Under the enlightened rule of the Buyid dynasty (945-1055 A.D.) the Islamic world witnessed an unequalled cultural renai
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English Pages 362 [59] Year 1992
HUMANISM IN THE RENAISSANCE OF ISLAM The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age
BY
JOEL L. KRAEMER SECOND REVISED EDITION
E.J. BRILL LEIDEN NEW YORK KOLN 1992
Kraemer, Joel L Humanism in the renaissance of Islam i the cultural revival during the Buyid age The first impression appeared in 1986 as a hardback edition ISBN 9004 07259 4, vol. VII in Studies in Islamic Culture and History. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Commit tee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Kraemer, Joel L. Humanism in the renaissance of Islam : the cultural revival during the Buyid age / Joel L. Kraemer. — 2nd rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (P. ) and index ISBN 9004097368 (pbk.) 1. Civilization, Islamic. 2. Iraq—Civilization—6341921. 3. Civilization, Islamic—Greek influences. I. Title. DS36.855.K72 1992 956.7 02 dc20 9226937 CIP
ISBN 90 04 09736 8 © Copyright 1993 by E.J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by E.J. Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center, 27 Congress Street, SALEM MA 01970, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
PREFACE In this study I shall attempt to show that in the Renaissance of Islam, which flourished under the enlightened rule of the Buyid dynasty, there was a conscious attempt to assimilate and transmit the intellectual legacy of Greek antiquity. By "Renaissance of Islam" I refer to a classical revival and cultural flowering within the soil of Islamic civilization, not to a renaissance, or resurgence, of Islam itself. The principal expression of this renaissance was a philosophical humanism that embraced the scien tific and philosophical heritage of antiquity as a cultural and educational ideal. Along with this philosophical humanism, a literary humanism epitomized in the word adab, equivalent in many of its nuances to Greek paideia, was cultivated by litterateurs, poets, and government secretaries. The renaissance I speak of, like the one which lends it its name, witnessed a powerful assertion of individualism, a burst of personal ex pression, in the domains of literary creativity and political action. It thrived in a remarkably cosmopolitan atmosphere. Baghdad, the center of the cAbbasid empire, and of Buyid rule, was a microcosm of the Islamic world, the rendezvous of scholars from far and wide, of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. Philosophers belonged to a class of their own, transcending particular loyalties, united by the pursuit of wisdom, the love of reason. The cosmopolitan environment of Baghdad, going back to the previous century, was permeated by a spirit of skep ticism and secularism. Rebellion against convention, characteristic of freespirited poets, was often accompanied by libertinism. The rulers of the Buyid dynasty, originally condottieri from Daylam, south of the Caspian Sea, managed to carve out an empire within the do mains of the cAbbasid caliphate and to become the protectors of the caliphate itself. ShTcIs, with Iranian political traditions and cultural reminiscences, they lent their enthusiastic support to the pursuit of philosophy and science, and to the cultivation of poetry and belleslettres. In contrast with its intellectual vibrancy, the age of the Buyids was one of social crisis and economic decline, a circumstance that raises the general question of correlation in periods of cultural growth between the superstructure of creative expression and the substratum of socio economic fact Several social groups were primarily responsible for the transference of culture in this age. Schools, informally constituted, were formed around the figure of a teacher, who was both educator and spiritual guide; the pursuit of knowledge was conceived of as being a path to human perfec
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tion and happiness. The school was fluidly interchangeable with the scholar's majlis ("circle"), consisting of students, colleagues, friends, and occasional visitors. The vizieral, or royal, majlis was the natural setting for the cultivation of literary humanism. A prominent association, the society of the Sincere Brethren, was more formally structured and, along with its religious and educational aims, it pursued sociopolitical objec tives of a revolutionary character. The outstanding individuals of this era, bearers and sponsors of its cul ture, were scholars who studied and preserved ancient treasures for posterity; secretaries and courtiers, whose need to know made them ideal receptacles for an encyclopaedic knowledge; and princes and viziers who were often men of the pen and the sword: gifted writers, competent ad ministrators, soldiers, statesmen, and benefactors of the arts and sciences. The cultural flowering called the Renaissance of Islam did not survive the decline of the Buy id dynasty. The SunnI restoration engineered by the Saljuqs ended this brief interlude. This restoration exemplifies a homeostatic tendency (the phrase is from Professor Roger Savory) in Islamic history, by which a period of receptivity to outside influence is followed by a retreat to entrenched traditional attitudes. To what extent did the students of ancient philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam succeed in decoding and transmitting the message of the ancients? In every instance of cultural transmission, inevitably a transformation, a hermeneutic process takes place. What, then, is com prehended? How is it naturalized and assimilated in its new home? In this study I am mainly concerned with the nature of the environment in which the cultural transformation took place and with the cultural elite who were its bearers, although attention is also given to theme and con tent. In a subsequent volume, Philosophy in the Renaissance of Is lam; Abu Sulayman alSijistani and his Circle, the philosophical legacy is treated in greater detail. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to a number of people who have contributed toward the realization of this book. Professor Franz Rosen thal generously read a previous version and was, as always, extremely helpful with comments and corrections. Professor Itamar Rabinovich, Head of the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, has been supportive in many ways, and I thank him and Mrs. Edna Liftman for the assistance of the Center in preparation of this volume. The Bronfman Program for the Study of ArabJewish Relations and the SonnenbergLuyt Fund sponsored its publication. Mrs. Doris Sherman typed the manuscript with great patience and care, for which I am grateful. Mrs. Miriam Lavron conscientiously checked galley proofs. My wife Roberta has shared it all, and the book is dedicated to her.
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A note on transcription and dating. I have transcribed Arabic names and terms, preserving long vowels, etc., except where the word is well known in English (e.g. "Sufi") and in the case of "Buyid," which, following the lead of Professor Roy Mottahedeh, in Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, I have left without a long u. Personal names are given with the definite article, when appropriate, except in the cases of SijistanI and Tawhldl, who appear frequently. The Christian year cor responding with the hijra date is given according to the Christian date of Muharram 1, unless the exact month of the hijra date is indicated or im plicit.
INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION The author is obliged to reviewers of the hardbound edition of this volume for raising issues requiring more refined analysis and elucidation. The best critic of a book is often its author who is most aware of its flaws. Thus Saint Augustine read his life's oeuvre in his old age and wrote his Retractationes, criticizing it as none other could. I must confess that, among other faults, I did not define some objec tives clearly enough. For instance, a primary aim, not adequately articu lated, was to present Islamic intellectual life in a certain epoch in its social context. I used the rare opportunity, provided by the writings of the ency clopaedic litterateur Abu Hayyan alTawhldl, my guide, to study the philosophers, theologians, belletrists, poets, secretaries, viziers, and emirs in their social setting; to observe them in their assemblies and ses sions in palaces, residences, bookstores, mosques, city squares, gardens, and archways. Another mea culpa was an overreliance on my Vorstudie, "Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: A Preliminary Study," which I assumed released me from addressing theoretical issues squarely in the book.1 I shall try to remedy this deficiency here and also note pertinent studies, mainly works published after the first appearance of this book. A serious theoretical issue, which was treated cursorily and aroused criticism, was my use of the terms "renaissance" and "humanism" as thematic for this volume and its companion, Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam. Questions (and eyebrows) were likewise raised at my evoking the concepts "individualism," "cosmopolitanism," and "secularism" to delineate some dominant traits of the age. The thrust of the criticism is that this vocabulary (discours) is European (Eurocentric) and inappropriate for a foreign culture ("the Other"). European civilization has been taken by some Western historians as a model of superiority and as a universally valid paradigm.2 What appeared to the present writer as a fair hypothesis—that informed mem bers of medieval Islamic civilization shared the fruits of the classical heritage in science, technology, and philosophy—was chalked up by some to a condescending imposition of Western ideals, norms, and values
See JAOS, 104 (1984) (Studies in Islam and the Ancient Near East Dedicated to Franz Rosenthal), ed. Jeanette Wakin, 13564. Reprinted in this volume, pp. 331360. 2 See the balanced formulation in Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (Seattle, 1987), 9091; trans, by R. Veinus from La fascination de I'Islam (Paris, 1980). 1
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on a foreign civilization with standards of its own. One is rather counseled to study the indigenous scholars, saints and sufls of Islam instead of the alien Falasifa and their revival of an imported culture; to explore the native traditions of folk medicine rather than the classical medicine of Hippocrates, Galen, and Dioscurides and their Islamic disciples; to inves tigate innate popular culture rather than the wispy ' 'high" culture of elite groups. Clearly, the very choice of theme, it is suggested, reveals the author's partiality for what in Islamic society is esteemed by European criteria. The allegation of a "Eurocentric" viewpoint warrants solemn atten tion. While this specific issue has been focal in recent years, the dilemma goes far beyond Eurocentrism and pertains to the general epistemological conundrum that has engaged historical inquiry for at least two centuries: How can investigators know their subject when they are inevitably condi tioned by subjective preferences, sensitivities, and social values; by an ideology shared with his or her observer society; and by the constraints of institutional and national pressures?3 Classicists and orientalists are not the only ones who face this interpretive trap and hermeneutical circle; all historians and disciplinary specialists have hidden (and not so hidden) agendas. And so the lines are not drawn by some cosmic dualism between neutral areas of specialty (e.g. anthropology) and disciplines guilty of cul tural imperialism (e.g. orientalism) but rather between responsible and unreliable scholarship. Historians must be committed to the possibility of arriving at some approximation of the truth. Otherwise we are in Alice in Wonderland with HumptyDumpty. The "countertrendy principles" of Arnaldo Momigliano are pertinent here—that history is the recovery of facts about the human past; that scientific evaluation of evidence enables historians to retrieve much of that past; that truth must serve as the historian's motto; and that it is none of his business to be a moral judge, much less a prophet.4 The more fashionable credo of Michel Foucault, that "[t]he exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge con stantly induces effects of power,"5 implies that knowledge is power that creates truth by a manipulation of discourse and is consequently self justifying. This view is in the final analysis epistemologically anarchical
See Rodinson, 83ff. Cited from his Lurcy Lecture at the University of Chicago in May 1982 by Peter Green, in his review of Momigliano's The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1991), TLS. July 19, 1991, p. 3. 5 See M. Foucault, "Prison Talk," Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 52. 3 4
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and selfimmolating. It bars any attempt at history writing. Since discur sive formations produce their own objects, "there can be no question of interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the referent. 6 In the wake of this and kindred doctrines, such as deconstructionism, it is inevitable that historical evidence is devaluated, history becomes a branch of rhetoric, and historiography becomes equivalent to writing fiction. 7 The Foucauldian notion of discourse undergirds Edward Said's con tentions against orientalism. According to Said, orientalism is to be un derstood as a Western attempt to dominate and even produce "the Orient" by means of its discursive formation. 8 On this basis Said freely asserts that the texts "can create not only knowledge but also the very reali ty they appear to describe." 9 It is thus natural that Said is reluctant to write a history of orientalism or even a history of the Orient, for this is precluded by the very notion of what discourse is. The clearest hint of a mandate for historians is to have the Orientals speak for themselves and not be represented by Occidental orientalists. Studying another culture, however exacting, is consentually acknowl edged as legitimate. It entails a meticulous process of translation of the artifacts of that object culture into the logos of the observer's society. There are obvious differences between the observer's terms of interpreta tion and native terms—signs, symbols, expressions—used by participants in the object society. Clifford Geertz c ites a number of dyads marking this duality (e.g. "inside" versus "outside," "phenomenological" versus "objectivist," and "emic" versus "etic," etc.), settling for the distinc tion made by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut between "experience near" and "experiencedistant" concepts. 1 0 An experiencenear con cept is one that a patient, subject or informant uses to indicate what he perceives, feels, imagines or thinks. And an experiencedistant concept is one that a specialist, ethnographer or other, uses in his or her scientific
M. Foucault 7 he Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 47; and H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1983), 61. 7 Green, loc. cit.. 8 E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 3. 9 Said, 94. The emphasis is in the original. 10 C. Geertz, From the Native's Point of View': Anthropological Understanding," reprinted in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 55 — 70, at 56 7; first published in the Bulletin of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 28 (1974). See also Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 1415, where he speaks of anthropological writings as interpretations of a second and third order, whereas first order interpretations are made by a ''native" whose culture it is. 6
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or philosophical work. For example, "love" is experiencenear and "ob ject cathexis" is experiencedistant. Terms such as "social stratification" and "religion" are experiencedistant for most people. Native concepts must be translated into interpretative terms compre hensible to an outsider. Geertz offers in this essay an extended definition of the Balinese word lek, which means something like "stage fright." His long Eurolinguistic explanation of the notion transfers it from its native sense, which is perceived by the Balinese, into European terms which the reader can fathom. This transfer of meaning occurs on a basic semiotic level. There are cultural symbols which require an intricate hermeneutical explication. For instance, in his famous essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," Geertz gives a complex and ingenious interpreta tion of the cultural and social significance of the traditional Balinese cock fight, treating it as a coded text and paradigmatic event.11 The contrast between experiencenear and experiencedistant is reminiscent of Bertrand Russel's wellknown distinction between "ac quaintance" and "knowledge about,"12 that is, between things we have presentations of and things we know by denoting phrases. We know, for instance, that the center of mass of the Solar system at a specific moment is some definite point, but we have no immediate acquaintance with this point. The native is in intimate touch with his or her customs by acquain tance; the researcher has a more removed knowledge about them. Mr. Jones, who is ill, is intimately familiar with his malaise; but his physician (presumably) has scientific knowledge about it. Russell's distinction be tween "acquaintance" and "knowledge about" is comparable to the difference between (Greek) gnosis vs. episteme and (Arabic) maHifa vs. Him.13 It is fashionable nowadays to prefer the "native's point of view" and to deprecate professional expertise: the perspective of the critic, inter preter, observer. Thus Walther Bust, in an antiinterpretive mode, is quoted as saying, "No text was ever written to be read and interpreted by philologists."14 I would gloss the bonmot by saying that, "No native dance was ever performed to be viewed by an ethnologist." And yet the philologist and the ethnologist, with their view from afar and disciplinary
11 The essay was published in The Interpretation of Cultures, 41253; first published in Daedalus 101 (1972), 137. 12 B. Russell, "On Denoting," Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. H. Feigl and W. Sellars (New York, 1949), 10315; reprinted from Mind, 14 (1905). 13 See Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, 161. 14 Cited by Julie Scott Meisami, "Arabic Culture and Medieval European Litera ture," JAOS, 111 (1991), 345.
