Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325 brill.com/ihiw
Graeco-Arabic Studies in Classical Near Eastern Studies: An Emerging Field of Training in Its Broader Institutional Context Kevin van Bladel The Ohio State University
[email protected]
Abstract This brief prospectus addresses the potential and need to realize the full growth of Graeco-Arabic Studies as a field of training and as a part of a broad and inclusive Classical Near Eastern Studies integrating several fields usually construed as separate.
Keywords Classical Near East – Graeco-Arabic Studies – Islamic studies – classical studies – late antiquity – Christian Orient – Byzantium – ancient Iran
Graeco-Arabic Studies have focused predominantly on the translations from ancient Greek into Arabic made in Baghdad from the late eighth century to the early eleventh century. This is the area in which the two classical languages interact most conspicuously in all of our extant sources. Specialists in this area have also devoted much attention to the reception and reinterpretation of ancient Greek texts by philosophers and scientists writing in Arabic, particularly al-Kindī (d. ca. 873), al-Fārābī (d. 950), Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037), Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1039), al-Bīrūnī (fl. 1000–1050), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), who themselves provide much of the evidence about the translated texts and their reception. Scholars working in this field have paid greatest attention to secular texts in philosophy, medicine, and the sciences, which constituted a great bulk of these translations and were the object of the philosophers and scientists just mentioned. Their importance for the histories of philosophy, science, and medicine cannot be overstated, and these special histories have
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/2212943X-00301012
graeco-arabic studies in classical near eastern studies
317
accordingly been the greatest beneficiaries of Graeco-Arabic studies. From detailed investigations of how each word was rendered from one language to another, remarkable gains have been made also in the elucidation of both languages as languages and of the technical vocabulary of both, although scholars of Greek and of Arabic in general have not taken advantage of these gains to the fullest. A relatively recent development in Graeco-Arabic Studies has been to take the social contexts of the translations into account in a meaningful way, seeking to explain why they were made, for whom, according to what demands, and with what ramifications. In other words, Graeco-Arabic Studies are now being integrated into histories of the Middle East in general. The gradual but steady growth of the scope of this area of investigation prompts a look toward the horizons and an attempt to discern how far Graeco-Arabic Studies extend and what they can contribute. In this brief prospectus I wish to address the potential and need for the realization of the full scope of Graeco-Arabic Studies.1 Fundamentally Graeco-Arabic Studies require a certain set of skills among its students, who need foremost to be able to read and understand both ancient Greek and classical Arabic, both languages known for the difficulty that they pose to their learners. It can take some years of constant study to acquire the ability to read either one of them with the precision necessary to conduct scholarship. Of course, knowing the two languages is not enough. Because so much of the primary textual material has not been addressed in publications, scholars who study the Arabic translations of ancient Greek works need to be philologists, like all serious Arabic specialists studying pre-modern texts and like the ideal classical scholar as well. They must also be able to read unedited manuscripts and should be able to edit texts according to a sound method. To be meaningful, Graeco-Arabic Studies furthermore need students who become able historians, who understand not only the histories of philosophy, medicine, and science, but also of Islam and the Arab conquest and its aftermath, as well as pre-Islamic antiquity and the sources of the ancient works transmitted. There are few institutional programs of study in existence where one can find training in all of these subjects, and perhaps none which supports students long enough for all these attainments. This is due not only to the inherent 1 The limited bibliographical notes to this essay are intended as merely exemplary, with select references mostly to recent scholarship. For introductions to Graeco-Arabic studies as construed until the end of the twentieth century, see Rosenthal, Classical Heritage; Endress, “Wissenschaftliche Literatur.” For studies of the language of the translation see Endress and Gutas, Greek-Arabic Lexicon; Ullmann, Wörterbuch. For the social context, see Gutas, Greek Thought. I thank Dimitri Gutas for his helpful suggestions in my presentation of the argument here.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
318
van bladel
