About the Work
Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas is a scholarly Festschrift edited by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman, published by Brill in Leiden and Boston. It appears as volume LXXXIII in the series Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Text and Studies, whose editors are Hans Daiber, Anna Akasoy, and Emilie Savage-Smith. The volume carries a copyright date of 2012 under Koninklijke Brill NV, is printed on acid-free paper, and bears both a hardback and an electronic ISBN alongside the series ISSN. Its cover reproduces a photograph of the All Gizah Pyramids taken in June 2006 at Nazlat as Samman in al-Jizah, Egypt, by Ricardo Liberato—an image that quietly echoes the birthplace of the scholar the book honors. Library of Congress cataloging places the work under the classification B741, with subject headings covering Islamic philosophy, Islamic philosophy’s Greek influences, science in Islamic countries, and Islamic civilization.
“The rule here is that if a possible is supposed to exist ( anna l-mumkina ida furida mawgudan), there comes to be a mix of an absolute and a necessary.”
The book is a collection of independent research contributions rather than a single continuous argument. Its essays range across philology, the history of science, philosophy, theology, and literary studies, and they are written by specialists for specialists. The volume opens with a dedication signed by the two editors, and it closes with an index. Between those covers, the reader encounters close textual work on Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, Persian, and Latin sources, along with historiographical reflections on how the field of Islamic studies has been shaped by inherited categories. The book is, in short, a representative specimen of early twenty-first-century scholarship on the classical and post-classical Islamic world, and it is also a portrait of a scholarly community gathered around a teacher.
Context
The occasion for the volume is the career of Dimitri Gutas, and the dedication makes that occasion explicit. Signed by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman, it describes Gutas as an adib in the classical sense—a person of Bildung, embodying the cultural and educational ideals of his community. He was born in Giza, in the shadow of the pyramids, raised in the Eastern Mediterranean, and eventually went to the United States in his search for knowledge. The dedication praises his erudition, his philosophical and philological questing, and the breadth and depth of his scholarship. It presents him as a generous sharer of adab, an educator of countless generations of students, and a demanding yet didactically masterful teacher who always adds a final piece of information connecting facts and influences. His Bildung, the editors note, extends beyond his profession: with his wife Ioanna he opens his home to friend and stranger alike, receiving each in their native language and cultural etiquette. The dedication closes on a note of loss, recording that David Reisman died in London in January 2011 before the project was completed, and that the book also testifies to his scholarship.
That double dedication situates the volume in a particular moment. The essays were assembled in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the ensuing “War on Terror,” a period in which public debate about “Islam and Science” intensified sharply. As one contributor observes, defenders of a glorious Islamic scientific past and deniers of any link between Islam and science populated the Internet, most of them lacking direct knowledge of historical works or scientific content. The volume’s scholarly mode—patient, source-critical, resistant to grand narrative—stands in deliberate contrast to that polemical atmosphere. At the same time, the book participates in a longer disciplinary conversation about how the history of Islamic philosophy and science should be written, a conversation that had been running for decades and that the volume’s contributors both inherit and push forward.
Structure of the Book
The table of contents divides the volume into three parts. Part I, “The Classical Heritage: Islamic Culture,” gathers essays on the transmission and transformation of Greek learning within Islamic and Christian Arabic milieus. Hans Daiber writes on the Christian scholar ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Fadl from Antiochia in the eleventh century as a transmitter of Greek works. William W. Fortenbaugh examines Aristo of Ceus and the fragments concerning eros. David C. Reisman treats professional medical ethics from a foreign past. Kevin van Bladel reconstructs the Arabic history of science of Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht, active around 770 to 809, and its Middle Persian sources. Heinrich von Staden analyzes the physiology and therapy of anger in Galen. Beatrice Gruendler studies al-Hatimi’s epistle on al-Mutanabbi and Aristotle. Sonja Brentjes interrogates “the prison of categories” and “decline.” Hidemi Takahashi examines manuscripts Yale Syriac 7–12.
Part II, “Classical Arabic Science and Philosophy,” turns to the Arabic philosophical and scientific tradition proper. Charles Burnett and Gideon Bohak present a Judaeo-Arabic version of Tabit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Opus imaginum. Jules Janssens examines Ibn Sina’s Taliqat. David A. King investigates the invention of algebra in Zabid. Tony Street considers medieval and modern interpretations of Avicenna’s modal syllogistic. Amos Bertolacci analyzes the distinction of essence and existence in Avicenna’s metaphysics. Gerhard Endress treats al-Kindi as epistolographer. Robert Wisnovsky discusses new philosophical texts of Yahya ibn ‘Adi. Alexander Treiger examines Avicenna’s notion of transcendental modulation of existence.