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techniques, can provide objective (public consentual) knowledge which authors and performers often lack.15 The use of a Eurolinguistic lexicon is virtually unavoidable. Critics of Eurocentrism themselves unwittingly sprinkle their writing with European locutions. "The Middle East" is a Eurocentric vocable and only meaningful when the area is seen from a Eurocentric viewpoint. "The Middle Ages" and "The Medieval Period" make no sense for Islamic civilization; the periodization is totally European. Nor does "Classical Islam" fit Islamic chronology. In fact, many seemingly innocent words are ethnocentrically loaded. The concept "man," says Foucault, is a recent invention of European culture from the sixteenth century.16 The expressions social class, cul ture, civilization, ethnic identity, intelligentsia, to cite a few examples, are European terms of interpretation imposed by the analyst on his or her subject. Common translations such as "religion" for din, "state" for dawla, and "nation" for umma condense a vast semantic range in the source language into a functionally equivalent lekton in the target lan guage which carries a myriad of interfering connotations. Caveat scriptor. Using terms of one's own cultural discourse to understand another's is the essential hermeneutical task as I saw it—to translate the legacy of another culture into comprehensible terms and to forge links between that culture and one's own.1' Indeed, this is precisely what the translators, scribes, and commentators did in the Islamic society which I studied. They tried to recover the meaning of Greek thought in terms which they could understand by a subtle and complex process of translation, exege sis, and interpretation. Importing the thought of ancient Greece into the gates of the Islamic city entailed a hermeneutical effort of dramatic proportions, and the success was astounding. To overcome the alien sta tus of "the Other" is the hermeneutical task par excellence,18 The terms of interpretation must be tested by their conformity with the evidential signs (texts, artifacts, etc.) in the culture under scrutiny. The initial task of the investigator is to avoid misunderstanding, primarily by studying source texts in their original language by sound oldfashioned philological method. This entails giving a reliable exegesis of the texts— what Biblical scholars call "lower criticism." The second task is to rise to
15 In fact, the writer of a text is not in a privileged position in relation to the inter preter and critic; he also becomes and interpreter and critic as soon as his text is created. 16 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), 386. 17 See Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, xiv, 136. 18 See HansGeorg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975); originally pub lished as Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen, 1960).
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a level of'' higher'' critical understanding by using the methods of special disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, etc. The critique of Eurocentrism is occasionally harnessed to ideological and political polemic. This unholy alliance of scholarship and politics is often premised on a disastrous retrojection of today's ideological conflicts onto the past. The modern clash between East and West—or the Middle East and Europe—we find blithely equated with the struggle between ancient Greece and Persia! The antiorientalist discourse about Europe and the Arab and Muslim Other replaces basic geohistorical facts with metaphors and political myths. Anachronism abounds; morphology becomes mythology. Edward Said glibly retrojects the bifurcation EuropeWest and AsiaEast to an cient Greece, thereby creating an essential and eternal West and East, aligning the ancient Greeks with the modern West and (amazingly) with—"orientalism"! Said notes that the "demarcation between Orient and West" exists and "already seems bold" by the time of the Iliad, and that distorted representation of the Orient occurs in The Persians of Aes chylus and in The Bacchae of Euripides.19 This, Said concludes, is "Euro pean imaginative geography,'' which makes Europe powerful and artic ulate" and Asia "defeated and distant."20 Now there are many things wrong with Said's reading and representa tion. The chorus he cites, on the basis of an inferior translation, from Aeschylus' The Persians (compare lines 548557 in the Loeb edition by Herbert Weir Smyth) portrays no conflict of Europe and Asia or of West and East. To remind the reader, the Persea was presented to an Athenian audience in 472 B.C. after the Greek victory over the Persian assailant, led by Xerxes who had invaded Athens, devastated its homes and violated its sanctuaries, only to be defeated by the Greeks, under the leadership of the Athenians. In Said's convoluted version it is a victory "over Asia, that hostile "other" world beyond the seas, not over the Persians at Marathon and Salamis in the course of their imperialist expansion West ward into Hellas. The chorus of elders, guardians of the Persian empire, are sympatheti cally depicted by Aeschylus as lamenting in the name of "the whole land of Asia" the defeat of their King Xerxes at the battle of Salamis, at the same time gently censuring his tactics and comparing him unfavorably with his father Darius ["Xerxes led forth (woe!), Xerxes laid low (woe!), Xerxes disposed all things imprudently with his seafaring barques. Why
Said, Orientalism, 56. Said, 57. See also p. 68 for further references to Western representations of the Orient in classical Greece and to Western imaginative geography. 19 20
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then was Darius in his time so scatheless of lord of the bow unto his peo ple, to the men of Susa a leader dear?"]. Said deftly omits the beginning of the chorus, where the Persian elders are portrayed by Aeschylus, veteran and hero of Marathon, as mourning the grief and wailing of the Persian maidens and wives and their longing for their departed and lost husbands. Then, in the same spirit of empathy, follows the lament of the whole land of Asia, which Said cites. The com passion for the fallen enemy expressed in the lines of the chorus and throughout the Persae is incredible in view of the circumstance that the Persians had invaded Greece and laid waste its cities. This compassion is only paralleled in the ancient world by the author of the Book of Jonah's care and pity for the people and even the beasts of Nineveh. Aeschylus does not view Persia as an alien other. Xerxes is depicted by Aeschylus symphathetically as a typical Greek tragic hero, whose hubris brought him to a disastrous downfall. The self and the other are not Europe and Asia, or West and East, but Hellas championed by Athens versus the Persians of Asia. Aeschylus stresses the victorious role of the Athenians, who were consciously defending their freedom and democracy from the foreign invader, defeat ing Darius, father of Xerxes, at Marathon, and Xerxes at Salamis. The portrayal by Aeschylus of defeated Asia far surpasses in humanity and sensitivity any of the ancient portrayals, pictorial and textual, by vic torious states over their enemies as for instance the gloating and vaunting Egyptian descriptions of defeated pigmylike Asiatics or Assyrian por trayals of routed and grovelling foes. The Persian wars undoubtedly created Greek patriotism and a sense of superiority and were the dramatic setting for the great cultural efflores cence of the fifth century B.C. But despite their feeling of preeminence and selfconfidence, based on a sense of their arete and political system, they regarded the Egyptians of Africa and the Babylonians of Asia as bearers of high cultures (see below). After all, Herodotus, the philobar baros, begins his Histories (1.1) by praising the great and marvelous works of both Greeks and Barbarians, and could even favor the more sophisti cated theology of the Persians to the anthropomorphic coarseness of the Greeks. None of this is surprising, for ancient Greece, Egypt and Baby lonia belonged to a common Mediterranean culture sphere (Kulturkreis). Aligning ancient Hellas with Europe and the West is anachronistic and misrepresents the cultural reality of the ancient world. In this respect, the theories propounding "the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization," despite all the criticism that may be mounted against them, are much more on the mark than is Said with his bifurcation of the ancient world into a European West versus an Asiatic East.
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Greek and Roman culture took root in (Central and Northern) Europe by a process of cultural assimilation, beginning in the medieval period. If European classicists in Berlin, Heidelberg, Paris, Cambridge, and Oxford saw themselves as proponents and transmitters of the classical tra dition, this was by a process of absorption and affiliation, not by lineal descent. They made the ancient classics their own. If nineteenthcentury German intellectuals believed that the owl of Minerva flew from Athens to Berlin, this does not make the Greeks Germans or the Germans Greeks. One has no right to assign ancient Greek and GraecoRoman science, technology, and philosophy to an essential West and to deny them to the denizens of the Mediterranean basin. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen appealed to all three medieval civiliza tions—ArabMuslim, Byzantine and European—each in its own special way: every culture selects and fashions its own antiquity. The role of the Arabs in transmitting the ancient scientific and philosophical classics to Europe is well known and of colossal significance for the history of world civilizations. The Arab translations of the ancient legacy were integral to the famous TwelfthCentury Renaissance. If there were no "Renaissance of Islam" in the ninth and tenth centuries, there would not have been a renaissance in Europe in the twelfth; and without this renaissance, it is doubtful that there would have been an Italian Renaissance of the Quattrocento. Classical culture in early and late antiquity belonged to the Kulturkreis of the Mediterranean. This ancient Mediterranean culture was not strange to the Arabs and Muslims. They usually referred to the sciences of the Greeks as culum alawPil or (culum) alqudama?, "the sciences of the ancients"—those with whom they felt affiliated. Arabs and Muslims ac knowledged then that they were not the first or only civilized people. Nowadays some Muslim fundamentalists and Western (selfappointed) apostles of Islam perpetuate the notion of an essential bond of science and technology (rational method) with the West. This is a historical distortion and does a severe disservice to Islamic societies. Islamic culture was linked from its inception with the cultural sphere of classical antiquity, and was directly affiliated with Hellenism and Ro man civilization. The Islamic empire replaced the Hellenistic successor states. The heartland of the area conquered by Islam was to a great extent coterminous with the orbit of the Hellenistic Diadochian states and the GraecoRoman civilization that arose in their wake. And the Renaissance of Islam was a conscious continuation of the cultural legacy of the Hellenistic and GraecoRoman epoch.21 It is thus understandable that 21
"Preliminary Study," 135.
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orientalists were motivated to study Islamic culture because of its affilia tion with antiquity.22 Thus the legacy of Athens, Alexandria and Antioch was not regarded as a foreign commodity by Arab and Muslim translators and phi losophers. They believed that the Greeks derived their wisdom from the East, and consequentially the study of Greek science and philosophy was not an innovation but a renovation, or renaissance. Alfarabi placed the birthplace of philosophy in Iraq, from where it was transmitted to Egypt, and then to Greece, and afterwards to the Syrians and then to the Arabs. And he and other philosophers envisioned a renaissance of philosophy in Iraq, wisdom thus coming full circle. The philosophical literature of our period stresses the theme of ex oriente lux. Empedocles is believed to have studied with Luqman the Sage in SyroPalestine at the time of King David. Pythagoras reportedly studied physics and metaphysics with the disciples of Solomon in Egypt, and learned geometry from the Egyptians. Thus the study of ancient Greek philosophy was viewed not as an innovation but as a renovation and rebirth.23 The Greeks themselves professed that mathematical sciences and geom etry originated in Egypt, and that astronomy, the sundial, the gnomon, and the division of the day into twelve parts came to Greece from Babylon. It was believed in antiquity that Pythagoras traveled to the East (Egypt, Babylon) and brought back knowledge of the sciences to Greece.24 These legends are anchored in actual fact. The Greeks learned mul tiplication and unitfractions from the Egyptians. Ptolemy used in his computations the sexagesimal system for fractions, adopted from the Babylonians, and astronomers used the sexagesimal system for minutes and seconds, a convention that has come down to us. Our numbers are derived from WestArabian notations, which came from Hindu numer als. And the Greek (and Latin) alphabet, of course, came from the Phoe nicians. I mention these wellknown data in order to emphasize that the culture sphere of the ancient world embraced the entire Mediterranean basin. Arab and Muslim intellectuals, philosophers, and scientists thus did not regard science and philosophy as alien, as did some Muslim religious scholars. A graphic witness to this are the portrayals in paintings of the See Johann Fuck, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa (Leipzig, 1955), 1. See in this volume, pp. 3, 140ff. 24 See Herodotus, Historiae, II, 109; Plato, Phaedrus 274c; Aristotle, Melaphysica, A, 1, 981b23 25. The theme of ex oriente lux became a prevalent motif in the Hellenistic period. See also B. L. Van den Waerden, Science Awakening, trans. A. Dresden, with author's ad ditions (New York, 1961), 15, 83. I have used his book for this and the next paragraph. 22
23
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ancient philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—dressed in Arab garb. The idea that Arabs and Muslims rejected science and philosophy as alien is a modern notion retrojected onto the screen of the past. The very methods of philological text analysis and interpretation, at tacked today as ossified vestiges of an obsolete art, were originally de veloped by the ancient Alexandrian Greek commentators on Homer and Aristotle. These philological tools were adopted by Hunayn b. Ishaq and his circle, and by the TenthCentury Baghdad school of Aristotelian studies which will concern us below (Matta b. Yunus, Yahya b. cAdI, cIsa b. Zurca, Ibn alKhammar, Ibn alSamh, Nazif alRumi, etc.). Reliable manuscripts were sought, even as far as the Byzantine empire; texts were carefully copied and collated; editions were produced; translations were made; commentaries were written—all in a good oldfashioned classicist tradition. Nineteenthcentury classicism and orientalism had their roots in the philological scholarship of the Italian Renaissance, but the tech nique is ancient and no more Western than coffee (although it was, to be sure, mainly cultivated in the West). Thus Islamic civilization emerged and flourished in intimate contact with other cultures which blossomed along the shores of the Mediterrane an basin. In my "Preliminary Study" I surveyed the attitude of cultural historians and Islamicists as to whether Islamic civilization should be regarded as belonging to the European culture sphere or to an Oriental cultural orbit? Some assigned Islamic civilization to a separate Kulturkreis, but most acknowledged that it finds its place alongside European culture. Among the latter some professed that it was very close to European cul ture; others claimed that it differed in essential ways. Carl H. Becker is the main spokesman of those who saw Islam as belonging to the European cultural sphere. He contended against Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Jaeger, and Jorg Kraemer—all of whom argued that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet"—stressing that Islam was affili ated from its birth with the cultural sphere of classical antiquity, but that Islam and Europe assimilated this cultural heritage in their own specific ways. 2^ A basic question raised by the cultural historians and orientalists dis cussed in the "Preliminary Study" was whether the Arabs and Muslims properly understood the Hellenic and Hellenistic culture which they adopt ed and transmitted. On this issue a consensus prevailed "that Islamic civilization failed to understand the cultural legacy (Nachleben) of antiquity