difficulty in the materials, but also to the division of Greek and Arabic studies into separate academic departments, a phenomenon tied up with the history of the modern research university. The divergence of interests between the two departments exacerbates this further. Scholars of Greek have focused overwhelmingly on ancient Athens in the period of its power and on texts antedating Roman domination. With respect to genre they have concentrated on literary texts, such as poetry, drama, and narrative historiography. These are texts of the sort not translated into Arabic until modern times, with the recent Arabic reception of modern classical studies.2 Arabists, for their part, have focused overwhelmingly on Islam and Islamic texts, and practically treat the advent of Islam as a new beginning in history. The goal of explaining Islam as such has tied Arabic studies very closely to the study of religion, a subject often given its own university department. These two fields, classical and Arabic studies, therefore do not communicate as much as they could with benefit, and their curricula leave a gap of several centuries mostly unaccounted for between them. It must be admitted that scholars of Islam have done more with the results of Graeco-Arabic Studies than Hellenists have, no doubt because the stakes are more apparent: Islamic doctrine developed concurrently with Arabic discussions of and debates about ancient Greek science, philosophy, and medicine, and the philosophical views conveyed in the translations had to be addressed by Muslim theologians. By contrast, the Arabic translations seem less relevant to ancient Greek, although this is a mistake, given the importance of the Arabic translations in preserving early witnesses to Greek texts in translation as well as Greek texts lost in their original language. It has been said correctly that Arabic is more important than Latin for modern scholarship on ancient Greek science, philosophy, and medicine.3 A third field of study has developed in recent decades, however, which interacts with both fields and which increasingly fills the gap between them, but which is not organized in universities as belonging to distinct departments. This is the study of late antiquity. Although scholars of late antiquity, being trained and employed in departments of history more than in departments of Classics, have focused overwhelmingly on cultural history, and largely not on philological or specifically textual studies, the products of their research do much to bridge classical Greek studies and the study of early Islam through
2 On the modern Arabic reception of European classical studies, see Pormann’s contribution to this journal issue. 3 Cf. Gutas, “Sayings by Diogenes,” p. 480.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
graeco-arabic studies in classical near eastern studies
319
the medium of Arabic. This is despite a long, fruitless, and needless debate over the chronological and geographical scope of late antiquity (such as, When did late antiquity begin? When did it end? Does it include the Arab conquest? Does it include Sasanian Iran?),4 in which scholars should rather let the questions investigated and topics pursued determine meaningful periods and limits, if any are to be recognized. It appears, however, to be accepted increasingly among specialists in this area that the modern narrative of late antiquity reaches an unmeaningful dead end without integrating the Arabic sources.5 This is correct. At the time of this writing, it is in the midst of these three groups that the relatively small number of scholars of Graeco-Arabic Studies subsist: alongside the classical Hellenists focusing mostly on literary texts and whose concerns generally are reserved for early centuries, the Arabists focusing on Islam and its ramifications, looking forward to the modern Middle East, and the historians of late antiquity focusing on culture not philology. For the most part GraecoArabic Studies perch with the Arabists, as with the present journal issue, but Graeco-Arabic Studies cannot do without the other two areas. Its students require training in all three of them, even if they cannot benefit entirely from all of them. It is a mutual relationship. Among the scholars in these three fields, however, students of Graeco-Arabic studies have the potential to make major contributions to all areas that reach far beyond the study of the translations from Greek into Arabic. This is by virtue of their training. The skills needed and the wide range of difficult topics with which one must be familiar before making meaningful sense of those decisively important translations can be applied to other important historical and philological problems once one is equipped with other, complementary skills. Instead of taking a retrospective view in summarizing the state of Graeco-Arabic Studies, to illustrate what remains to be done within the field of those translations (and it is enormous in scope, as other contributions in this volume indicate), I wish to indicate what other projects one can carry out with a researcher’s level of ability in both Greek and Arabic. This immediately points to new horizons for Graeco-Arabic Studies as a field of training and reveals its potential for more vigorous institutional subsistence through natural alliances with other fields normally construed as neighboring but separate while having much in common. 4 E.g., Ando, “Decline;” James, “Rise;” Marcone, “Long Late Antiquity?”; Morony, “Sasanian Iran;” Pourshariati, “Introduction.” 5 E.g., Hoyland, “Early Islam”; Fowden, First Millennium. Two major overviews of the study of Late Antiquity have appeared recently: Rousseau, Companion; Johnson, Oxford Handbook.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