Part III, “Muslim Traditional Sciences,” addresses the religious disciplines and their intersections with philosophy. Suleiman A. Mourad studies Qur’anic hermeneutics in Mu’tazila discourse as reflected in the Tahdib of al-Hakim al-Gisumi, who died in 494/1101. Felicitas Opwis examines attributing causality to God’s law in Fahr ad-Din ar-Razi. Racha El Omari considers Kitab al-Hayda as an apocryphal text. Yahya Michot traces Ibn Taymiyya’s historiography of falsafa from al-Ma’mun to Ibn Sab’in via Avicenna. The volume ends with an index.
The three-part arrangement is not merely thematic. It moves from the cultural and institutional conditions under which Greek learning entered Arabic, through the philosophical and scientific achievements of the classical Arabic tradition, to the traditional religious sciences that both absorbed and contested that inheritance. The arc is thus from transmission, to elaboration, to reception and critique—a shape that mirrors the volume’s governing scholarly interest in how knowledge travels, changes hands, and is reclassified.
Inside the Book
The Volume and Its Architecture
The book opens as a Festschrift in honour of Dimitri Gutas, edited by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman and issued by Brill in Leiden and Boston in 2012, as the eighty-third volume of the series Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science. Its cover carries a photograph of the Giza pyramids taken in 2006, and its cataloguing places it among works on Islamic philosophy, its Greek influences, science in Islamic countries, and Islamic civilization. The table of contents arranges the contributions in three movements. The first, on the classical heritage within Islamic culture, gathers essays on the Christian translator ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Fadl of Antioch, Aristo of Ceus on eros, professional medical ethics, Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht’s Arabic history of science and its Middle Persian sources, Galen on the physiology and therapy of anger, al-Hatimi’s epistle linking al-Mutanabbi with Aristotle, the “prison of categories,” and Yale Syriac manuscripts. The second, on classical Arabic science and philosophy, ranges from a Judaeo-Arabic version of Tabit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus to Ibn Sina’s Taliqat, the invention of algebra in Zabid, Avicennan modal syllogistic, the distinction of essence and existence, al-Kindi as epistolographer, new texts of Yahya ibn ‘Adi, and the transcendental modulation of existence. The third, on the Muslim traditional sciences, treats Mu’tazilite Qur’anic hermeneutics, causality and God’s law in Fahr ad-Din ar-Razi, the apocryphal Kitab al-Hayda, and Ibn Taymiyya’s historiography of falsafa. An index closes the volume.
The Dedication to Dimitri Gutas
The dedication, signed by both editors, portrays Gutas as an adib in the classical sense — a person of Bildung embodying his community’s cultural and educational ideals. Born in Giza in the shadow of the pyramids, raised in the Eastern Mediterranean, he went to the United States in search of knowledge. The editors praise his erudition, his philosophical and philological questing, and a scholarship at once broad and seminal; they describe him as a generous sharer of adab and a demanding yet didactically masterful teacher who always adds a final piece of information connecting facts and influences. His Bildung, they note, extends beyond the profession: with his wife Ioanna he opens his home to friend and stranger alike, receiving each in their native language and etiquette. The dedication closes by recording that David Reisman died in London in January 2011, before the project was finished, and that the book also stands as testimony to his scholarship.
Hans Daiber on Christian Transmitters of Greek Science
The first contribution, opening the section on the classical heritage, argues that Christian scholars played a decisive role in carrying Greek science to the Arabs — as translators, commentators, and authors of monographs built on Greek works — a role documented in Graf’s Geschichte der christlich-arabischen Literatur and Nasrallah’s history of the Melkite Church’s literary movement. Both historians attend to the prolific Melkite scholar Abu l-Fath ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki, a deacon of Antioch whose grandfather became bishop after his wife’s death. Nothing is known of Ibn al-Fadl’s life beyond two works dated 1052; Graf places part of his output in the mid-eleventh century, while Nasrallah holds that he died at the end of that century.
Fortenbaugh on Aristo of Ceus and Eros
William Fortenbaugh’s essay turns to the fragments on eros. A report is awkwardly written because the verb phesi appears twice in close succession: first with Clearchus as subject, then apparently returning to Aristo, who says that Lycophronides spoke verses tying beauty to modesty. Meineke deleted the second phesin, and Gulick’s Loeb translation behaves as if he had, but Fortenbaugh prefers not to emend: on his reading Aristo referred to Clearchus and quoted Lycophronides, who joined beauty with a countenance showing aidos. Both Peripatetics then stand in good company, since Aristotle said lovers look to the eyes, where modesty dwells. Footnotes distinguish character from emotion — the face expresses emotions but less clearly character — and suggest “eyes” is used inclusively for the brows and the area between them.