See also Gerhard Endress, An Introduction to Islam, trans. Carole Hillenbrand (New York, 1988), 17. Chapter 2, on "Europe and Islam: The History of a Science," is valua ble and pertinent to our discussion. 25
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in general and its educational and humanistic ideals in particular."26 The minds of these Orientals, some said, were "atomistic," incapable of abstract or discursive reasoning. The goal of Oriental culture is said to be salvation and the redemption of the individual soul, for which Orientals sought gnosis, that is, salvational knowledge. It is also observed, with more justification, that the Oriental heritage from antiquity was restricted in that it did not include Greek history, poetry, drama, or the Roman classics.27 And it is alleged that the recep tion of the Hellenic and Hellenistic heritage was purely utilitarian, so that medicine, geography, astronomy, mathematics, natural sciences, and alchemy were the main fields of interest. While this point has some merit, it cannot be denied that the Orientals were also motivated by intellectual curiosity and a quest for human perfection and happiness (in Aristotelian terms). The Orientals, it is claimed, could not comprehend the cultural and educational value of Platonic works but were aware only of a "de composed Platonism"—only immortality and the theory of the soul. Aristotle was supposedly viewed through Neoplatonic eyes. If anything, the Orientals grasped the deformed, superstitious Neoplatonism of late antiquity. Orientals had allegedly an endemic aversion to rationalism, tending rather to classify, write handbooks and introductions to Aristotle. A basic antihumanism was supposedly prevalent. This reductive model of the naturalization of science and philosophy within Islamic culture has had its own Fortleben and impact. It is, for instance, espoused by Ira M. Lapidus in his massive A History of Islamic Societies.28 Lapidus devotes a few pages, a minute fraction of his compen dious volume, to the absorption of Greek philosophy in the Islamic world and its subsequent transmission to Europe. The author reiterates the core and essence of the reductionist position. He portrays the Arab and Muslim perception of Greek thought as refracted through the prism of late antique teaching, a product of late disfiguring Neoplatonism. After the bold and sweeping assertion that "Greek thought in the Islam ic world was Greek thought as preserved, understood, and interpreted in the late Roman empire," Lapidus informs us that "Plato's ideas were represented by his political works and some of his dialogues."29 (The bizarre division into political works and dialogues is puzzling. One may "Preliminary Study," p. 140. For the extent of the Arabs' knowledge of Greek literature and its impact on Arabic fiction, see F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. E. and J. Marmorstein (London, 1975), chapter 12. 28 Published in Cambridge, 1988. 29 Lapidus, 93. 26 27
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ask, for instance, whether Lapidus classifies the Republic as a political work or a dialogue.) He goes on to observe that works of Aristotle were also known, cautioning the reader: "However, most of the materials called the work of Aristotle and Plato had actually been written in the centuries fol lowing the deaths of the two master philosophers, when they were reinter preted in neoPlatonic terms as teachers of a path to spiritual salvation." Lapidus implies that the Arabs and Muslims were deprived of the authentic Urtexts to which others (the West presumably) had access. He omits the vital detail that Aristotle's works were not edited and published in Greek until 70 B.C.—some two hundred and fifty years after Aristotle's death—by Andronicus of Rhodes. The fact is that Arab and Muslim writers had access to excellent trans lations of the very texts of the same ("authentic") Aristotle used from antiquity to the present.30 Arabic translations from the Greek sources were made in the ninth and tenth centuries of virtually the entire Aristotelian corpus (and many are accessible nowadays in published edi tions). Indeed, the Greek manuscripts used by Arab translators occasion ally predated those used in (European) Greek editions of the texts and should be used as testimonia in such publications. Aristotle's Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and his biological works, for example, were meticulously copied, assiduously studied, and diligently interpreted.31 Nor was Plato only known as reinterpreted in Neoplatonic terms. Though none of his dialogues have been preserved in their entirety, Arabic translations of the Republic, the Laws, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the Letters are known to have existed (although whether they were epi tomes or complete translations is uncertain).32 As is well known, Alfara bi presents a political interpretation of Plato's thought in his Philosophy of Plato, even omitting the theory of ideas and the immortality of the soul—a far cry from Neoplatonism.33 Lapidus goes on to explain that "The Greek heritage also included the scientific and medical ideas of Galen, the pseudoscience of the Hellenis tic world including alchemy and the semimystical, semiscientific ideas of the neoPythagoreans and the Hermetics." Lapidus suggests that
Neoplatonic works like The Theology of Aristotle and the Liber de causis were widely ascribed to Aristotle, but this does not mean that Aristotle was reinterpreted in Neopla tonic terms and taken to be a guide to spiritual salvation. 31 See F. E. Peters, Aristoteles Arabus: Monographs on Mediterranean Antiquity II (Leiden, 1968), and his Aristotle and the Arabs (New York & London, 1968). 32 See F. E. Peters, "The Origins of Islamic Platonism: The School Tradition," in P. Morewedge, ed., Islamic Philosophical Theology (Albany, 1979), 1445, especially p. 15. 33 See also Peters, "Origins," 30. 30
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Hellenistic thought was an amalgam of phantasmagoria served up in large doses to gullible Arabs. But what of the scientific works of Apollonius of Perga, Dioscurides, Euclid, Nichomachus of Gerara, Ptolemy and their reception?34 Despite his view of a truncated Hellenistic repercussion on Islamic cul ture, Lapidus admits that "Greek culture had a profound impact upon the growth of Islamic civilization," especially in the realm of philosophy,30 but the significance of this impact is not elucidated. In treating the classi cal heritage in Islam, Lapidus tiptoes lightly around the sources, avoiding philological trifles, in whimsical abstractions, dismissive and trivializing. The striking underplay of cultural and intellectual topics in A History of Islamic Societies, despite the cultural turn in historical research of the last decade or so, makes it hardly surprising that the cultural revival under the Buyid dynasty36 is never mentioned. I impose upon the reader's time to discuss Lapidus' adoption of the reductive model because of the influence of his book, which is presented as "[a]n authoritative and comprehensive history of Islamic societies . . . that will no doubt prove to be a classic work in its field." The present volume and its companion argue against this reductionist thesis. It is stressed that the TenthCentury Baghdad School of Aristotle Studies had a solid grasp on the teachings of "the First Teacher," as Aristotle was called. The texts were available, and Arab commentaries on the logical and physical works reveal them as keen students of Aristotle. As A.I. Sabra, Nicholas Rescher and others have shown, Arab writers had a profound understanding of logic and mathematics, and were not impeded by "atomistic thinking in compartments" or immersed in purification, redemption, and phantasms of a late debased Hellenism. As opposed to the reductionist thesis, I argue that "renaissance" is an appropriate term, and that a true renaissance occurred. Adam Mez saw a renaissance in the atmosphere of the ninth and tenth centuries, by which he meant a revival of Hellenistic culture, though he did not devote much
In the circles discussed in this volume and its companion, the pseudosciences alchemy and astrology were discussed in a spirit of questioning and skepticism. The thought of the Italian Renaissance was, of course, suffused with alchemy, astrolo gy, magic, Kabbalah, and Hermetic theology. See, for example, the fundamental studies by Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964); and Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley, 1972). 35 Lapidus, 94. 36 Buyid is strangely disjoined in the index from Buwayhid, as though they were two separate dynasties. 34
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space to it.37 I limited myself deliberately to the (late) tenth century, to a specific phenomenon called in my subtitle "The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age." My aim was to show that there was in the tenth century, under the protective stimulation of the Buyid dynasty, a con scious attempt to assimilate and transmit the intellectual heritage of Greek antiquity, and that the age of the Buyids was the hauteepoque of Mez's "Renaissance of Islam." My book was expressly more restrictive than Mez's Renaissance of Islam. Mez, like Burckhardt before him, in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, dealt with all aspects of social and political life and with material culture. I concentrated, as the title indicates, on the phenomenon of humanism, which was not specifically treated by Mez. There is no justification for the view that the intense study of Greek science and philosophy in tenthcentury Baghdad was so drastically dis tinct from that of Europe that the word "renaissance" does not apply. Europe in the famous TwelfthCentury Renaissance had much less of the ancient heritage to go on; the Europeans then possessed (two hundred years after the renaissance treated here) a very narrow legacy and de pended upon translations from Arabic into Latin.38 The term "renaissance" is used by analogy with similar phenomena in the West. Cultural history seeks patterns and structures in the welter of artifacts it analyzes. The great cultural historians, says Johan Huizinga, "have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art."39 Thus the term "renaissance" is applied as a morphological construct to various periods of cultural re birth. The term is clearly vague, even as used in a European setting, and has been interminably debated. The word must be employed with caution and not devalued by overuse and misapplication. For, as Huizinga says, there is ever a danger of morphology degenerating into mythology.40 This happens when the morphological construct loses its moorings in the firm soil of textual evidence. In some ways the Renaissance of Islam resembled the Italian Renais sance of the Quatrocento; in others it was similar to the TwelfthCentury Renaissance. As a classical revival it resembled both. In its recovery of
" The Egyptian scholar . CA. Abu Rida translated Die Renaissance des Islams of A. Mez under the title alHadara alislamiyya fi lqarn alrabic alhijn; casr alnahdafi lislam (Beirut, 1967), thus using the modern term nahda for "renaissance." 38 See MarieTherese d'Alverny, 'Translations and Translators," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson et al. (Oxford, 1985), 42162. 39 See his essay "The Task of Cultural History," in Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, trans. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marie (New York, 1959), 59. 40 Huizinga, 60.
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science and philosophy—Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, Ptolemy—it re sembled the TwelfthCentury Renaissance. And in its literary humanism it was more like the Italian Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century. The main expression of this renaissance I found to be a philosophical humanism that encompassed the scientific and philosophical heritage of antiquity, elevating it as a cultural and educational ideal. Along with this, a literary humanism, expressed in the word adab (which rendered paideia in GraecoArabic translations), was cultivated by litterateurs, poets, and government secretaries. The figure portrayed in the following pages who most exemplifies "TenthCentury Renaissance man" is the vizier alUstadh alRa^Is Abu 1Fadl b. alcAmId, a model of philosophical and literary humanism. He began his career as a government secretary (katib), and tutored the future emir cAdud alDawla in sound methods of administration and the art of statesmanship. Ibn alcAmId was a distinguished stylist in prose and poetry and a great master of epistolary technique. He affiliated himself with "the following (shica) of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle." Ibn al cAmId was an antiquarian and collector of manuscripts. His pursuit of philosophy and the sciences brought him to the realms of logic, ethics, politics, metaphysics, and also mathematics and engineering. He special ized in mechanics, which required a thorough familiarity with geometry and physics, and succeeded in manufacturing rare siege instruments and in devising new weapons. The vizier was intrepid in battle. He was also an excellent draftsman. To this may be added his stupendous memory for poetry and also his expertise in Koranic sciences and exegesis. It is hard to resist the temptation to say that his pursuits and versatility are reminis cent of Leonardo da Vinci.41 I see no reason to reject the term "humanism." Others, in fact, preceded me, whose views I discussed in my "Preliminary Study": cAbd alRahman Badawl, Louis Gardet, and Muhammad Arkoun.42 Badawl and Gardet discussed humanism as a feature of the religion of Islam per se, whereas the humanism I discuss belongs to Islam as a complex civili zation. My notion of humanism is closest to the view of M. Arkoun, who presented Abu Hayyan alTawhldl and Abu cAli (b.) Miskawayh as proponents of humanism, and to the vista of Marc Berge in his many studies on Tawhldf, culminating in his comprehensive Pour en humanisme vecu: Abu Hayyan alTawhidiA3 Subsequent to the above and to this
41 42 43
See below, 2519. See "Preliminary Study," 14547. Published in Damascus, 1979 (Institut Frangais de Damas).
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volume there appeared George Makdisi's The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West, with Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh, 1990)—a vast and detailed study which covers all aspects of Islamic learn ing. Makdisi renders adab as "humanism" and udaba? as "humanists," and uses the locution in the broadest possible terms to include learning in general. Makdisi's main objective, as in an earlier volume, The Rise of Col leges, is to show the influence of Islamic educational institutions on Europe an learning. In portraying "The Physiognomy of the Age" (and elsewhere), I stressed three salient traits: individualism, cosmopolitanism, and secu larism.44 Some critics claimed that use of these terms risks conveying a false historical perspective and modernizes and europeanizes the fourth century of the Hijra. But assigning these properties exclusively to the (modern) West is based on conventions and idees regues. A current stereotyping of Islamic societies brands them as collectivist, provincial, and religious in contrast to (modern) Western societies, which are perceived as individualistic, cosmopolitan, and secular in nature. If we carefully examine Islamic cul ture in ninth and tenthcentury Iraq and Western Iran on the basis of the evidence, we find that the above traits are salient. By individualism in this context I mean selfawareness of one's personal identity as distinct from other people or a defining group—family, clan, tribe, nation, etc. (I do not mean viewing the individual as of ultimate value and an end in him self.) Individuals certainly belonged to social networks and were bound by mutual commitments and loyalties.43 And there are obviously many examples of collectivism and of group dominance over the individual and of confessional factionalism (e.g. the raging street battles between Sunnls and ShTcIs). Nevertheless, in the circles of the intellectual and power elite we discover a striking display of individualism and high striving for per sonal achievement in literary creativity and political leadership. In the Buyid age, stature and worth (hasab) counted for more than genealogical descent (nasab)f6 The government bureaucrats (kuttab), whose stature in the cAbbasid state was high from the start, could crave the lofty office of vizier, as did Ibn alMuqaffac in the eighth century. Abu Hayyan al Tawhidl was apparently of lowly origins, his father a date vendor. The famous viziers Abu 1Fadl b. alcAm!d and the Sahib Ismacfl b. cAbbad rose to high rank by individual striving and personal achievement. The
44 4:1
46
See this volume, vii, 2, 1120, 60, 190, 20708, 211, 254. See Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton, Mottahedeh, 98ff.