320
van bladel
Scholars who are equipped both with classical Greek and Arabic are able to make new contributions to all three fields already addressed. For Arabic and Islamic studies strictly speaking, it is no exaggeration to say that classical Arabic learning and Islamic thought (in the strict sense) cannot be understood without taking into account the translations from ancient Greek. Even the language—style, syntax, and lexicon—of classical Arabic learning was shaped by the refined jargon of the translations, which attempted to render the nuances of the original Greek texts. For classical Greek studies, the value of the Arabic translations for preserving ancient Greek thought has already been mentioned. This goes beyond the obvious and indispensable benefit of preserving otherwise lost texts and providing important early witnesses to troubled ancient textual traditions.6 The Arabic translations represent a selection of ancient texts for preservation conditioned by historical circumstances and social needs rather different from those active in Western Europe. The difference in receptions should demonstrate how specifically conditioned the European reception of ancient Greek learning has been, and it thus has the potential to provide major insights into the constitution of classical studies as a field. The translations of ancient Greek texts into Arabic embody a parallel phenomenon of reception in the non-European half of the former Roman Empire. For scholars of late antiquity, who already know Greek, it is quite clear by now that Arabic sources have the potential to illustrate decisively the arguments they make about change and continuity in the period of their concern. There are at least three other areas in which a training in Graeco-Arabic Studies will have an indispensable utility and that become allies by virtue of this. One of these is Byzantine Studies. It is becoming increasingly evident that to understand Byzantine society and its state, one must understand its interregional context. Arabic-speaking peoples dominated Byzantium’s international relations from the seventh century onward. Byzantinists also have much to gain still furthermore in the neglected study of the Byzantine Greek reception of Arabic texts in translation, which may turn out to be more substantial than anyone has expected. This area of investigation is still in its infancy.7
6 For a recent example of a text preserved fully only in Arabic, see Swain, Seeing the Face. For a milestone in the demonstration of the application of an Arabic witness to a Greek textual tradition, see Gutas and Tarán, Poetics. 7 Examples of pioneering studies on the Byzantine reception of contemporary Arabic texts and culture include Condylis-Bassoukos, Stéphanites kai Ichnélatès, and Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book. For a survey of the Arabic-Greek translations in Byzantium see Gutas, “Arabic into Byzantine Greek.” El Cheikh, Byzantium, studies the Arab view of Byzantium as it changed over several centuries.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
graeco-arabic studies in classical near eastern studies
321
Second, the study of Oriental or Eastern Christianities, an established but perhaps minimally enfranchised scholarly enterprise, likewise requires the ancient Greek of late antiquity along with Arabic. Not only does the vast quantity of Christian Arabic texts exceed those in Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Old Nubian, or Syriac, but also the number of Christian Arabic texts to have received scholarly attention is smaller than for most of these others. Thus Arabic presents the most unexplored frontier and least tapped resource for the study of Christianity in the Near East, neglected perhaps because of the normal association of Arabic with Islam.8 Training in Greek and Arabic therefore represents the soundest investment for the student of these fields, complemented again by other sorts of study. The study of Christian texts translated between Greek and Arabic will, as they become clearer through studies like some of those in the present volume, provide an important complement for our understanding of the philosophical, scientific, and other secular texts from Greek into Arabic. Third, the study of ancient Iran holds quite natural but perhaps unexpected connections for Graeco-Arabic Studies. This is because the most extensively attested corpora of textual primary source material concerning ancient Iran are in Greek and Arabic. Greeks in one case, in the fourth century bc, and Arabs in another, in the seventh century, dominated and colonized Iran, overturning two different Persian empires and superimposing their own. As a result of the literary production fostered in the wake of these conquests, and the fortune of the survival of the texts, the two languages of the conquerors give access to more source information about ancient Iran than any other. It is a commonplace today for specialists