In the Life of Aristides, Plutarch describes the rivalry between Aristides and Themistocles. Citing “some people,” he says the two were raised together and competed in deed and word, their philonikia early revealing different phuseis: Themistocles cool, daring, unscrupulous, quick to action; Aristides steady, intent on justice, refusing falsehood and deceit even at play. Plutarch then cites Aristo the Cean, without naming a work, for the claim that their enmity began in eros: both loved the beautiful youth Stesilaus, were immoderate in passion, and carried their erotic rivalry into politics. Fortenbaugh resists treating the two segments as a unit, since they are clearly distinguished and fit poorly together — the first shows Aristides steady, the second immoderately passionate, with the later rivalry explained by training rather than nature.
Van Bladel on Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht’s History of Science
Kevin van Bladel’s study concerns Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht’s account in the Kitab at-Tuhmagan, preserved in an-Nadim’s Fihrist. He argues the title should be read as tohmagan, a rendering of Greek genethlialogy, the astrological science of nativities, and traces the word to Middle Persian tohm, “seed, stock, lineage.” Abu Sahl was an astrologer of the early ‘Abbasid court, son of Nawbaht, who helped cast Baghdad’s foundation horoscope in 762; he succeeded his father by 775 and later served Harun ar-Rasid in the khizanat al-hikma, and an-Nadim credits him with seven titles and calls him a translator from Persian. His account tells of the loss and recovery of learning in three phases: the primordial age of Gam and ad-Dahhak, when sciences multiplied and ad-Dahhak gathered scholars into a city of twelve palaces for the zodiacal signs; Alexander’s depredations, when he killed Dara, ruined the towers, copied the libraries of Istahr into Romaean and Egyptian tongues, and burned what was written in Persian; and the Sasanid restorations.
Harmonizing Foreign Learning with the Avesta
The Middle Persian phrases behind Abu Sahl’s paraphrase describe Sabuhr either adding texts to the Avesta or collating them with it; both readings are problematic, but Abu Sahl says the king “harmonized” books that had been at variance. The verb allafa, collocated with gama’a, “to bring together,” recurs for Ardasir’s unification of the kingdom and Kisra’s gathering of books, so that Ardasir and Sabur unite and harmonize their realm politically and doctrinally. Abu Sahl’s source shows the books conflicted with Zoroastrian scripture, and the phrase “to measure against” the Avesta means foreign learning was accepted only where it did not conflict with scripture — a reference he omitted as inappropriate for his Muslim audience. The “correct copy”
Galen on Anger: Activity and Passion
Heinrich von Staden’s reading of Galen opens the segment by unpacking a distinction that runs through the whole Galenic account of the emotions. Galen uses energeia and pathos in two different senses. In the first, an energeia is the activity of whatever undergoes the pathos: cutting something is at once the cutter’s activity and the cut object’s passion, the two necessarily joined in one underlying thing. In Galen’s Platonizing soul, anger is an activity of the affective or “spirited” part, but a passion of the other two parts and of the whole body when anger forcibly drives it to act. In the second sense, an energeia is a motion in accordance with nature and a pathos one contrary to it—nature here meaning what nature seeks as an end, not what merely follows from something else. Pulsation is natural, palpitation contrary to nature, though both arise in the heart; and a pulse that is too slow, fast, short, or long is a pathos even while remaining an activity of the heart.
Anger, then, is always an activity of the spirited part, but insofar as it is runaway and immoderate it is not a natural activity but a contrary-to-nature passion, its motion resembling a great abnormal pulse in the arteries. Because the whole body-soul complex is carried away by it, anger is a passion in both senses. Galen nonetheless classifies anger among the external causes of disease, listing it alongside food and drink and every kind of motion as a pathos psychikon that disturbs those who grow angry, frightened, or anxious. The puzzle—how something originating within the body-soul complex can count as external—is resolved through Galen’s polemic against Erasistratus and his followers, especially in On antecedent causes, where he insists that ill-advised exposure to heat and cold can contribute to fever, against their claim that disease arises only through internal processes such as plethora.
The Triad of Causes and the Six Non-Naturals
Galen’s answer lies in his adaptation of the triad of antecedent, preceding, and containing causes. Antecedent causes are external and precede their effects without being sufficient for them; preceding causes are the internal effects of those external antecedents; containing causes are co-temporal with the effects that vary along with them. This lets Galen describe sequences in which external and internal factors matter without necessitating disease, while the containing internal cause does. Anger, though it has internal somatic roots, is causally external and antecedent to disease, since it produces an internal physical change that can become a preceding cause. Galen groups anger among the six things that necessarily alter the body—ambient air; motion and rest; sleep and wakefulness; food and drink; evacuation and retention; and the affects of the soul—the precursor of the later “non-naturals.” He further distinguishes natural, non-natural, and contrary-to-nature causes of pulse change: temperament, gender, age, sleep habits, and seasons are natural; moderate exercise, baths, and appropriate food and drink are non-natural; and excesses of either turn them into contrary-to-nature causes that either dissipate the vital faculty or compress and burden it. Such causes, he says, cannot all be enumerated, since their multitude is unlimited in quantity and kind.