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founders of the ruling Buyid dynasty were parvenus whose ancestor was an obscure fellow, an indigent fisherman or carrier of firewood. They rose to power from the plain status of rugged condottieri, and consequently had to trump up a legitimizing genealogy and also affiliated themselves to the cAbbasid family by marriage. Cosmopolitanism in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries went along with the burgeoning urbanism. Baghdad was a cosmopolitan city, a rendezvous for people from far and wide, from various ethnic and reli gious backgrounds, the cultural capital of a tremendous empire, stretch ing from Spain to India.4/ Christians, Jews, and Sabians participated in the dominant Islamic civilization; and Christians, in particular, had a hand in shaping it. Secularism is not necessarily European and modern, although its pre sentday ubiquity is unprecedented. Secularism is not a recent trend associated with urbanization, the prestige of science, or the breakdown of social form, but is old and found even in tribal societies.48 The religion of Islam was the regnant code, but a spirit of secularism, by which is meant skepticism and worldliness, pervaded philosophical and literary circles in this age. Philosophers, in the wake of Alfarabi, saw religion as a system of symbols representing a rational truth in figurative language, appealing to the popular imagination. Translators and philos ophers affected a rhetorical accommodation to the dominant religion of their society, in the first place by transferring Greek terms into Islamic locutions, (e.g. nomos > shan^a, sunna\ nomothetes > wadic alshanca [al sunna]), and by rendering Greek concepts into Islamic currency, as the philosopherking of the Republic appears as prophet and /mam.49 This was not a secularism that could abandon the curbs and restraints of religion; it had to submit in obeisance to the dominant faith. Secularism among prosaists and poets was pervasive. The vizier Sahib Ibn cAbbad, a devotee of dissipation and wantonness, was a patron of the poet Ibn alHajjaj, master of scurrilous verse (sukhf), mockery and buf foonery (mujun), traceable to the licentiousness of Abu Nuwas in the previous century. The humanism of the adib Abu Hayyan alTawhldi and of the historianphilosopher (Ibn) Miskawayh is celebrated. The popular genre of adab—as literary education and entertainment, teaching ethical
See "Preliminary Study," p. 147, where the words of G. Levi della Vida, are quoted to the effect that Islamic society was "even more cosmopolitan than the hellenistic and Roman world had ever been." 48 See Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1982), ixx. 49 On rhetorical accommodation, see J. L. Kraemer, "The Jihad of the Falasija," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 10 (1987), 288324. 47
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principles, and giving guidelines for professions—is secular in its essence, open, and pluralistic. The kuttab were trained in adab, and had a broad humanistic education. The hold of the Islamic faith on the intellectual and power elite was thus often tenuous. Its authority over popular segments of society is generally supposed to have been absolute. One tends to assume the domination of a scriptural, elitist Islam on the common people in Islamic societies in the premodern period and to disregard popular nonIslamic belief and custom for which there is limited data. But what was actually the case? Jacques Le Goff and JeanClaude Schmitt, for instance, by careful digging, have uncovered in medieval Europe a rich folklore and pagan remants that survived as a popular "low" culture alongside the ideology and institutions of the Church.50 Some reviewers have noted that the traits for defining this period of cul tural revival (individualism, cosmopolitanism, secularism) are traceable to the preceding century. This is true, and I noted that the time span of this revival bridged the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. Mani festations of skepticism and relativism of values are no doubt anticipated in the previous century. In my "Preliminary Study," Burzoe, Paulus Persa, and Salman Pak are noted as precursors of the skeptical motif ("the equivalence of proofs"). The literary humanism of the ninth century alJahiz was noted, and attention was given to Abu Bakr alRazI, Ibn alMuqaffac, Abu cIsa alWarraq, and Ibn alRawandi.51 When we identify a century with a cultural movement, we must view the boundaries of the century as flexible and relative.52 The concept of a century must be used freely so as to encompass what precedes and ensues, with stress on the central period. I concentrated on the cultural efflores cence which burgeoned in the period between two great pillars of Islamic thought, Alfarabi and Ibn Sma, taking Abu Hayyan alTawhldl as my guide. I used his writings, which reflect the era, as a telescope for viewing its culture: schools, circles, societies, scholars, patrons, and potentates. I never intended to convey the impression that the entire culture of the age in all its aspects flourished under the stimulus of a lofty renaissance and majestic humanism. During this age, ulema were expounding the
50 See J. Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen age (Paris, 1977), translated as Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980); J.C. Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1983); and the discussion of John Van Engen, '"The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem," American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 51952, at 52832. 51 "Preliminary Study," 156; and see in this volume, "Introduction," 11, 15. 32 See C.H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the 12th Century (New York, 1957), 10; Renais sance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson et al., xxvii.
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shanca; the faithful were going to the mosque, performing ablutions, fast ing, traveling on pilgrimage to Mecca, and fighting against the infidels. Hanbali influence was profound among the broad masses of Baghdad. This was why I gave in Part I a general orientation into the period. I depict an elite culture, not an official, mass, or popular culture. Many maintain that this elite culture is marginal and irrelevant to the real es sence of Islam. Whether or not this marginality holds true, in cultural terms it is irrelevant. More people were presumably studying the sayings of hadith than the aphorisms of GraecoArabic gnomologies. But this limi tation is true of any period of cultural growth: the Athens of Pericles, the Rome of Cicero, the Paris of Voltaire—how many ordinary citizens par take of all this? This elite culture was fostered in the upper strata of political leadership, encouraged by Buyid emirs and viziers, and carried on in their scintil lating courts. Ibn alNadlm's famous catalogue (Fihrist) of books current in Baghdad encompasses literature that was accessible to the educated class in general, to a bourgeois, urban segment of society—merchants, physicians, and bureaucrats, who had the leisure and interest to peruse these books. And popular movements, such as that of the Sincere Brethren and the broader IsmacHT cause, appealed to the public on the basis of a Neoplatonic emanationist cosmology. The RascPil Ikhwan alSafa? are a virtual encyclopaedia of knowledge, including themes from the Aristotelian Corpus, Christian and Jewish substrates, and also Per sian, Indian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Manichaean ingredients.33 As the book engaged me for a long time, and was delayed for various reasons, it was inevitable that some bibliographical sources were not mentioned. And since the publication in 1986 works have appeared that are relevant to its themes. A major work of one of the prominent philosophers of this period, Abu 1Hasan Muhammad b. Yusuf alcAmirI, his Kitab alAmad^ala labad, has been well edited and translated, along with a valuable introduction and commentary, by Everett K. Rowson (New Haven, 1988). Alfarabi, whose figure loomed over our period through his disciples, has been profoundly presented by Miriam Galston in her Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton, 1990). Ibn Slna, the giant who marks the end and summation of our period, has received a thorough textual study by Dimitri Gutas, in Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden, 1988). The two Cambridge History of Arabic Literature volumes on the 'Abbasid period provide invaluable resources for understanding our see I. R. Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan alSafa5) (London, 1982). 53
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period and its context. These are: cAbbasid BellesLettres, ed. by Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge, 1990) and Religion, Learning and Science in the cAbb asid Period, ed. by M.J.L. Young etal. (Cambridge, 1990). Of partic ular relevance in the BellesLettres volume is the article by H.N. Kennedy on the cAbbasid caliphate and the successor states; the chapter by C. Pel lat on alSahib Ibn cAbbad, and the chapter by M. Berge on Abu Hayyan alTawhldi. In the Religion, Learning and Science volume, the most perti nent chapters are the splendid tour de force on philosophical literature by Muhsin Mahdi; the informative chapter on administrative literature by C.E. Bosworth; the articles on individual philosophers: alKindl (Fritz W. Zimmermann), alRazI (Albert Z. Iskandar), alFarabi (Alfred L. Ivry), and Ibn Slna (Salvator Gomez Nogales); and L.E. Goodman's survey of the translation of Greek materials into Arabic. Finally, I should like to cite from a review of the companion volume by S. Parvez Manzoor, of Stockholm,54 who stressed that the work has its bearings in the humanistic tradition of learning and that its author had "undertaken to transmit with an open mind the insights and convictions of another culture, often exotic, in such a way that the philosophic 'paradigm' shared by the informed in that culture is shown forth in its appeal and grandeur."00 The reviewer concluded: "Certainly, in an age where academic scholarship has become the handmaiden of ideological polemics, the humanistic tradition of learning has a role to play." 54 55
Sec Muslim World Book Review, 8 (1988), 457. See Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, xiv.
INTRODUCTION 1. The Renaissance of Islam In adopting the title Die Renaissance des Islams for his book on Islamic civilization in the fourth/tenth century Adam Mez was clearly inspired by the monumental Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien of his compatriot Jacob Burckhardt. Mez did not venture to explain his ascription of the Western term "renaissance" to a nonWestern phenomenon. He was, in fact, reticent about his theme. His diffidence was shared by others, even by scholars close to the book. H. Reckendorf, for instance, in a preface to the posthumously published work, was clearly discomfited by the title, as was D. S. Margoliouth, who wrote a forward to the English translation. Margoliouth pointed out, for instance, that whereas "renaissance" in the Western tradition means the restoration of something lost, the institu tions discussed by Mez were first introduced rather than recovered. Yet, it can be argued that the expression "Renaissance of Islam" is apposite, and that it conveys a sense of the cultural process that Islamic civilization experienced in the tenth century.1 The Italian Renaissance witnessed a rebirth of classical learning, culture, and style. The term "renaissance" has accordingly been extend ed to various cultural revivals and periods of classical restoration. Western renaissances (e.g., Carolingian, Ottonian, TwelfthCentury, Byzantine, etc.) have fashionably proliferated. There is equal warrant for recognizing a kindred phenomenon in the culture sphere of Islamic civilization, which enjoyed in the tenth century a rebirth of the classical legacy and a general cultural revival.2 A. Mez, Die Renaissance des Islams (Hildesheim 1968; reprint of 1922 edition); English translation by S. K. Bukhsh and D. S. Margoliouth, The Renaissance of Islam (London 1927). An Arabic translation, with additional notes, was published by M. CA. Abu Rlda under the title alHadara alislamiyya fi lqarn alrabic alhijri; casr alnahda fi lislam (Beirut 1967). S. D. Goitein, "Changes in the Middle East (9501150)," in D. S. Richards (ed.), Islamic Civilisation 9501150 (London 1973), pp. 2021, comments upon the relationship of Mez' book to Burckhardt's classic. H. A. R. Gibb, "An Interpretation of Islamic History," Studies on the Civilization of Islam (Boston 1962), pp. 1718, places the "Islamic Renaissance" in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries (tenth to twelfth centuries A.D.), when (in his view) cultural and intellectual activities developed in an atmosphere of material prosperity and religious heterodoxy, and creative achievements had a personal and individual character. 2 E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York 1969), pp. 42112; F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. E. and J. Marmorstein (London 1975), pp. 1213. R. S. Lopez argues for the existence of a renaissance in tenthcentury Europe in "Still another Renaissance?" The American Historical Review, 57 (1951): 121. Lopez observes (p. 4) that the tenth century marked the zenith of the Renaissance of Islam. He 1
2
INTRODUCTION
Although it is unavailing to compare in detail the Renaissance of Islam with Western renaissances, and unnecessary to do so in order to affirm that such a renaissance occurred, a few observations along these lines are nevertheless in place. In certain important respects the Renaissance of Islam is most akin to the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Both ac centuated the scientific and philosophic legacy of Hellenic antiquity, whereas the Italian Renaissance was more concerned with a rhetorical and literary tradition. In fact, in both the Islamic revival and the Medieval Renaissance literature and history are omitted in translations from the Greek. Scholars in the Renaissance of Islam were engaged in the absorption of Greek learning; those of the TwelfthCentury Renaissance were involved in the absorption of Greek and Arabic learn ing. (It may be said, perhaps, that were it not for the Renaissance of Islam, the TwelfthCentury Renaissance would not have taken place.). In other respects, the Islamic cultural revival may be likened to the Italian Renaissance. There is a similarity in their assertive individualism and spirit of secularism. But whereas in the Italian Renaissance energy was invested in the effort to reproduce antiquity in art and architecture, and in style in general, this cannot be said for the Renaissance of Islam. While in the various Western renaissances there was generally an awareness that a new era had dawned—often seen as a return to a radiant past—and the words "revival," "renovation," and "rebirth" were in voked to communicate this impression, in the Islamic milieu renovation language was used for religious revivication, and we do not find it, to my knowledge, in the context of the cultural renaissance that concerns us. This linguistic vacuum does not, however, entail the absence of the phenomenon. The term "renaissance," as applied to "the Renaissance period," first gained currency in the nineteenth century; it was no less a renaissance on this account.3 In the Italian Renaissance a premeditated effort was made to revive the cultural legacy of antiquity. Similarly, the cultural elite in the Renaissance of Islam appear to have consciously striven to restore the an cient Hellenic scientific and philosophic heritage. The Islamic Falasifa (philosophers) believed that they were renewing a legacy that was ancient also notes (p. 5) that this century "saw perhaps the finest hour of the Byzantine Empire. As far as Europe is concerned, Lopez states (p. 2) that "If renaissance be understood in its original meaning of revival, new birth, or, indeed, new conception, no period in Euro pean history seems entitled to be called renaissance more than the tenth century." 3 Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, p. 5. The modern Arabic term for "renaissance" is nahda, which means "rising, awakening." It is the term used by Abu Rlda in his Arabic translation of The Renaissance of Islam. The Arabic literary revival, or renaissance, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is called nahda (less often—ihyay). Nahda is also used for political and national rebirth.
