of blind imitation, but had to be adjusted to the needs of the time as we shall see later on. But much needs to be done still before one can substantiate in a comprehensive manner the effects of all these activities in very concrete terms.

And yet, some preliminary results have already been reached by just applying the framework of this alternative narrative. We can now put some of those results on the table and hopefully use them to paint a slightly different picture from the one the classical narrative usually offered. As we can now see, the translation movement was not a movement to imitate a higher culture that was there standing in competition with one's own. Instead, the acquiring culture had to dig out texts, that is really appropriate those texts, which were practically forgotten in the source culture. For although the Byzantines still spoke and wrote in Greek, they kept the classical books in vaults for years until they were brought out as a result of the demand in Baghdad, where they were now better appreciated. In a sense those sources were given a new lease on life as a result of the dire needs of the Syriac- and Persian-speaking communities who needed to reclaim the government positions their forefathers had lost. But more importantly, the competitive environment forced those new seekers of knowledge to quickly bypass the scientific production of Byzantium at the time and to seek their interlocutors in the best of the classical sources. It is no wonder that the names of philosophers and scientists who were not even contemporaries and who all produced their knowledge before the third century of the Christian era (Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and Diophantus, among others) became household names in ninth-century Baghdad.

Another result that can now be seen much more clearly, and continues to become more obvious everyday, is that the translation movement of early Abbāsid times, since it was generated by social conditions of the Islamic government itself, did not simply translate the classical texts, digest them and then began to create a science of its own as the classical narrative continues to tell us. What seems to have happened is that the translation and creation were taking place at the same time, as we shall also see again. Or better yet, with the alternative narrative we can discern some creative activities to have preceded the translations of the advanced text, and that those creative activities by themselves required further translations in order to lead to more creative thinking and so on. In this manner we can understand why al-Ḥajjāj b. Maṭar had to read Ptolemy's text very carefully and to correct it whenever he thought it was in error.

Furthermore, these preliminary results also demonstrate that both the translators as well as the patrons of those translations were themselves, and in most cases, scientists in their own right. And although they were close to political power, they were digging niches of their own within the ruling bureaucracy that could outlast the caliphs themselves. In other words, those bureaucrats had their own needs for those sciences and for the scientists that sometimes accompanied them. In a good number of cases they were scientists themselves as well. To illustrate their own hold on power, all we have to do is to consider their relationship to the person of the caliph himself, only to realize how much more established they were in order to survive in some cases at the caliphal court even after the succession of three to four caliphs who would be at times violently removed from power. Yet the physicians, the astrologers, the engineers, etc., would survive and continue to exercise that indispensable role their parents had wished for them, when they set them out to reach for the more advanced classical sciences.

Modern historians of Islamic science have already begun to demonstrate the ingenious research that seems to have taken place in early Islamic times, just as the translations were being carried out. And if we come to realize, as we now hopefully do, that the dīwān translations had already opened the door for further more advanced translations, then it becomes only natural to expect such creative results once the door for creative activities had been swung wide open for all qualified people to compete. This would be an ideal dream for a society that was undergoing what we would now call nation building. And something of the sort seems to have happened.

Modern research has also begun to uncover that this creative activity included most and foremost a process of re-assessment of the Greek scientific legacy, as we shall see later on, which constituted an active program of correcting the Greek mistakes. It even went further than that to create new scientific disciplines, such as algebra and trigonometry, as we have already seen. It even reformulated older disciplines, as was the case with the discipline of astronomy when the new science of hay'a (theoretical astronomy) was created at the same period. All these results need to be fleshed out and their consequences pursued even further before we can come to grips with their full social and cultural implications.