Al-Mutanabbi and the Philosopher
Beatrice Gruendler’s study turns from medicine to poetry, asking how the great philosopher came to corroborate al-Mutanabbi’s gnomic verse. The maxims themselves are stoic in temper: if there is no escape from death, cowardice is mere weakness; fearing adversity before life ends is softness of character. Arabic poetic tradition had long stood apart from philosophy—al-Buhturi faulted Ibn ar-Rumi for spoiling poetry with logic—yet Aristotle entered the canon of exemplary figures in Abbasid verse. Ibn ar-Rumi mocked a scribe whose son was preoccupied with Aristotle’s tales; al-Mutanabbi praised his patron Ibn al-‘Amid as “Aristotle” and “Rastalis.” Versified prose gained importance with fourth/tenth-century epistolary writing, and writers from al-Mubarrad to Ibn Tabataba traced gnomic verses back to the philosopher, al-Hatimi tracing an al-Mutanabbi verse on stopping time to Aristotle via an-Nagim. Since al-Mutanabbi’s fame stretched from Iran to al-Andalus, he deserved a worthy precedent, and the First Teacher fit.
The second epistle and Pseudo-‘Ukbari identify Aristotle as the source of most gnomic sayings, though he shares credit with the Qur’an, Hadith, Luqman, Caliph Umar II and his son, a Bedouin, proverbial lore, and Arabic poets. The exact relationship between maxim and verse was never insisted upon: the Hatimiya‘s preface envisions either a meeting of minds or the poet’s study of the philosopher, and Pseudo-‘Ukbari often presents maxims as parallel rather than origin, loosely worded as “from the Philosopher.” A few cases label the maxim “root” and the verse “borrowed” or “transferred,” suggesting philosophy was given disciplinary precedence over poetic formulation rather than textual filiation. These sayings belong to popular philosophy—Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s Anecdotes of the Philosophers and the Siwan al-hikma attributed to Abu Sulayman as-Sigistani—and the segment closes with a concordance ordering verses by incipit and cross-referencing as-Sahib’s Amtal.
The Prison of Categories
Sonja Brentjes opens her essay by arguing that the historiography of Islamic societies still labors under century-old categories that have escaped reflective questioning despite postmodern critique: “decline”; the suppression of philosophy and the ancient sciences by religious orthodoxy; the claim that philosophy died after Ibn Rusd; the question of why no scientific revolution occurred in Islamic societies; timeless notions of “Arabic” or “Islamic” science; nostalgic creatures like the “Golden Age”; and oppositions of rationality to superstition, Europe to the Islamic world, progress to decline. Since 9/11 and the “War on Terror,” debate on “Islam and Science” has intensified, with apologists and deniers populating the Internet, most lacking knowledge of the historical works. Brentjes cites Jim Khalili, Nidhal Guessoum, and Muzaffar Iqbal as recent representatives of unsound depiction, and names the FSTC’s “1001 Inventions” exhibition—opened in London in 2010, then Istanbul, New York, and Los Angeles—as the most successful apologist project, replacing Eurocentric historiography with a myth of a Muslim invention of modern science appropriated by Europe. She invokes A. I. Sabra’s unfulfilled task of studying the sciences in past Islamic societies on their own terms, noting that few biographies exist beyond the beacons and that context is usually deemed irrelevant except as “science in the service of Islam.”
Decline as an Inappropriate Category
Brentjes argues that “decline” is conceptually unsuited to historiography, since no single category can capture an entire society, let alone several. In cyclical theories it is simply the third stage of any social organism; in linear theories it is a negative violation of good behavior that mobilizes aggression or defense.
The Cairo Genizah Fragments of Tabit ibn Qurra and Pseudo-Ptolemy
The opening of the book’s second major section turns to a scholarly article by Charles Burnett and Gideon Bohak on newly identified Cairo Genizah fragments containing Judaeo-Arabic versions of two astro-magical texts. The Genizah, a used-paper storage room of a medieval synagogue in use from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, held many hundreds of astrological fragments in Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, most never studied or catalogued. The authors examine four fragments from two manuscripts, clearly copied by the same scribe, preserving a Judaeo-Arabic version of much of Tabit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus and some of the Opus imaginum attributed to Ptolemy. The significance is considerable: while both works were well known in Latin and much discussed, neither had previously been identified in any Arabic manuscript.
Two phrases from the beginning of Tabit’s work appear quoted in the eleventh-century magic handbook Gayat al-Hakim, and the Arabic text was well known by the twelfth century, when two Latin translations were made — one by Adelard of Bath, probably in Antioch, and another a little later by John of Seville and Limia in Spain. The two translations differ greatly, and the principal difference is that the Liber Prestigiorum includes prayers to the spirits of the planets and the making of rings, absent in the more orthodox Liber De imaginibus. The Genizah fragments allow, for the first time, seeing most of the original Arabic text — though written in Hebrew characters — and comparing it with the Latin. Correspondence with John of Seville’s translation confirms that he translated an Arabic text closely, while the possibility remains that Adelard translated from a variant version not yet identified. For Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Opus imaginum, only one Latin translation is known, assumed to be another translation by John of Seville, and the Genizah fragments confirm the two works travelled together.