INTRODUCTION
3
and also native to their area. According to certain legends, adopted by the Falasifa, going back to the Hellenistic period, the ancient Greek philosophers derived their wisdom from the Near East. Empedocles, for instance, is said to have studied with Luqman the Sage in SyroPalestine in the time of King David; and Pythagoras reportedly studied physics and metaphysics with the disciples of Solomon in Egypt, and learned geometry from the Egyptians. These philosophers imported to Greece the wisdom that they had imbibed in the Orient. The study of ancient Greek philosophy was therefore viewed not as an innovation but as a renova tion.4 According to the Muslim philosopher Alfarabi, philosophy had existed in ancient times among the Chaldeans of Iraq. It subsequently reached the people of Egypt, from whence it was transferred to the Greeks, among whom it remained until its transmission to the Syrians, and then to the Arabs. Pinpointing Iraq as the birthplace of philosophy is signifi cant, for it was apparently in Iraq (the heart of a favorable clime) that Alfarabi and other Islamic philosophers anticipated a rebirth of philosophy. The wheel would thus come full cycle. Alfarabi asserts also that Plato and Aristotle had not only given an account of philosophy and of the ways to philosophy but also of the ways to renew it when it becomes confused or extinct.5 Thus seen, the revival of classical learning, in what Franz Rosenthal has called "the GraecoArabic renaissance," was a conscious attempt to retrieve the philosophical and scientific patrimony of antiquity. The sheer quantity of ancient texts that were recovered, translated, and com mented upon is astounding. The list appreciably exceeds the number of philosophic classics perused during, say, the Carolingian or Twelfth Century Renaissances. The Fihrist (Catalogue) of Ibn alNadlm, who flourished at the height of the Renaissance of Islam, gives us an idea of the philosophic texts that were available in Baghdad's libraries and bookstores in our period. Without going into detail, we may observe, for example, that virtually the entire Aristotelian Corpus and its principal Abu Sulayman alSijistani, Siwan alhikma, ed. CA. Badawi (Teheran 1974), p. 83. D. M. Dunlop's important edition of the Siwan alhikma became available_to me too late to be used for citation. SijistanI quotes the passage from Abu 1Hasan alcAmiri's alAmad cala alabad ( = Ms. Servili 179/2, fols. 80b82a). The texts appear almost verbatim in Sacid al AndalusI, Tabaqat alumam, ed. L. Cheikho (Beirut 1912), pp. 2122; trans. R. Blachere (Paris 1935), pp. 5860, from whence they were copied by later authors. On classical and Hellenistic sources of the Pythagoras legend, see I. Levy, La legende de Pylhagore de Grece en Palestine (Paris 1927), pp. 1820. The legends concerning his visits to Palestine (and Phoenicia) and Egypt were given currency by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. 5 Alfarabi, Tahsil alsacada (Hyderabad 1345/1926), pp. 38, 47; trans. M. Mahdi, The Attainment of Happiness, in Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Glencoe 1962), pp. 43, 4950. 4
4
INTRODUCTION
Greek commentaries were known. Many of Plato's writings were accessi ble in complete versions or in summary form. A fair number of Presocratic texts, transmitted in late antiquity, found their way into Arabic. Euclid and Ptolemy were studied, as were medical writings ascribed to Hippocrates, and the works of Galen.6 It is nevertheless true that a certain "constriction" of the ancient heritage did occur. The renaissance we speak of took place without the inspiration of Cicero, and without a word by Horace, Livy, Virgil, or Suetonius. And if Greek philosophy was known in its essential outlines, Greek drama and historiography were not—save for the names of authors and isolated quotations. The antiquity that inspired the Renaissance of Islam is not the same as the antiquity that inspired the Italian Renaissance. But neither was the antiquity of other Western renaissances the same as the antiquity of the Italian Renaissance. Each epoch selects and fashions its own antiquity. The Renaissance of Islam in its broadest time span may be said to have bridged the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. This period, the zenith of S. D. Goitein's "Intermediate Civilization of Islam," witnessed the emergence of an affluent and influential middle class, which, having the desire and means to acquire knowledge and social status, contributed to the cultivation and diffusion of ancient culture. Urban society, with all its acute problems—inadequate food supply, disease, lawlessness, and strife—nonetheless provided the necessary framework for creative enter prise and for the freedom to break with traditional patterns and con straints. The physical mobility of merchants and scholars was matched by a social mobility: assertive individuals broke traditional structures of class ranking by genealogy; knowledge and intelligence and talent came to the fore as determinants of rank and status. During this age rulers and statesmen were avid patrons of learning, entertaining philosophers, scientists, and litterateurs in their resplendent courts. The burgeoning of commerce and trade, extending even beyond the boundaries of the em pire of Islam, and the growth of urbanization, facilitated communication among people of diverse backgrounds. Baghdad became the nucleus of a massive empire stretching from Spain to India. Islamic society, in the words of G. Levi della Vida, was "even more cosmopolitan than the hellenistic and Roman world had ever been.'' The apogee was reached in the second half of the tenth century under the rather enlightened and tolerant rule of the Buyid dynasty in Iraq and Western Iran. Buyid On the classical legacy in the Islamic world, see, for example, Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage, R. Walzer, Greek into Arabic (Cambridge, Mass. 1962); F. E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs (New York 1968); CA. Badawi, La transmission de la philosophic grecque au monde arabe (Paris 1968). The "GraecoArabic renaissance" is mentioned by Rosenthal (p. 14). 6
INTRODUCTION
5
princes and their viziers were energetic patrons of the arts and sciences. The age of the Buyids was undoubtedly the highwater mark of the period dubbed by Adam Mez "the Renaissance of Islam" and in many respects the glory of medieval Islamic culture.7 The second half of the tenth century—the period that primarily con cerns us—was bracketed in the Islamic East by the towering figures of Alfarabi (d. 950) and Avicenna (d. 1037), whose fame reached medieval Europe. No philosophers of their stature lived during our age. Its thinkers were epigonal figures whose fame remained confined to their own culture sphere: Yahya b. cAdI, cIsa b. Zurca, alHasan b. Suwar, Abu Sulayman alSijistanl, Abu CA1I (b.) Miskawayh, and Abu 1Hasan alcAmirI. All eminent, none stand in the first rank, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Alfarabi, Avicenna, or Averroes. (In this respect, it may be recalled that a stunning epoch like the Italian Renaissance could not boast of great philosophers on the order of Plato and Aristotle.) It would be extravagant and misleading to compare our period to the age of Pericles, Ciceronian Rome, the Italian Renaissance, or the era of Louis XIV. It does, nevertheless, have in common with these epochs a rich and vibrant clustering of culture heroes and intellec tual luminaries. 2. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam The classical revival of the Italian Renaissance is linked primarily with the activity of scholars called "humanists." Renaissance humanism adopted the ancient classics as a cultural and educational program and ideal. While the term "humanism" was actually coined by a German educator in 1808, the word "humanist" (Italian humanista and its equivalents) was in use already in the sixteenth century for scholars engaged in the studia humanitatis. Paul Oskar Kristeller has stressed that Renaissance humanism was not wedded to a specific philosophical system or school. Indeed, Renaissance humanists tended to avoid the study of philosophy—i.e. logic, natural science, and metaphysics—re taining an interest in ethical thought. Renaissance humanism was primarily a literary phenomenon, and as such—as a pursuit of classical learning—Renaissance humanism belongs to the Western rhetorical tradition. Kristeller (and others) therefore regard the humanists as the successors of the medieval dictatores—the practitioners of the ars dictamims (epistolary theory and practice). Professionally, the humanists functioned S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden 1966), pp. 5470; G. Levi della Vida, "Dominant Ideas in the Formation of Islamic Culture," The Crozer Quarterly, 21 (1944): 21314. 7
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INTRODUCTION
as teachers of the humanities and as secretaries for rulers and city ad ministrations. Copying and editing ancient texts was a natural extension of their professional and academic pursuits. While uncoupled with a specific philosophical trend, Renaissance humanism did have certain philosophical implications: an emphasis upon the value and dignity of man; an elevation of individualism as the expression of one's own sensa tions, experiences, and thoughts; and promotion of cosmopolitanism, af firming the unity and common destiny of mankind.8 The mode of humanism that thrived in the Renaissance of Islam was clearly not part of the Western rhetorical tradition which had its roots in a Ciceronian educational and cultural program. The overriding objective of the Islamic humanists was to revive the ancient philosophic legacy as formative of mind and character. Like the Renaissance humanists, their intellectual preoccupations were not intimately bound to a specific philosophic outlook. Unlike the Renaissance humanists, however, the Islamic humanists did not shun the various branches of philosophy proper. Aristotelian thought dominated their logical investigations, their work in natural philosophy, and their reflections on ethics. But this tendency does not betoken a hardbound commitment to a specific philosophic system. Their political thought was fundamentally Platonic, and a blend of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism pervaded their metaphysical speculation. They were selective, deferential to the entire legacy of the ancients, rather than narrowly restrictive. Their interests were mainly philosophic rather than literary. Yet, the foundation of their studies was textual and philological. The chief architects of this philosophic humanism in our period were the Christian philosopher Yahya b. cAdI and his immediate disciples. They divide into two groups. The first—Ibn cAdI's Christian pupils— continued the (predominantly Christian) tradition of meticulous textual editing, translating, and commenting, which goes back to Hunayn b. Ishaq and his school in the third/ninth century; namely, Abu cAlI cIsa b. Ishaq b. Zurca, Abu 1Khayr alHasan b. Suwar b. alKhammar (Khumar), and Abu CA1I b. alSamh. These philosophers constituted what Richard Walzer has called "the Christian philosophical school of I have also discussed "Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam" in an article published in a volume of studies for Franz Rosenthal. See "Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: a Preliminary Study," y.4 OS, 104 (1984): 13564. And see "The Culture Bearers of Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam," The Irene Halmos Chair of Arabic Literature Annual Lecture, Tel Aviv 1984. My understanding of Renaissance humanism flows in particular from the writing and lectures of P. O. Kristeller; see especially, "The Humanist Movement," Renaissance Thought (New York 1961), pp. 323; and "Humanist Learning in the Italian Renaissance," Renaissance Thought II (New York 1965), pp. 119. 8
INTRODUCTION
7
Baghdad." The second group of disciples were Muslim scholars; inter alios, cIsa b. CA1I (son of the famous vizier, cAl! b. cIsa), Abu Sulayman alSijistanl, and Abu Hayyan alTawhldT. The renowned bibliographer Muhammad b. Ishaq b. alWarraq, known as Ibn alNadlm, was in close contact with Ibn cAdI and his school. Abu Hayyan alTawhidl's vivid portrayals of cultural life in Baghdad during this period reveal that, in the circles of Yahya b. cAdI and of his pupil Abu Sulayman alSijistani, and in the general intellectual ambience of the time, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sabians, and Mazdaeans communed in the study of the an cients—united by what Werner Jaeger once called "the ecumenical power of antiquity."9 Ibn cAdT and his pupils corrected and refined previous translations, added their own, deliberated over textual and terminological problems, and engaged in philosophical speculation. The relationship between philosophy and religious doctrine was a major intellectual preoccupation of theirs. The philological finesse and philosophical insight of Ibn cAdT and his pupils are evident in the editions of Aristotle's Organon and Physics that emanated from his school. Ibn cAdI was a copyist by profession—a skill he may have inherited from his father. He was also a keen collector of manuscripts. His profes sion and humanistic avocation thus went hand in hand. Ibn alNadim was also a professional copyist and, like Ibn cAdI, a rabid bibliophile. In writing his Fihrist, he occasionally consulted Ibn cAdT's autograph catalogue of philosophical books. TawhTdi was a copyist, malgre soi, and a chancellery secretary when opportunity knocked. cIsa b. cAli was also a chancellery secretary, as were several members of Sijistanl's circle. The secretarial art appears to have been the most prominent profession among members of these scholarly groups. Others combined scholarly activity with business or medicine. Ibn Zurca was a commercial trader; Ibn Suwar, a physician. Ibn alSamh owned a bookstore, a rendezvous for Christian philosophers. The last three were apparently well off, unlike their teacher, who was unable to purchase manuscripts he coveted. Ibn Zurca, Ibn Suwar, and Ibn al Samh were censured by TawhTdi for their cupidity, a charge he tended to level against those more fortunate than himself. SijistanT apparently had no profession aside from teaching. He depended upon stipends and was generally hardpressed. 9 Walzer, "The Arabic Translations of Aristotle," Greek into Arabic, p. 65; W. Jaeger, "Die Antike im Wissenschaftlichen Austausch der Nationen," in Humanistische Reden und Vorlrdge, 2nd ed. (Berlin 1960), pp. 17585, especially pp. 18081; and "Die Antike und das Problem der Internationalitat der Geisteswissenschaften," in Inter Nationes, Jahrgang I (Berlin 1931), p. 93.