But we can also say that the results that have been established so far can definitely demonstrate very clearly that the process of monopoly which was first exercised by the dīwān employees, and then attempted again by the more educated class of their descendants, as was clearly demonstrated by Ibn Māsawayh's treatment of Ḥunain and the group of physicians at al-Mutawakkil's court, who afflicted the same Ḥunain with all sorts of calamities and intrigues, came to no avail. The reason for its failure came from the very nature of science itself, which does not easily allow for the monopoly of such activities, especially when there is a desperate societal need to pursue them. We can also say that the resulting flourishing activities at the time of the early Abbāsids, who themselves simply inherited all those competing classes of very qualified people from the Umayyad reforms, created an unprecedented recovery of the sciences of antiquity with a deep desire to deploy them for the purposes of the time, a phenomenon that was not to be repeated until the time of the late European renaissance.

At this point, I would like to go back and raise the question about the actual benefits that could be derived from the adoption of this new alternative narrative. In my defense, all I can say is that this new narrative had to be adopted after I have been fully convinced by al-Nadīm's strategy in presenting his argument about the translation movement. It was in that argument that he made the direct connection between the Islamic Civilization's appropriation of the ancient sciences and 'Abd al-Malik's reforms which were mainly centered around the order to translate the dīwān. It was al-Nadīm as well who saw that appropriation as a consequence of the reform. One wonders if 'Abd al-Malik himself ever contemplated all the consequences that his order entailed. But for us, by adopting this new narrative, if it does not do us any good, at least it will certainly help us explain the behavior of the dīwān employees, and the social conditions that ensued by isolating them as a class whose children will from then on strive to come back to the government at the higher, more desirable and more indispensable positions.

But on the theoretical level, what would be the benefit from adopting this new narrative in preference to the classical narrative that was in fact the brain-child of some of the most distinguished orientalists? This, when we also know that this very classical narrative seems to have served the community of Islamic intellectual historians for more than a century now. The answer to this question must be sought on two levels: The practical level which touches directly on the process of narrating the internal history of science itself, where we could pursue the developments of scientific ideas from one concept to the next, and the methodological level, which touches upon the reasons for which the history of science is written in the first place. As a corollary the answer also touches upon the best way to write history in general.

On the practical level, by adopting the alternative narrative, we would be able to answer some of the questions that will be discussed later when we use the discipline of astronomy as a template for the remaining disciplines and as a direct application of the impact of the new narrative. This will serve us well when we undertake to explain the developments in that discipline once it came to be pursued and reformulated within the Islamic civilization. We will then see that many phenomena, which had remained as veritable enigmas under the classical narrative, could now become easily understandable with the alternative narrative. To give only one quick preview at this point, I point to the language of the translation itself and the manner in which this very language could resolve the scientific technical terms so that someone like al-Ḥajjāj b. Maṭar could produce the earliest surviving translation of the Almagest in a fluid, technical and highly readable Arabic. This, when we know that this book is probably one of the most densely-written technical books, if not the most, and in which such terms as "auj", "ḥaḍīḍ", "ufuq" for "apogee" "perigee", and "horizon" respectively, were freely used without having to transliterate the Greek as was done in other works from the same period or even from a later period, as in the works of Qusṭā and Isḥāq b. Ḥunain. How could al-Ḥajjāj, who was one of the earliest Abbāsid translators, create this technical language? How could he succeed when we know how difficult such an enterprise can be? To convince one's self of that difficulty, all that one has to do is to consider the heroic efforts that have been pursued in the modern Arab countries, over the last fifty years or so, and continue to be pursued, to create such a technical language? If the alternative narrative does not answer any question other than this one, it would indeed prove its worth over and above the older classical narrative that remained silent about it, or turned it into an irresolvable puzzle in the first place. That is, if we stick to the classical narrative, which assumed that there were no sciences to speak of before the Abbāsid translation period, the hegemony of the Mu'tazilites, the dream of al-Ma'mūn and the like, we will not be able to explain the rise of this technical language of Ḥajjāj at this early period.