Describing the Manuscripts
Four Genizah fragments are known, all apparently copied by the same scribe, dated by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger to the late-twelfth or early-thirteenth century and by Edna Engel to around the thirteenth century, stemming from two manuscripts labelled A and B, all in the Cambridge University Library Genizah collection. Manuscript A, T-S Ar. 29.51, consists of four bifolia of paper, dismantled into separate bifolia when preserved in Cambridge, with the innermost bifolium fully preserved and the outermost only about seventy percent surviving. The scribe wrote nineteen to twenty-two lines per page, with large letters, only six to eight words per line, distinct letter-forms, and double slashes at the end of many textual units, facilitating identification of additional fragments by the same hand. T-S Ar. 30.91, a single folio, is clearly by the same hand and was the first folio of the same quire, which is why it is most badly damaged, with less than sixty percent preserved.
The two fragments join to make up nine folios of the original quire; as the standard quire of the period was the quinion, probably only one more folio is missing, the last, likely badly mutilated. The text was likely much longer than twenty pages, so the original manuscript must have contained one or more additional quires. The manuscript was written in Judaeo-Arabic, with occasional Arabic letters for some words. The preserved sections divide in two: from the beginning of Ar. 30.91 to line 7 of fol. 7v of Ar. 29.51 is a long series of instructions for producing different talismans, closely paralleling paragraphs 5 to 73 of Carmody’s edition of the two Latin versions of Tabit.
The Synoptic Edition and Tabit’s Talismans
The passage then opens an editorial introduction to a synoptic Judaeo-Arabic/Latin edition of two sample texts. The first is a long extract identified by the Latin versions as belonging to Tabit ibn Qurra, paralleling section VI of Carmody’s edition. The second is a shorter extract identified by the Latin version as belonging to Ptolemy, covering the first two decans of Aries. In editing the Judaeo-Arabic text, the editors followed manuscript A, noting for each paragraph in which manuscripts it is preserved and indicating where B diverges from A. The Latin text of Tabit takes into account both Carmody’s readings and a fresh reading of a Paris manuscript; for the Pseudo-Ptolemy text, both the same manuscript and Boudet’s edition were considered. In both cases, the Judaeo-Arabic enables choosing more likely readings than previous editors provided. A footnote notes that in manuscript A there is a proliferation of diacritical points over many letters, even those not usually marked in Judaeo-Arabic, while in manuscript B most are omitted.
The Tabit passage opens with a talisman used for making contact between the ruler and one of his men and his officers so that he inclines towards him with friendship, and his status with the ruler is raised. The comment notes the Latin does not translate one phrase but otherwise keeps close to the Arabic, and that the Arabic word for officers indicates a particular Latin reading should be preferred. The text then gives instructions: if you wish to make it, you begin first by taking for it the ascendant, confirmed with correct thought. Then you observe whether there is between the lord of the ascendant and the lord of the tenth conjunction or reception. The Latin follows the Arabic exactly. If you find the lord of the ascendant is joined to the lord of the tenth in trine or sextile aspect and there is full reception between them, and they are both in a good condition and unharmed by the malefics, the matter will be fulfilled; immediately a sound talisman, which has great effect. The comment notes both Arabic and Latin have a phrase for “immediately” containing the word for “trace/effect,” which may cause confusion.
If you want to do this and you do not find any of the things mentioned and you find the ascendant and the tenth unharmed by the malefics, the matter will be fulfilled, if God wills, and the talisman will be sound and has great effect. The comment notes this Latin sentence follows the next one, the two sentences having been swapped in respect to the Arabic, and it omits “if God wills.” If you do not find any of the things mentioned and you find the ascendant and its lord and the tenth and its lord unharmed by the malefics, and you find the lord of the ascendant in the tenth and the tenth in the ascendant and it is aspecting the lord of the ascendant in a good aspect, the matter will be fulfilled, and the mixture will be according to the aspect of friendship and its opposite, and the talisman will be successful, if God wishes.
The Taʿlīqāt Attributed to Ibn Sīnā
The next article, by Jules Janssens, surveys the Taʿlīqāt attributed to Ibn Sīnā, comparing it with the Ilāhiyyāt of the Shifāʾ and citing Badawī’s edition with manuscript corrections. On one page, a variant reading concerns whether the effect’s posteriority exists with the priority or differs from it in existence; this matches the Ilāhiyyāt.