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INTRODUCTION
The proponents of humanism in our period associated in informal fraternal circles guided by a spirit and ideology of friendship. The par ticipants in these learned circles were motivated by a shared commitment to reason and mutual interest in the sciences of the ancients. The Sijistan! circle, about which we are informed by Tawhldl, resembles in many of its features the Platonic Academy of Florence, whose leader was Marsilio Ficino. Like the Florentine academy, Sijistanl's circle was not so much an organized institution as it was simply the circle that formed around the master. While there was a common doctrine, more or less identical with the master's thought, and while many participants were literati who merely reiterated his opinions, the circle also included members having independent ideas and interests. The activities of the SijistanI circle, like those of the Florentine academy, included improvised discussions with members of the circle and visitors, organized discussions on special occa sions, public lecture courses, and private instruction.10 The curriculum of philosophical studies in the Renaissance of Islam was broadly humanistic. A model syllabus is embedded in an Arabic biography of Aristotle current at the time. Aristotle is depicted as having studied poetry, grammar, and rhetoric in his youth. The vita considers these linguistic studies essential for philosophy inasmuch as they are closely related to logic. When Aristotle had thoroughly mastered the arts of grammar, poetry, and rhetoric, the biography tells us, he applied himself to the study of ethics, politics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.11 The curriculum implicit in this biographical sketch comprises: (1) grammar, poetry, and rhetoric; (2) logic; and (3) philosophy; the latter consisting of ethics, politics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. The syllabus is thus based on an authentic Aristotelian classification of the sciences, according to which theoretical philosophy is subdivided into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics; and practical philosophy, into politics, economics, and ethics. (Mathematics was further subdivided by 10 Kristeller, Renaissance Studies II, p. 93. Compare also the practice of Plotinus. Ac cording to his pupil Porphyry, his lectures were generally open to the public. The study of texts formed the basis for lectures and discussion. Whereas Plotinus' lectures were generally available to the public, his writings were confined to a limited circle of associates—the reverse, it may be noted, of university custom nowadays; see J. M. Rist, Plotinus; the Road to Reality (Cambridge 1967), pp. 811. 11 Siwan alhikma, pp. 13536 (entry on Aristotle); and alMubashshir b. Fatik, Mukhtar alhikam, ed. CA. BadawT (Madrid 1958), pp. 17980. The text of alMubashshir b. Fatik is translated by I. During, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Goteborg 1957), pp. 19798, and by A. Baumstark, Aristoteles bei den Syrern vom V. VIII. Jahrhundert (Leipzig 1900), pp. 12829. The source of the biography was "Ptolemy the Stranger" (Gr. Xenos/Ar. alGharlb).
INTRODUCTION
9
Ammonius Hermiae into arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music; i.e. the famous quadrivium.) The branch of learning comprising poetry, grammar, and rhetoric is said in the biography to have been called "the comprehensive'' (almuhit). This reference to a comprehensive education is probably an at tempt to render the egkuklios paideia, by which writers in the Graeco Roman period intended general education or culture. This notion of general education reflects Aristotle's actual view that a basic general education is a prerequisite for higher philosophical studies. Egkuklios paideia actually had two senses: (1) the general education of an educated gentleman; (2) the basic learning, or propaedeutics (propaideumata), that served as an introduction to advanced education. It is the second sense that is intended in the biography of Aristotle. The propaedeutics became the seven liberal arts {artes liberales), i.e. the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and theory of music). Drawn up in late antiquity (about the midfirst cen tury B.C.), and transmitted to the Latin Middle Ages, they became the educational and cultural program of the Renaissance humanists.12 Alfarabi's wellknown classification of the sciences, which presents a curriculum of higher education similar to the syllabus in the biography of Aristotle, also intimates the course of studies that the Islamic philosophers followed. Alfarabi enumerates: (1) linguistic sciences (grammar, syntax, writing, reading, and poetry); (2) logic; (3) mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, optics, astronomy, music, technology, and mechanics); (4) physics; (5) metaphysics; (6) politics (in cluding jurisprudence [fiqh\ and theology [kalam]). This scheme incor porates the Aristotelian division of the sciences into theoretical and prac tical parts. The linguistic sciences and mathematics contain, in grosso modo, the liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium). The native Arab sciences (linguistic sciences, jurisprudence, theology) are subsumable in this syllabus under both linguistics and politics. The curriculum is a neat blend of an Aristotelian classification of the sciences, the liberal arts, and the Arab sciences. Alfarabi's enumeration of the sciences and the syllabus of the Arabic biography of Aristotle point to the broadly humanistic scope of the educational program adopted by the Falasifa.13 On egkuklios paideia, see H. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb (New York 1956), pp. 24345, 303, 52728; H. Fuchs, "Enkyklios Paideia," Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum, 9 (1962): 36598; H. Roller, "Egkyklios Paideia," Glotta, 34 (1955): 17489. . w 13 Alfarabi, Ihsa: alculum, ed. Angel Gonzalez Palencia, 2nd ed. (Madrid 19d3), pp. 79; Rosenthal, Classical Heritage, pp. 5455. 12
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INTRODUCTION
The humanism that flourished in the Renaissance of Islam was an offspring of the humanism ideal that germinated in the period of Hellenism and GraecoRoman antiquity. Its primary features are: (1) adoption of the ancient philosophic classics as an educational and cultural ideal in the formation of mind and character; (2) a conception of the com mon kinship and unity of mankind; and (3) humaneness, or love of mankind. The philosophic humanists in the Renaissance of Islam believed that the sciences of the ancients (culum alawPil), in contrast to the Arab sciences (culum alcarab), are the common possession of mankind. Al Kindl, in the third/ninth century, had called the sciences of the ancients "the human sciences" (alculum alinsaniyya:). The philosophers contend ed that while grammar establishes rules for the correct speech of specific nations, philosophy—specifically, logic—regulates valid reasoned dis course for all mankind. The sense of the unity of mankind implies love of mankind. Love for all men, and pity and compassion for them, is taught by Yahya b. cAdI in a moving passage in his TahdhTb alakhlaq. He speaks of men as forming one tribe, linked by humanity (insaniyya). The term in saniyya, which is used often by philosophers in our period, has several meanings. It is the quality men share in common, or human nature; it also signifies being truly human, in the sense of realizing the end or perfection of man qua man, often synonymous with the exercise of reason.14 Along with this philosophic humanism, we find in our period a type of literary humanism that is epitomized in the word adab. Adab is a polysemous term, meaning (as Francesco Gabrieli explains) refinement and urbanity; the knowledge which renders someone refined and ur bane—i.e. profane Arab culture and sciences (poetry, oratory, history, rhetoric, grammar, lexicography, metrics) and broader humanistic studies (of Greek, Persian, and Indian provenance); the knowledge re quired for a specific calling (e.g. adab alkatib)\ and belleslettres. In GraecoArabic translation literature adab often renders Greek paideia and has many of its nuances.15 M. Guidi and R. Walzer, Uno scritto introduttivo alio studio di Aristotele (Rome 1940), pp. 395, 398/trans. pp. 409, 413; Walzer, "New Studies on AlKindl," Greek into Arabic, pp. 17778. For the universality of logic and Ibn cAdT's ideal of the unity of mankind, see below, pp. 11015. The word insaniyya is used currently for "humanism," and as such is a neologism; see L. Gardet, La cite musulmane, 4th ed. (Paris 1976), p. 273, note 1. Alfarabi discusses the term insaniyya in his Kitab alhuruf (Book of Letters), ed. M. Mahdi (Beirut 1970), pp. 7780, where it means "humanity" in the sense of the quality that human beings have in common. 15 F. Gabrieli, "adab," EI, I, 17576; C. A. Nallino, Raccolta di scritti editi e inediti (Rome 193948), VI, 117; Ch. Pellat, "Variations sur le theme de 1'adab," Etudes sur I'histoire socioculturelle de I'Islam (VIIeXVe s.) (London 1976), VII; F. Rosenthal, 14
INTRODUCTION
11
The main bearers of this literary humanistic culture were the scribes, secretaries, civil servants, litterateurs, and courtiers who plied state chancelleries and courts. The literary production of this broadly humanistic adab was, in the words of Gabrieli, "the backbone of high cAbbasid culture." In this milieu, wit, grace, charm, and eloquence were highly esteemed. Charm, or elegance (zarf), was the core and substance of this cultural refinement. This refined elegance was combined with in sight into human nature and the ways of the world. The encyclopaedic education of secretaries, embracing Arab and alien learning, often ex posed them to charges of heretical deviation. Their casual attitude toward religion is highlighted by alJahiz in his brief treatise in censure of secretaries.16 3. The Physiognomy of the Age Speaking of what, for convenience sake, may be called "the physiognomy of the age," with an eye to the cultural elite, a number of the period's salient features (individualism, cosmopolitanism, secularism) may be delineated. Individualism. Burckhardt viewed the "discovery of the individual"—the selfawareness of men as individuals—as an innovation and hallmark of the Italian Renaissance. In this respect, he contrasted the Renaissance with the (European) Middle Ages, when (as he claimed) "Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, par ty, family, or corporation—only through some general category." "Literature," The Legacy of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. J. Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (Oxford 1974), pp. 32427. On the equivalence of adab to paideia in GraecoArabic translation literature, see S. M. Afnan, A Philosophical Lexicon in Persian and Arabic (Beirut 1969), p. 4; and specimens in M. Ullmann, Die arabische Uberlieferung der sogenannten Mendandersentenzen (Wiesbaden 1961), pp. 17, 20, 67; F. Rosenthal, "Sayings of the Ancients from Ibn Durayd's Kitab alMujtana," Orientalia, 21 (1958), nos. 21, 29, 57, 58; Mukhtar min kalam alhukama3 alarbaca alakabir, ed. and trans. D. Gutas, Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation (New Haven 1975), pp. 74, 171 and 175 (cf. also pp. 93, 169, and 187). 16 G. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam (Chicago 1961), pp. 25057; Modern Islam (New York 1964), p. 73, note 43; Ch. Pellat, The Life and Works of Jahiz, trans. D. M. Hawke (London 1969), pp. 27375. See also trad. Pellat, Hesperis, 43 (1956), pp. 2950. Pellat suggests, "Gahiziana III. Essai d'inventaire de l'oeuvre Gahizienne," Arabica, 3 (1956), p. 163, no. 92, that the Risala fi dhamm akhlaq alkuttab, as preserved, is not the original treatise of alJahiz but a compilation containing only passages by him. The condemnation of secretaries may be a playful excercise (cf. p. 164, no. 93: Risala fimadh alkuttab) rather than an objective assessment; nevertheless, the attitude represented was presumably widely entertained visavis the secretarial class. On the humanism of the practitioners of adab in the third/ninth century, see G. Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba, L'homme, son oeuvre, ses idees (Damascus 1965), pp. 422ff. Lecomte rightly indicates that the litterateurs {udaba7) and secretaries (kuttab) were not uniformly committed to a profane ideal; many were deeply impregnated by Islam and were defenders of the faith. (Prof. J. Sadan led me to Hesperis and Lecomte.)