in ancient Iran to attempt to present an “Iranian point of view” in their narration, reacting to the mistakes made by earlier historians who presented Iran and narrated its history only from a Greek or Arab perspective, but fundamentally their plea for a “more Iranian” perspective is naïve. It is a mistake to approach a historical problem while projecting modern national sentiments and ethnic distinctions over the issues, and to prefer sources on that basis rather than on the basis of a source-critical approach. Indeed it is an error of method to exclude any sources relevant to a problem, regardless of origin. Nobody can ever write a fair account of ancient Iran without Greek sources, because they are indispensable for the periods of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid and Sasanid dynasties. The same can be said for the early history of Zoroastrianism. All historians who make the complaint just described do in fact themselves necessarily make use of Greek sources,
8 See the contributions of Binggeli and Treiger in the present volume.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
322
van bladel
revealing the insubstantiality of the complaint.9 As for Arabic sources and their application to ancient Iran, the study of Sasanian Iran was practically founded on the Arabic narrative of aṭ-Ṭabarī in Nöldeke’s edition and translation.10 Of course, Arabic sources have been and remain indispensable for understanding Iranian history and culture after the Arab conquest, but Arabic is also necessary for understanding pre-Islamic Sasanian literature, much of which survives in Arabic translation, neglected by specialists in Iran. With respect to this last point, translations from Middle Persian and other Iranian languages into Arabic have much in common with, and share a history with, those made from Greek. In this domain, then, Graeco-Arabic Studies and Iranian Studies are especially close kin, just as they are also in the early New Persian reception of ancient Greek learning in Khurāsān, which came by way of Arabic, beginning in the tenth century. The same sorts of linguistic, philological, and historical skills required for Graeco-Arabic Studies, when complemented by Iranian topics including Old and Middle Iranian philology rather than the study of the philosophical and scientific topics that have predominated, provide excellent preparation for the study of ancient Iran. All of these areas are in a sense open to scholars with the same sort of training. This is not to say that training in Graeco-Arabic Studies, as hitherto construed, is by itself sufficient for investigating these differently configured areas of research. It is rather that all of them require more scholars with an advanced training in Greek and Arabic together and the attendant philological topics, and with a solid grounding in the history of “late antiquity” in its long chronology (third to eighth century or even first millennium), in addition to the other special skills they will need for each area. Thus the combination of Greek and Arabic, the two most extensively attested classical languages of the Near East after Alexander, provides common ground for several important fields of scholarship all of which have much to gain from one another. The potential in any institution capable of fostering a
9
10
E.g., Daryaee, Sasanian Iran, pp. xiii–xvii; Pourshariati, “Introduction,” p. 5 n. 10, p. 6. Dignas and Winter, Rome and Persia, pp. 1–3, feel the need to forestall charges of eurocentrism in their use of Roman sources on Sasanian Iran. By contrast Waters (Ancient Persia, p. 219) recognizes that “the unavoidable reliance on ancient Greek sources is not entirely negative” in dealing with the Achaemenid period. Strootman (“The Seleukid Empire”) rightly points out that the Seleukids are mistakenly treated as “proto-Europeans alien to the Near East” by both classical scholars and orientalists. All these sorts of remarks illustrate the currently ambient sentiment that an authentic Persian narrative, purified of “Western perspectives” or “Islamic perspectives” based on Greek and Arabic sources, is possible. Nöldeke, Geschichte.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
graeco-arabic studies in classical near eastern studies
323
curriculum in Greek and Arabic together should therefore be evident. It could open new avenues for scholarship, sustain research in any of these areas, and unite them in their common interests, enhancing communication between scholars in these perhaps unwittingly cognate fields. There remains the problem of how to realize this beneficial alliance of fields united by the training of scholars in Greek and Arabic together along with the required complementary skills and methods. An institutional base is necessary. In the American academic setting in which I write this, it seems possible only if a university should retain simultaneously three or more experts in the complementary areas just discussed, who are willing to develop a shared curriculum and have a favorably disposed administration ready to provide the means for their reorganization or collaboration and the allocation of funds for adequately prepared graduate students to join them. Otherwise, some departments of Classics or Near Eastern Studies