Tusi’s Interpretation of Avicenna’s Modal Syllogistic
Tony Street’s study closes by pressing the question of what Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi actually claims for Avicenna’s modal logic. Tusi, he argues, treats the modal syllogistic as resting at least partly on metaphysical theses; logically he may only demonstrate that first-figure proofs are available once second-figure syllogisms are granted, but Street suspects he intends something weightier. Street asks whether Tusi distinguishes the analysis of Thom, which fits Avicenna, from that of Rescher, which fits Katibi and those who reject Avicenna’s syllogisms with possibility minor premises, and what Tusi means by the recurring phrase “suppose that possible actual.”
The backdrop is a late-twelfth-century dispute. Two students of Magd ad-Din al-Gili sought truth-conditions for modal propositions that would exclude Katibi’s reading. Suhrawardi al-Maqtul, in the Hikmat al-ishraq, reasoned that since the contingency of the contingent, the impossibility of the impossible, and the necessity of the necessary are all themselves necessary, the modes should be folded into the predicate so that the proposition becomes necessary in every circumstance — hence formulations such as “Every man necessarily must be an animal,” “Every man necessarily may be a writer,” and “Every man necessarily must breathe at some time,” with the “necessarily” placed mid-proposition only for stylistic reasons and moved to the front under negation. Roughly contemporaneously, Fahr ad-Din ar-Razi supplied the distinction between reading the subject term according to actual reality and according to the essence. Katibi gave the canonical statement: “every J is B” according to the essence means that everything which, were it to exist, would be a J among possible individuals would, insofar as it existed, be a B; according to actual existence, every J actually — whether at, before, or after the judgment — is B actually. It became standard to assume Avicenna’s propositions are read according to the essence, while most logicians after the mid-thirteenth century read them according to actual existence. Tusi knows the distinction and condemns the majority for the latter reading, though he does not think the essentialist reading accurately represents Avicenna either.
Tusi makes the move “suppose that possible actual” four times — twice in §8.2, once in §9.1, once in §10.2 — each time dealing with a universal proposition, almost always “every J is possibly B.” This is not upgrading, which applies only to particular propositions embedded in a possibility operator. In §9.2 he supposes a potentiality had by every member of a species, such as writing had by men, to be an actuality such as breathing, then examines how that affects the perfectibility of the inference. Street concludes that Tusi’s comments push us to foreground the Thom interpretation’s application to natural constituents and potentialities: Tusi assesses syllogisms by focusing on Natures and their properties, evident in his use of the canons “the possibly possible is possible” and “the possibly necessary is necessary.” The account in the Pointers likely differs from Avicenna’s earlier views, so proofs from the Pointers should not be mingled with those in the Salvation and Syllogism. Relying on Tusi risks anachronism, but it lets us be guided by Avicenna’s most erudite and passionate defender.
Appendix: Tusi on the Pointers
The appended translation works through Tusi’s commentary section by section. In §7, if every J is B actually the mix is perfect; if by possibility, judgment may not pass clearly from B to J. Avicenna means that connexions produce, and the conclusion follows the major premise’s modality only if the minor term enters under the middle actually — so syllogisms of this figure are perfect when the minor premise is actual and imperfect when it is possible. §7.2 notes that a potential minor may combine with a potential major, an actual but non-necessary major, or a necessary major, three mixes requiring proof; logicians proved these by indirect reduction, but Avicenna deserted that method and proved them with three proofs of the reasoned fact. §8 observes that if the judgment on B is by possibility there is a possibility of a possibility, and the mind nearly knows it is a possibility, for what is possibly possible is by nature near the judgment that it is possible. §8.1 applies this to the first mix of two possibility premises, which Avicenna thought the mind easily grasps, inclining to the view that the mix is perfect. §8.2 sets out the proof: the possible is that from whose supposition no impossibility follows; take J as possibly possibly A, suppose it passes from first possibility to existence — the first possibility falls away and it becomes possibly A; suppose again that it is existent — the second falls away and J comes to be A with no impossibility following, so J is possibly A. §8.3 validates the argument by contraposing “everything which is not possible is impossible to be possible,” primary in the mind, which contraposes to “everything which is not impossible to be.”
Essence and Existence in Avicenna’s Metaphysics
Amos Bertolacci’s editorial analysis turns to Avicenna’s Ilahiyat, chiefly chapter I, 5, with translated excerpts labelled Text 1 through Text 7. In Text 1, Avicenna argues that when one assumes in the mind that essence B is a determinate thing different from essence A — as if saying “the essence A is a certain essence, and the essence B is another essence” — the statement is informative only through this assumption of difference and conjunction, and it is this notion that “thing” is meant to convey. Section [2.3] adds that the concomitance of “existent” never separates from “thing”: a thing is either an existent in concrete objects or an existent in the estimative faculty and intellect, and were it not so it would not be a thing.