But if we go along with al-Nadīm and affirm that the translation movement had already started with the translation of the elementary sciences of the dīwāns,[143] and then remember that this dīwān translation movement preceded the translation of al-Ḥajjāj by about a full century, then it would become easy to understand the benefit that these earlier translations must have produced at the level of coining technical terms for someone like al-Ḥajjāj to use so freely 100 years later. There is no doubt that al-Ḥajjāj must have introduced some of his own terms, as we can still see in the hesitation of people like Qusṭā and Isḥāq to follow him. At this point, I have no desire to underestimate the efforts that were definitely expended by al-Ḥajjāj himself in accomplishing this project, but I do wish to emphasize that the alternative narrative puts him in his historical context, which allows him to pick up from the newly available language of the dīwān translations, add some of his own, as could be understood in a normal historical process, and not force him to perform miracles by creating a whole new technical language from scratch, as the classical narrative would have asked us to believe.

Al-Ḥajjāj's technical language is only one of the many sources of difficulty that we shall encounter in the following chapters, and where we will have occasion again and again to harp back on the benefits that could be derived from the adoption of this alternative narrative.

On the theoretical level, why do I call for the adoption of this alternative narrative? In response I must point to the importance of connecting the history of science to the social conditions in which science is spawned. For although I do not think we will be able to pinpoint exactly why a certain science is supported in a specific society at a specific time, while other fields of knowledge were stifled, I am certain we cannot fully understand the inner workings of the interaction between scientific production and the social, economic and political conditions without paying attention to this dialectic relationship. Adopting the alternative narrative will allow us at least to understand why certain translations were done at specific times, and why the very act of translation became important when it did. This will surely save us from the confusion usually offered by the classical narrative that attributes the origins of the translation movement to essentialist features of Islamic religion itself at times, while at other times it focuses on the racial composition of early Islamic society, like attributing the interest in the translations to the Persian "elements" of the Abbāsid empire, as we are so often told.

With this alternative narrative, we can see for the first time, after the insight of al-Nadīm, the clear relationship between scientific production and the social factors that made that production essential on the first hand, and possible on the other. With that insight we can come close to understanding the early intellectual history of Islamic civilization. And from that perspective we may finally come to appreciate the role played by the government bureaucrats (the kuttāb and the viziers) in promoting the acquisition of the ancient sciences, by patronizing this acquisition for their own purposes of competition and advancement in their jobs.

We would no longer need to continue to attribute such interest to a caliph's dream or the like, as if history marches in tune with the dreams of a single ruler or other. Furthermore, this alternative narrative allows us to explain why the 129 Galenic books on medicine were all translated for bureaucrats and not a single one of them to a caliph, as we were told by Ḥunain himself in the aforementioned treatise. We can also understand why the third, or maybe the fourth, translation of the Almagest was also patronized by another bureaucrat by the name of Abū Ṣaqr b. Bulbul (d. ca. 892), who worked first as a kātib and later promoted to a vizier, and not by the caliph himself.

I shall have occasion to return to these issues in light of the history of the Arabic astronomical tradition, where, as I have already said, I will use that discipline as a template against which I will check the validity of this alternative narrative. I will continue to use every possible occasion to illustrate the advantages gained by adopting this alternative narrative over and against the classical one, hoping that we can come to understand better the development of Islamic scientific thought.

With all that I hope that I have stressed enough the need to go back to the primary sources, both historical and scientific, and to try to re-read them without the biases of any ideological narrative, as much as possible, in order to detect from the sources themselves the direction that was taken by the scientific production and why. That process will hopefully lead us to a better understanding of the real developments in Islamic science, the various periods it went through, and come to finally appreciate, as much as we can, the real social forces that made all that possible.

Now that I have explained the motivation for the acquisition of the ancient sciences, and hopefully explained the processes and the social factors that brought it about, it is time to turn to the social conditions once more and try to detect the impact that these new "ancient" sciences had on the nascent Islamic civilization and how they were themselves transformed by this civilization. I shall devote the lion's share of the discussion to the impact of the Greek sciences on early Islamic society, for no reason other than the fact that those sciences became the focus of great concern from the earliest centuries and continued to capture the imagination of later scientists in everything they did, much to the neglect of the Persian and Indian sciences whose impact apparently began to fade rather quickly around the middle of the ninth century.