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INTRODUCTION
Locating the discovery of the individual in the Renaissance has been questioned by more recent historians who have pushed back this self discovery to the Middle Ages.17 The individual rose to prominence during the Renaissance of Islam. The intensely competitive atmosphere in the courts of the Buyid sovereigns promoted the development of the individual personality and fostered a strong sense of selfawareness. Both patron and client were spurred by the lure of fame. This was an achieving society and a time of rapid upward mobility. The triumvirate who founded the Buyid dynasty were rugged condottieri; they were assertive individuals who carved out territories and then established an empire by outmaneuvering and defeating kindred soldiers of fortune. Buyid viziers usually rose from the secretarial class, propelled over others by their knowledge, talent, and resourcefulness. An assumption prevailed that honor and fame were limited commodities, that there was not enough to go around. Statesmen vied in collecting entourages; beneficiaries of largesse competed for prizes and acclaim. The passionate rivalry inevitably bred envy, backbiting, and strife. The pages of Tawhldl's works are studded with allusions to others' pettiness and jealousy. These were vices he himself owned in spades. He was a painfully envious person, cantankerous and proud. But his allusions to the envy in the breasts of others are not dismissible as mere psychological projections. The persons he defamed most solemnly—the two viziers depicted in Akhlaq alwazirayn (Ibn alcAm!d and Ibn cAbbad)—were in fact outstanding men. They were statesmen, soldiers, and scholars each; one a philosopher, the other a theologian, both accomplished poets and prosaists. But they were also supreme egoists, haughty and tempestuous, aggressive, avid of power and fame, spiteful and envious. And so Tawhldi portrays them, honestly and with relish. The struggle for recognition stimulated selfawareness and selfcrea tion, a sharp demarcation of one's self from others, and a profound recognition of one's individuality.18 Personal experience assumed significance. It is not surprising that, in this milieu, letter writing became a popular genre of literary creation. This was partly an extension of a J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York 1958), p. 143; C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 10501200 (New York 1972). 18 Consider in this connection the lines of a famous contemporary, the poet Abu 1Tayyib alMutanabbi: "Not in my people have I found honour, but rather they in me;/and my boast is in myself, not in my ancestors,... If I am conceited, it is the conceit of an amazing man who has never found any surpassing himself;" A. J. Arberry, Poems of AlMutanabbi (Cambridge 1967), p. 22/23. Preference for personal achievement above genealogical distinction is a common motif in our period; see, e.g., R. Mottahedeh, Loyal ty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton 1980), p. 98. 17
INTRODUCTION
13
professional function—many literati were secretaries—but it also betokens a taste for personal expression. The correspondence of the great epistolary writers of the period—Abu Bakr alKhwarizml, Abu Ishaq al Sabi3, alSahib Ibn cAbbad—is saturated with personal touches and ac cents. Personal experience infiltrates and enhances historiography. Miskawayh stresses in the section that covers contemporary history in his Tajarib alumam (The Experiences of the Nations) his own experience of the events. He means to highlight the authenticity of his account, the superiority of Hyan (eyewitnessing) to khabar (reported information); but at the same time a subjective shading, personal evaluation and response, assert themselves. Tawhldl's writing is refreshingly personal and subjec tive. This is what makes him so unreliable and so fascinating a narrator. Both write virtually without chains of transmission (isnads). TawhldT has them, but usually "soandso told me" suffices. (And when he gives long, impressive isnads, it is usually to mask a false account.)19 Cosmopolitanism. Baghdad in the Buyid age was the meeting place of men from all parts of the Islamic world, of various religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Learned circles and princely entourages encom passed a mixed assortment of men. Poets, scholars, and secretaries roved from court to court, transferring allegiance with impressive ease, readily shifting landscape and horizon, always strangers, never "home." Among those with a heightened sense of individual self, narrow group at tachments were weakened and wider allegiances enhanced. Philosophers belonged to a class of their own (as Leo Strauss claimed), transcending particular loyalties. But along with their cosmopolitan concerns, they tended to maintain formal allegiance with their respective religious com munities. The creative thrust of individualism, and the reaching out of cosmo politanism, inevitably collided with social and religious norms and customs. The need for accommodation to societal standards promoted dissimulation and role playing. Traditional Islamic society demanded a high degree of group conformity. As the group norms were, in principle, those approved by the religious law, conformity entailed adherence to this law. Societies, in general, are governed by fundamental postulates that bind the social order and impose sanctions on nonconformists who abjure them. Orthodox religions and other ideologically closed systems tend to wink at infringement of the rules provided that lipservice is paid to the guiding ideology; in other words, it is the public pronouncement of heresy, not harboring heretical ideas, that is penalized. The Tawhldl's Risalat alsaqlfa is a case in point. It is a patent forgery, purportedly con taining a correspondence between Abu Bakr and CA1I, and begins with a long impressive isnad; ed. I. Keilani, Trois Epitres d'Abu Hayyan alTawhidi (Damascus 1951), pp. 526. 19
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INTRODUCTION
philosophers, attuned to the rules of the game, often conformed in their writing to accepted views, while confidentially communicating outrageous doctrines to their coteries or writing esoterically. The pressure to conform impelled ShTcTs in a Sunn! environment to practice prudent dissimulation (taqiyya).20 But taqiyya was not the exclusive preserve of ShIcIs. Camouflaging one's true beliefs was a prevalent technique of selfpreservation. A Muslim reared, or known publicly, as a ShaficT, for example, may have harbored ShicT sentiments; moderate Shlcism might be a foil for extreme Shlcism, and this in turn a mask for heretical (say, Manichaean) ideas. Deep inside the individual nurtures a private faith, in which he participates with a small circle of secret sharers. The interplay between the outward (.zahir) and the inward (batin) ("the mask and the face") takes place not only in esoteric exegesis of sacred writ; it is evident in certain physical phenomena in the Islamic environ ment: the walled house, protecting its inhabitants from the encroachment of the street and the public, and the veiled woman. The Islamic philosophers were adept at taqiyya; so were many poets and litterateurs. We may assume that posing, or roleplaying, was also a common form of selfprotection in courts of sovereigns. There are many strata and hidden depths of the soul concealed from the outside, and the process of discovery entails peeling away the various layers overlaying the soul's in ner core.21 Secularism. Another feature of the period's physiognomy, along with in dividualism and cosmopolitanism, is secularism. The creative minority—philosophers and scientists in particular—viewed religion as a conventional matrix of social norms and communal behavior. Without vanishing or thoroughly losing its force, religion lacked the cogency of something absolutely valid and compelling. Religion could not be brushed aside. It was a factor that had to be taken into account, reckoned with: Islam remained, for instance, the tribunal before which pursuit of the sciences was sometimes justified—when justification was called for. Salutations, blessings, and aspirations were expressed in religious for mulas. Leaders invoked the name of Allah before major undertakings. I. Goldziher, "Das Prinzip der Takijja im Islam," ZDMG, 60 (1906): 21326 ( = Gesammelte Schriften, ed. J. DeSomogyi [Hildesheim 196773], V, 5972). 21 H. Katchadorian, " 1 he Mask and the Face; a Study of MakeBelieve Society in the Middle East, Middle East Forum, 37 (1961): 1518; M. C. Batesonrfa/., "Safayi Batin; a Study of the Interrelations of a Set of Iranian Ideal Character Types," in L. Carl Brown and N. Itzkowitz (ed.), Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies (Princeton 1977), p. 269. The authors depict the interplay between the outside and the inside in the contem porary Iranian ethos. Their observations are pertinent to the medieval situation as well. For philosophic esotericism, see the writings of Leo Strauss, especially Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe 1952); and What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe 1959). 20
INTRODUCTION
15
Philosophers saluted the banner of religion in deference to political and social responsibility. The regnant political philosophy, inspired by Alfarabi, held religions to be symbolic representations of the truth. The true and the good were determined autonomously, not on religious grounds, and these criteria became the measure and standard for religion. Philosophy was viewed as independent of, not as ancillary to, faith and theology. The enlightened did not, as a rule, assault the religious myths of the vulgar. (At least the Falasifa did not; the Mutakallimun were more mili tant in this regard.) Since religious myths were tolerated as symbolic truths useful for mass consumption, religious polemics among philosophicallyminded men appear as playful intellectual exercises, not as abrasive clashes of faith and conviction. This tolerant mood was not surprisingly accompanied by a spirit of skepticism. The notion of "the equivalence of proofs" (takqfu'3 aladilla), meaning that the contradictory claims of religions and ideological systems are equally valid (or invalid), was popular among intellectuals, and Mutakallimun in particular. Skepticism tended to veer into its companions—pessimism and cynicism. A spirit of cynicism and mockery prevailed, displayed in con tempt for all that was venerable—first and foremost man himself. Among the literati we find debauchery and frivolousness, libertinism, drinking, and sexual licentiousness—conduct embodied in the word mujun. Mujun is an exotic blend of the raffine and recherche along with coarseness and vulgarity: poetry and wine along with scatalogical humor. The poet Ibn alHajjaj was a virtuoso performer in this mode. The obscenity (sukhf) of his verse was a prime cause for its popularity. A famous line of his says: "As a house must have a latrine, so must my verse be obscene." Mujun and sukhf were not, of course, new phenomena—they are traceable to the relaxed cosmopolitan atmosphere of ninthcentury Baghdad—but the dose is powerful and virulent in our period.22 While not an ascetic religion (although ascetic forms of Sufism are among its profoundest expressions), Islam is at least austere, given its AlThacalibT, Yatimat aldahr, ed. M. M. cAbd alHamld (Cairo 195658), III, 35. Referring to such impressive exponents of pornography as Ibn alHajjaj, Mez asserts that the principal representatives of this genre had pedigrees similar to that of Ibn al Rawandi—son of a Jewish convert, exponent of mujun, heretic (p. 258, note 6/269, note 4). The true spiritual progenitor of mujun was more likely the ninthcentury poet Abu Nuwas (d. between 198/813 and 200/815), renowned for his pederasty, wine imbibing, and religious cynicism; see M. G. alZuhayrl, alAdab ji zill bani buwayh (Cairo 1949), p. 248. Ninth and tenthcentury mujun differ, Zuhayrl observes, in that it was generally con demned in the earlier period, whereas in Buyid times it enjoyed widespread, even official, approval. See also G. E. von Grunebaum, "Aspects of Arabic Urban Literature Mostly in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries," AlAndalus, 20 (1955): 25981. 22
16
INTRODUCTION
prohibition of wine and music. Tears of repentance and fear of the Day of Judgment are recommended, not laughter and frivolity. In the words of the Prophet, "If you knew what I know you would laugh little and weep much."23 The passionate, frenzied side of life, so well expressed, say, in Greek religion, is fairly suppressed. The oxymoron of piety and frivolity ("seriousness and jest") in the same person was rather common in the Buyid age. The theologian alSharif alRadi, for instance, the marshal (:naqib) of the cAlids, edited a selection of poems by Ibn alHajjaj, master of obscenity, and mourned his death with an elegy.24 AlThacalib! deplores the hypocritical behavior of a group of cadis who were boon companions of the vizier alMuhallabl. He notes that Ibn Qurayca, Ibn Macruf, the judge alTanukhl, and others, each a venerable sheikh, join ed the vizier's soirees twice weekly. They divested themselves of their dignity and indulged in revelry and dissipation (khalaca), drinking and carousing, only to return the next morning to their sedate habit, dignity of office, and to the modest demeanor of great sheikhs.25 Abu Hayyan al Tawhldi, always on the alert for human frailty, incessantly cavils at the hypocrisy of men of piety and learning. He accuses prominent members of the circle of the theologian Abu cAbdallah alBasri of pederasty. There is independent testimony that passion for boys was regarded as a typical vice of religious dignitaries. In 350/961 the office of chief judge in Baghdad was auctioned to someone who was accused of pederasty, licen tiousness, and drinking alcoholic beverages.26 TawhidT describes how various Baghdadian worthies were propelled into states of rapture (tarab) over singing girls and boys (.Imtac, II, 165ff.). He mentions judges and other judicial functionaries, Sufis, poets, and theologians. Among those singled out is the chief judge Ibn Macruf. The 23 The hadith had wide currency among ascetic Sufis, particularly those known as "the chronic weepers" (albakka?un); A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill 1975), p. 31. The Koran disapproves of scoffing (sukhf) (49:11), and according to a popular hadith the Prophet prefers weeping to laughter; A.J. Wensinck, A Handbook of Ear ly Muhammedan Tradition (Leiden 1960), p. 250. Sober gravity and selfcontrol, expressed in the concept hilm, are commended; see Ch. Pellat, "Seriousness and Humour in Early Islam," Etudes, VIII. 24 Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat ala'yan, trans. M. de Slane (Paris and London 184271), I, 449; Mez, Renaissance, p. 259/269. 2j AlThacalibT, Yatima, II, 33637. Abu Bakr Muhammad b. cAbd alRahman b. Qurayca was a prominent judge, d. 367/977; H. Busse, Chalif und Grosskonig; Die Buyiden im Iraq (9451055) (Beirut 1969), pp. 204, note 9, and 503; alBaghdadi, Ta^rikh baghdad (Cairo 1349/1931), II, 31720, Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat, III, 93. cUbaydallah b. Ahmad b. Macruf was chief judge in Baghdad from 360/971 to 363/973; Busse, pp. 27576. Abu 1Qasim alTanukhl was the father of Abu cAli alMuhassin alTanukhl, author of Nishwar almuhadara. On the vizier Abu Muhammad alMuhallabl, who served the Buyid emir Mucizz alDawla from 345/956, see below, pp. 5455. 26 Mez, Renaissance, p. 213/223. On the pederasty practiced by religious figures, see also Zuhayri, Adab, p. 266.
INTRODUCTION
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Sufi preacher Ibn Samcun is said to have been delighted by a singer named Ibn Buhlul (Buhlul means "clown"). A certain alMucallim, the retainer (,ghulam) of alHusri, the Sheikh of the Sufis, heard this very Ibn Buhlul singing in the courtyard of a mosque after the Friday worship. The poet Ibn alHajjaj is (not surprisingly) a member of this group. (Tawhldl alludes to the poet's intimate relations with both a singing girl and her husband.) Abu cAbdallah alBasri's rapture over a singer is said to have alienated the theologian alWasitl from him. And Abu Sulayman alMantiql was enraptured by the singing of a talented youth from Mosul. The lad charmed and shamed people, ascetics and sedate, trivial and great—with his handsome looks, smile, enchanting talk, furtive glance, physique, and coquetry.27 To be sure, this coincidence of opposites—of piety and profanity, spirituality and sensuality—is hardly limited to our period, or to the Islamic milieu, as any reader of, say, Boccaccio will attest. In our period it was pronounced and played out against a background of cynicism and despair similar to that described in the Decameron. Ideal Human Types. Human ideals are projections of the fundamental aspirations of a society. Three ideal types in the Renaissance of Islam—the philosopher, the ruler, the courtier—especially concern us. The philosophers conceived of the ideal philosophical life as one of withdrawal from society. The image of the ideal philosopher was in fluenced in this regard by the portrayal of Socrates as an ascetic recluse in Arabic biographical sources, which followed (in this respect) ancient StoicCynic vitae. In a brief treatise on the philosophical life, Ibn Suwar proclaims the ideality of a serene life of retirement and repose. He counsels the philosopher to earn his livelihood as a gentleman farmer, or (as second best) to seek the protection of a prince.28 27 Abu 1Husayn b. Samcun, HanbalT preacher and mystic, died in 387/997; Brockelmann, GALS, I, 360; Sezgin, GAS, I, 667. Abu 1Husayn (Hasan) alHusri, a Sufi preacher, died in 371/981; Ibn alJawzT, al~Muntazam (Hyderabad 135758/193839), VII, 11011. On the theologian Abu cAbdallah alBasri see below, pp. 178f. On HanbalT Sufism, see G. Makdisi, "The Hanbali School and Sufism," in Adas IV Congresso de Estudos Arabes e Islamicos (Leiden 1971), pp. 7184. 28 See for example, Abu Bakr alRazT, alSira alfalsafiyya, ed. P. Kraus, Opera Philosophical Cairo 1939), pp. 97111; and "Razianal," Orientalia, N.S. 4(1935): 30034; A. J. Arberry, "Rhazes on the Philosophical Life," Asiatic Review, 45 (1949): 70313; also in Aspects of Islamic Civilization (New York 1964), pp. 12030. AlRazT gives the Cynic version of an ascetic Socrates when speaking of Socrates' early style of life. See also the in troductions to the sections on Pythagoras and Socrates in Mukhtar min kalam alhukama? al arbaca alakabir, ed. and trans. D. Gutas, pp. 63, 85. Gutas discusses (pp. 21617) the af filiation of these texts to the Siwan alhikma, where the Socrates passage appears verbatim and is ascribed to Hunayn b. Ishaq (ed. BadawT, pp. 12425). Socrates is also styled an ascetic by Ibn alNadlm, alFihrist, ed. G. Flugel (Leipzig 187172), p. 245; trans. B. Dodge, The Fihrist of alNadlm (New York and London 1970), p. 590; by alMubashshir b. Fatik, Mukhtar alhikam, p. 82; and by others. For Ibn Suwar, see below, p. 128.