Bertolacci’s analysis distinguishes two formulations. In the first, Avicenna separates “existent” from “thing” through synonyms of “existent” not shared by “thing”: “existent” is synonymous with “established in reality” and “realized,” yielding “existence regarding the fact of being established in reality,” while “thing” is analyzed via “essence,” the essence being named “proper existence” — the concrete way of existing proper to a determinate species, conveyed by its distinctive essence. This distinction appears exclusively in the first formulation, and the notion of proper existence recurs throughout the Ilahiyat. The second formulation equates the thing/existent distinction with essence versus existence, and Avicenna works through five propositions: that “the essence so-and-so is existent in concrete objects, or in souls, or absolutely” is informative; that “the essence so-and-so is the essence so-and-so” and “the essence so-and-so is an essence” are tautologies; that “the essence so-and-so is a thing” is uninformative unless “thing” means “existing thing”; and that “the essence is a thing” is even less informative unless so meant. A sixth proposition, “the essence A is a thing, and the essence B is another thing,” is informative if “another” means “different.” Section [2.3] describes “existent” as a concomitant of “thing”
Avicenna and the Prehistory of Transcendental Modulation
Alexander Treiger’s study of Avicenna’s notion of transcendental modulation begins by setting aside Avicenna’s later influence on the Latin West and the scholastic doctrine of the analogy of being, and instead asks a narrower historical question: how was “existent” analysed as a predicate before Avicenna? The stakes are theological as well as logical. If “existent” applies first and foremost to the Necessarily Existent and only posteriorly and less dignifiedly to contingent things, then it cannot be a genus, since genera apply to their species equally. God’s essence would therefore escape composition from genus and differentia.
Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi, answering Sahrastani, had insisted that the notion of the modulated term long predated Avicenna, citing Aristotle’s Topics, Alexander of Aphrodisias’ lost commentary on the Categories, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Farabi. Treiger grants that these proof-texts show Avicenna invented neither the notion nor the term, but argues they do not refute Sahrastani’s real claim: that Avicenna was the first to hold that “existent,” predicated of the Necessarily Existent and of contingent existents, is a modulated term. Tusi’s failure to find pre-Avicennian evidence is itself explained by this hypothesis.
From Aristotle to the Late Greek Commentators
The terminological groundwork distinguishes polysemous and monosemous terms, univocal and equivocal predication, pure and impure equivocals, and the crucial category of the modulated univocal. Aristotle had already set the problem: in the Categories he opposes synonymous to homonymous predication, while in Metaphysics Gamma he says “existent” is spoken of in many ways but with reference to one nature, neither purely univocal nor purely equivocal but possessing a quasi-univocal unity, with primary substance as the paradigmatic sense and accidents as derived.
Two positions then crystallized. Alexander of Aphrodisias placed “existent” between univocals and equivocals, using the formula “from one and with reference to one” and treating it as a paradigmatic equivocal. Porphyry, by contrast, treated “existent” as equivocal, since the ten categories are highest genera and “existent” is not their genus; he classified equivocals by chance and by thought, the latter subdivided into similarity, analogy, “from one,” and “with reference to one goal.” Ammonius and Abu l-Farag ibn at-Tayyib followed Porphyry; Elias, Pseudo-Elias, David, and Stephanos followed Alexander. Treiger argues the disagreement is purely semantic.
The Shift to Modulated Univocity and the Arabic Terminology
Elias’ commentary on the Isagoge marks the decisive shift: the categories partake of both the name and the definition of “existent,” but unequally, making it a modulated univocal—a move motivated by harmonizing Plato and Aristotle. Ibn at-Tayyib likewise treats “existent” as modulated, explaining that all things are called existents through emanation from the First Principle and desire to imitate it. Treiger then examines the Arabic terms taskik and asma musakkika. Wolfson had suggested they translate Greek amphibolia, but Treiger rejects the second half of this: amphibolia in Alexander concerns ambiguity of syntax, not of terms. He proposes instead a mistranslation of logos as “meaning.”
Farabi defines the modulated term as one with a single meaning whose referents differ in priority and posteriority—substance before accident, potentiality before actuality, command before prohibition. In the Kitab al-Huruf he calls “existent” an equivocal expression predicated of all the categories, comparing it to the word ‘ayn, yet elsewhere he says “existent,” “thing,” and “one” apply to the categories by order and proportionality, which Treiger reads as modulated univocity. Crucially, Farabi never extends this to the transcendental level. Philippe Vallat’s claim that Farabi held a transcendental analogy of being is rejected: Farabi spoke only of substance and accident, so the earliest attested transcendental modulation remains Avicenna’s.