may see the opportunity to participate in these advances and broaden and modify their missions accordingly. It is perhaps not too much to wish for such means to bring Graeco-Arabic Studies to their maximum scope as a field arising from the potential inherent in the training it entails. In any case, scholars should seek ways to collaborate along these lines. Greek and Arabic together, with their extensive and rich corpora of texts, have the potential to serve as the foundation for an encompassing field which goes beyond the translations from Greek into Arabic but looks at all of the uses to which research in both can be applied. The study of classical Greek and Arabic, late antique history and society, eastern Christianity and and Islam and their literary traditions, Byzantium, and ancient and medieval Iran are linked potentially through this field of training into something greater, which, for lack of a better name, one may call Classical Near Eastern Studies.11
Bibliography Ando, Clifford, “Decline, Fall, and Transformation,” Journal of Late Antiquity 1.1 (2008), pp. 31–60. Condylis-Bassoukos, Stéphanites kai Ichnélatès, traduction grecque (xie siècle) du livre Kalīla wa-Dimna d’Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (viiie siècle). Étude lexicologique et littéraire, Louvain: Peeters, 1997. Daryaee, Touraj, Sasanian Iran (224–651ce): Portrait of a Late Antique Empire, Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2008. 11
For the field encompassed by Graeco-Arabic studies see also the contributions by Gutas in the present volume.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
324
van bladel
Dignas, Beate, and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbors and Rivals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. El Cheikh, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, Cambridge, ma: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2004. Endress, Gerhard, “Die wissenschaftliche Literatur,” in: Grundriss der Arabischen Philologie, Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1987–1992, [vol. 1: Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer; vol. 2: Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Helmut Gätje; vol. 3: Supplement, ed. W. Fischer, 1992], vol. 2, pp. 400–506 and vol. 3, pp. 3–152, 1987–1992. Endress, Gerhard, Dimitri Gutas, and Rüdiger Arnzen, A Greek-Arabic Lexicon (GALex), Leiden: Brill, 1992–. Fowden, Garth, Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Gutas, Dimitri, “Arabic into Byzantine Greek: Introducing a Survey of the Translations,” in: Knotenpunkt Byzanz. Wissensformen und kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen, eds. Andreas Speer and Philipp Steinkrüger, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012, pp. 246–262. Gutas, Dimtri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries), London: Routledge, 1998. Gutas, Dimitri, “Sayings by Diogenes Preserved in Arabic,” in: Le cynisme ancien et ses prolongements, eds. M.-O. Goulet-Cazé and R. Goulet, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993, pp. 475–518 [repr. in Dimitri Gutas, Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, no. ii]. Gutas, Dimitri, and Leonardo Tarán (eds.), Aristotle: Poetics, editio maior of the Greek Text with Historical Introductions and Philological Commentaries, Leiden: Brill, 2012. Hoyland, Robert, “Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion,” in: Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott F. Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 1053–1077. James, Edward, “The Rise and Function of the Concept ‘Late Antiquity,’” Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), pp. 20–30. Johnson, Scott F. (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Marcone, Arnaldo, “A Long Late Antiquity?: Considerations on a Controversial Problem,” Journal of Late Antiquity 1.1 (2008), pp. 4–19. Mavroudi, Maria, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: the Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources, Leiden: Brill, 2002. Morony, Michael, “Should Sasanian Iran Be Included in Late Antiquity?” Sasanika Occasional Papers 1, 2008. Nöldeke, Theodor, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden, Leiden: Brill, 1879. Pourshariati, Parvaneh, “Introduction: Further Engaging the Paradigm of Late Antiquity,” Journal of Persianate Studies 6 (2013), pp. 1–14.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
graeco-arabic studies in classical near eastern studies
325
Rosenthal, Franz, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. Emile and Jenny Marmorstein, London: Routledge, 1975. Rousseau, Philip (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Strootman, Rolf, “The Seleukid Empire between Orientalism and Hellenocentrism: Writing the History of Iran in the Third and Second Centuries bce,” Nāme-ye Irān-e Bāstān 11/12 (2011–2012), pp. 17–35. Swain, Simon (ed.), Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ullmann, Manfred, Wörterbuch zu den griechisch-arabischen Übersetzungen des 9. Jahrhunderts, 3 vols., Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002–2007. Waters, Matt, Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550–330bce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015) 316–325