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INTRODUCTION
Proximity to power was notoriously a mixed blessing, and much senti ment was directed both for and against the system of patronage. There were notable examples of philosophers and scientists refusing invitations to courts, or being dragged in, kicking and protesting, and other in stances of congenial accommodation with this world, its temptations, and compromises. The philosophers were aware of the loneliness and the risks of a life cut off from the common run of humanity. "He who swims in our sea has no shore but himself," quotes Sijistani.29 They knew that the contemplative life is inherently antisocial and consequently antagonistic to the multitude. Abu 1Hasan alcAmirI observes in this spirit that cultivating philosophy exposes its proponents to the danger of persecution and even death. The spectre of Socrates' fate was an abiding reminder. While extolling the virtues of solitude, the philosophers also appreciat ed the necessity of political organization and the indispensability of a wise and just ruler. The Aristotelian dictum, "man is naturally a political animal," was widely acclaimed. This was taken (along with certain Platonic themes) either in the sense that society is necessary to supply man's minimum requirements, or it was understood to imply that man is a gregarious creature who craves human association and friendship. The philosophers did not believe that the life of the ruler embroiled in politics was worth living. They were convinced that, in gaining this world, the sovereign lost his soul. This sentiment was expressed, for ex ample, by Sijistani and his circle on a celebrated occasion when news reached them of cAdud alDawla's death. In view of the opposing re quirements of philosophy and politics, the Platonic notion of a philosopherking was both extolled as an ideal and decried as a contradic tion in terms. When TawhldT quoted to the vizier Ibn Sacdan Plato's statement that there would be no cessation of trouble unless either philosophers became kings or rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy (.Republic 473ce; Imtac, II, 3233), the vizier objected to the formulation because, he contended, philosophy is only consummated by someone who withdraws from this world and devotes himself to the next; but a king cannot reject this world: he must govern its inhabitants, bring welfare and avert harm, and he has associates whom he must consort with and control. 29 Sijistani says that his patron Abu Jacfar b. Banuya (Banawayh), king of Sijistan, was fond of this saying, which is ascribed to Democritus (Siwan alhikma, p. 316). The aphorism is quoted in the name of Abu Sulayman (alSijzi) in the pseudoAristotelian treatise on dreaming, edited and translated by H. Gatje, in Studien zu Uberlieferung der aristotelischen Psychology im Islam (Heidelberg 1971), p. 134/135.
INTRODUCTION
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When philosophicallyminded men did engage in political life (the vizier Ibn alcAmId, for instance), they were obliged to violate their philosophical principles. The impracticability of reconciling the demands of a contemplative life with the claims of political involvement entailed a differentiation of roles. The relationship of Alexander and Aristotle became an exemplary resolution of the dilemma. The enlightened ruler and the philosophical tutor became ideal types. The AristotleAlexander model exemplified the union of theory and practice, knowledge and ac tion. The philosophers considered the ultimate aim of man to be happiness (,eudaimonialsacada). Happiness, they thought, is achieved through the perfection of virtue, preeminently by the exercise of reason. Attainment of this happiness, or perfection, was said to be something divine, as Aristotle had stated in the Nicomachean Ethics. They depicted this attain ment, in noetic terms, as the conjoining of man's (particular) intellect with the divine (universal) intellect. The end of man was conceived as being his selfrealization as a godlike being—we may say his "deifica tion." By rising above the perturbations of sense and the disquiet of the emotions to the serene realm of the intellect and the divine, the philosophical man escapes worldly anxiety (qalaq) and reaches tranquility (sakina). The life of contemplation was an exalted form of escapism. The attainment of happiness, or perfection, is an individual achieve ment. But just as philosophers affirmed the necessity for society to pro vide one's basic needs, so they celebrated friendship as a means for at taining ultimate perfection. The philosophers in our age formed fraternal circles wherein they could pursue the truth in unison, sharing knowledge and insight. An explicit ideology of friendship, reaching back to ninth century coteries, pervaded these circles, and the ancient theme of friend ship was extensively discussed. Paradoxically, philosophers often spoke of the monarch as the man most suited for ultimate happiness and perfection. He is among men the most godlike since, like the divine principle, he is engaged in governing the world. Sijistam depicts cAdud alDawla, in his treatise On the Specific Perfection of the Human Species, as the recipient of a divine effulgence, and as the perfect, divine individual whose intellect is conjoined with the cosmic intellect. The second ideal type is the ruler. Certain rulers in our period displayed the "manysidedness," or "versatility," that Burckhardt and others have detected in Renaissance man (I'uomo universale). Other men of action were simple and uncouth, lacking grace and cultural refinement. The founders of the Buyid dynasty, like other Daylami soldiers of for tune (Makan b. KakT, Mardawij aljlli, Qabus b. Washmglr), rose from
20
INTRODUCTION
the rank of condottieri to the position of local potentates. The first generation of Buyid emirs (the brothers Mucizz alDawla, Rukn al Dawla, and cImad alDawla) displayed the toughness and group solidari ty that Ibn Khaldun later discerned in founders of dynasties. By the second generation the rough edges are burnished: cAdud alDawla tempered the robustness of his forebears with subtlety and erudition. His sons were already too refined and not sufficiently vigorous to rule suc cessfully. The Buyid emirs, who were military chiefs, held the reins of govern mental power. As ruling elite, they eclipsed the secretarial class, which had played a pivotal role in society from the beginning of the cAbbasid era. But their viziers, or secretaries of state, often overshadowed them in strength of character, intellect, and administrative talent. They were the quintessential men of action and the truly versatile personalities of the era. Miskawayh portrays Abu 1Fadl b. alcAmId, in a long encomium, as a student of philosophy, with a prodigious memory for poetry, and as a gifted engineer, dexterous artist, poet, military commander, and ad ministrator. Ibn alcAmTd's son was dubbed Dhu 1Kifayatayn ('"the Doubly Competent"), with the pen and the sword. The famous vizier IsmacIl b. cAbbad—statesman, soldier, poet, theologian—was ap propriately titled Kafi alKufat ("the Supremely Competent"). These were men who could calculate taxes or lead armies by day, and recite amorous verse and discuss literary criticism in their soirees by night. They were equally proud of their literary style and their political power. The courtier occupied a middle position between the contemplative and active types. Chancellery secretary, tutor, poet, historian, the cour tier espoused the educational goals and cultural aspirations of the enlightened and the literati, while sharing in the life style of the men of power he served. His benefactors expected him to be informative and entertaining; his letters had to be sprinkled with learned allusions; his knowledge and experience of human affairs, as broad as possible. The courtier's store of information might include tidbits ranging from tradi tions of the Prophet (hadith) to gnomes of the Greek and Persian sages, historical anecdotes, belletristic passages, poetry, and gossip. TawhldT was an unsuccessful courtier—he lacked the requisite sophistication and tact—but he has done us a great service by recording courtly seances, giving us insight into the mise en scene. 4 . The Mentality of the Age
I have spoken so far of individualism, cosmopolitanism, secularism, and ideal types in tracing the physiognomy of the age, concentrating
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upon select members of society: the creative minority and the political elite. Let us consider for a moment the populace—those who set the general tenor of life. In this apergu I follow the lead of historians of the school of psychologie historique who attempt to describe the "mentalite" of a given period, i.e. its pervasive psychosociological traits. In his study of France during the ancien regime, Robert Mandrou speaks of the "characteristics which all contemporaries had in common," or "the basic features common to every mentality at the time."30 In a summary of these features, Mandrou first stresses the pre cariousness of daily life for the general population, who were chronically underfed and whose two constant companions were fear and famine. To illustrate the insecurity of life, Mandrou quotes Taine's description of the average man who lived during the period of the ancien regime: "The com mon people resemble a man walking in a lake with the water up to his mouth; the least depression in the bed of the lake, or the smallest wave, and he loses his footing, goes under, and drowns."31 The precariousness of life, living at the edge of disaster, is in fact characteristic of premodern societies, and not surprisingly witnessed in our period. In describing a famine that occurred in 334/946, during the emirate of Mucizz alDawla, Miskawayh conveys the tenuousness of life and the terrible panic that accompanied such disasters. "This year," he writes, "inflation was so high that people had no bread at all, and ate the dead, grass, carrion, and cadavers." He then describes the acts of actual cannibalism, the piling up of unburied corpses, and the flight of people on the roads where they perished from starvation crying out "hunger, hunger."32 To understand our period it is essential that we appreciate its perils and the deep feelings of insecurity caused by famine, epidemic, war, or brigandage—constant threats, sources of terror and anxiety. Widespread and chronic malnutrition, and deficient resources for con trolling a hostile environment, contributed toward a feature of the men tality of the ancien regime that Mandrou calls "hypersensitivity of tempera ment" or "emotivity." He discerns emotional extremism in the fear of darkness, wild animals, brigands, comets, eclipses, plague, disease, and famine, and in collective waves of panic during epidemics, wars, peasant R. Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France 15001640; an Essay in Historical Psychology, trans. R. E. Hallmark (London 1975), pp. 23536. 31 Mandrou, p. 13. 32 Miskawayh, Tajarib alumam — The Eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Concluding Por tion of the Experiences of Nations, ed. and trans. H. F. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth (Lon don 192021), II, 9596 (text); V, 99 (trans.). The pagination of the Arabic text is given in the body of the translation; hence references below will be to the text alone. I have modified the translation when necessary. 30
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INTRODUCTION
revolts, and urban riots.33 Lucien Febvre, father of the school oipsycho logy hisiorique, comments on the "astonishing emotional changeability' and the "quickness to anger and to embrace" of medieval men.34 Febvre quotes Johan Huizinga on "the violent and highstrung tenor of life" during the late Middle Ages. Life, says the great Dutch historian, was so violent and so contrasting that it had "the mixed smell of blood and of roses."35 Febvre speaks of the polarity of hate and clemency, and of the combination of savage cruelty with the most touching pity during the autumn of the medieval period. How can we explain these extreme reac tions? Febvre sees their cause in the severe contrasts in everyday life (night and day, darkness and light), in harsh climatic changes, and in the general insecurity of life, when fire could in no time destroy a whole village, and when famine was an incessant threat. The instability of the environment is translated on the sociopsychological level into emotional instability.36 We find in our period, on both the individual and group level, a similar hypersensitivity of temperament. Individuals (especially rulers) were capable of the tenderest affection and the most outrageous cruelty. The fickleness of benefactors toward courtiers and confidants was notorious. cAdud alDawla typifies this emotional coincidentia oppositorum in our period. He was an enlightened and cultivated monarch who punished rivals with savage fury. The viziers Ibn alcAm!d and Ibn cAbbad also combined cultural refinement with inhumane cruelty. The cruelty, to an extent, came with the job, but it was more than that. On a group level, we find waves of wild panic at times of famine, epidemic, ur ban riots, and foreign invasions. After emotivity Mandrou mentions "social antagonism" or "social aggressiveness." This antagonism or aggressiveness is the antipode of in group solidarity. Mandrou explains that social groups (parish, class, youth society) were created, to a great extent, by hostile feelings. Thus Mandrou, pp. 23637. Cf. the description of insecurity and terror, in particular at night, and the sharp contrast between day life and night life in Imperial Rome in Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, ed. H. T. Rowell, trans. E. O. Lorimer (New Haven 1940), pp. 4751. The influence of a hostile environment—wild animals, dark and cold nights, sharp physical contrasts, disasters, violence—in inducing in minds insecurity and uncouthness is also stressed by M. Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago 1961), pp. 7273. 34 Lucien Febvre, "History and Psychology," in A New Kind of History and Other Essays, ed. P. Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York 1973), pp. 89. 35 J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City 1956), p. 27. Febvre, "Sen sibility and History; How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past," in A New Kind of History, p. 16. 36 Febvre, "History and Psychology," p. 7. To be sure, emotional instability and ex tremism are hardly limited to premodern societies. In this regard, Hedrick Smith's The Russians (London 1976), especially pp. 13437, 14344, may be consulted with profit. 33
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viewed, ingroup solidarity is a defensereaction to external threat: the group closed ranks against the outsider.37 In our period social, religious, and ideological antagonisms were notoriously intense. The city of Baghdad was riven by clashes of rival fac tions—Sunnls and ShIcIs, Turkish and DaylamI troops, the Bab alBasra and the Karkh quarters—and by dissension between hostile theological schools (Ba Hashimiyya and Ikhshldiyya), disputes between theologians and philosophers, and between theologians and jurists, debates between devotees of the ancient sciences and the Arab sciences, contests between grammarians and philologists, and so on. Urban antagonisms embroiling Sunnls and ShIcIs, Turks and Daylamls, rival quarters, and local vigil antes were so out of hand that when a Byzantine army invaded Northern Mesopotamia in 972, threatening the capital itself, the Muslim reaction was panic, mutual recrimination, and civil strife rather than closing ranks against the outsider. The cohesion of Muslims did not suffice to outweigh subgroup antagonism.38 Abu Hayyan alTawhldl censures the Mutakallimun in particular for their clannish fanaticism and contentiousness, but he also cites other in stances of antagonism concerning issues both grave and slight. He cites the ongoing debate between Basrians and Baghdadians concerning the relative merits of their towns, and the fanatical devotion of claques among Baghdad residents to either of two champion couriers—Marcush and Fadl: one a ShIcI, the other a SunnI, they were couriers in the time of Mucizz alDawla who competed in bringing mail between Baghdad and Isfahan. TawhidI relates an amusing anecdote in this connection concer ning the judge Ibn Macruf. While once passing through a certain neighborhood, a local fanatic, grasping the reins of his mule, queried whether he was a fan of Marcush or of Fadl. Assessing his peril, he prudently asked his retainer to tell him whose territory they were in so that he could give an appropriately safe answer. TawhidI catalogues idle controversies elsewhere, citing Abu Muhammad alNubatl on the folly and dementia of disputes among secretaries, judges, notaries, and weightlifters, stripped lads who claimed chivalry (futuwwa), calling it jawamardiyya, and also the BasraBaghdad controversy, the FadlMarcush rivalry, and debates over the merits of poets.39 Mandrou, pp. 23739. See also Jvlottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership, pp. 15867, et passim, on factions bound essentially by "negative loyalties." 39 On Marcush and Fadl, see, for example, Ibn alAthlr, alKamilfi lta\ikh, ed. C. J. Tornberg (Leiden 185176), VIII, 425. Busse, Chalif und Grosskonig, p. 406, notes that Sunn! Fadliyyun and Shfl Marcushiyyun parties existed as far afield as Ahwaz and Ramhurmuz in Khuzistan. See also Mottahedeh, p. 160 .Jawamardiyya (