Avicenna’s Transcendental Modulation
In the Book of Categories of the Kitab as-Sifa, Avicenna divides non-univocal predication into three classes, the first of which—a single meaning differentiated afterward—covers existence differentiated by priority and posteriority, degree of deservingness, and strength or weakness, as well as relative applications to a principle, a goal, or both. In the Danesname he refutes those who call existence purely equivocal across the categories, and in the Ilahiyat he holds “existent” sufficiently univocal for a single science. Only in the Mubdhatdt does he extend modulation to the transcendental level: existence applied to the First Principle and to contingent existents is modulated, not equivocal. Against Sahrastani’s objection that this still yields composition in the Necessarily Existent, Avicenna answers that existence is a non-constitutive concomitant, predicated in quale rather than in quid, differentiated by the quiddities themselves.
Al-Jushami’s Qur’an Commentary and Its Transmission
Suleiman Mourad’s study of al-Hakim al-Jushami turns to the Mu‘tazili tafsir tradition, known partly through at-Tusi’s at-Tibyan but preserved more richly in al-Jushami’s Tahdib. Ibn Funduq’s poem establishes that the grandfather’s name was Karama, not Karrama. Al-Jushami studied Mu‘tazilism, Hanafi law under the chief judge an-Nasihi, and tafsir under Ibn Abi t-Tayyib; the suggestion that he studied with the Zaydi imam an-Natiq bi-l-Haqq is mistaken. He was still in Gisum in 472/1080, and in 478/1086 began teaching his Kitab Gala al-absar in the city mosque over sixty sessions, resuming after a pilgrimage to Mecca—so the visit was not late in life.
Later Zaydi sources claim he was killed in Mecca in 494/1101, either by the Compulsionists for his anti-Hanbali epistle or by maternal cousins, but Ibn Funduq’s detailed knowledge of his descendants tells against this; Yemeni Zaydi sources had reason to fabricate. Al-Jushami wrote over forty books, many surviving through Zaydi interest, including the Tahdib, the Safina, and two theological works. Around eighty Tahdib manuscripts survive, nearly all from Yemen, copied or commissioned by Zaydi imams and scholars, with some reaching India, Italy, and Iran; the earliest datable copy is from 565/1170. The work reached Yemen through the Isma‘ili-turned-Zaydi Qadi Ja‘far, who studied it in Rayy with Abu Ja‘far ad-Daylami, said to have studied it with al-Jushami’s son Muhammad; it is also alleged that az-Zamakhshari brought it to Mecca and taught it to the Zaydi Ibn Wahhas, from whom it passed to Qadi Ja‘far.
Al-Razi on Causality in God’
Ar-Razi on Causality and the Concomitance of Law and Welfare
The final stretch of Felicitas Opwis’s study turns to ar-Razi’s treatment of causality in God’s rulings. Ar-Razi sets out the position of those who deny any causal link between the ratio legis and the ruling itself, yet he refuses to follow them all the way: he rejects their refusal to use suitable characteristics as a means of identifying the ratio legis. Even granting that God’s actions cannot be reduced to motives, he argues, one may still hold that determining suitability in a characteristic yields probable knowledge that it is the correct ratio legis. His first argument appeals to God’s habit: Muslims agree it is not logically necessary that the stars and planets move as they do, yet God’s custom is to make them conform to these patterns, so probability obtains that they will keep them — the same holds for rain falling from clouds, satiety following eating, and burning from contact with fire. His second argument turns to the Shari’a, where rulings and maslahas are mutually simultaneous and concomitant, neither acting effectively upon the other. Suitability thus becomes the indicant for attributing a ratio legis to a ruling, and since it yields probable knowledge, analogy built on it counts as legal proof.
This proposition — that God’s rulings are concomitant with bringing about welfare and averting harm — proves acceptable to proponents and opponents of causality alike, and understanding the relationship as concomitance renders the word “cause” innocuous. Ar-Razi’s solution upholds God’s omnipotence while giving jurists the means to extend the law, bridging the rift between those who deny human intellect any grasp of God’s motivation and those who make humankind’s welfare God’s motivation, and moving past the Mu’tazila-As’ariya quarrel over whether God is obliged to legislate for His servants’ good. His own stand is hard to pin down: he never advocated that God is bound to legislate for believers’ welfare, nor did he likely agree wholly with the opponents of motivation. Most probably he held a position compatible with As’arism — God laid down law for believers’ welfare, and while necessary causality is rejected, God’s habit permits treating suitability as a probable indicant. This matches Louis Gardet’s account of a “modern” As’arism introduced by al-Guwayni, marked by syllogistic reasoning and recourse to causality even where secondary causes’ efficacy is denied ontologically; ar-Razi reasons almost exclusively in syllogisms and employs causality as a concomitant relationship.
The conclusions gather the whole inquiry. Efficient cause-effect relationships were problematic for Muslim theologians because they infringed on God’s omnipotence: Mu’tazili theologians accepted secondary causality put into existence by the Creator, while early As’aris denied it, proposing that God directly created each effect anew. By the fifth/eleventh century jurists increasingly thought of the ratio legis as the ruling’s motive. Hanafi-Mu’tazili jurists such as al-Gassas and al-Basri understood believers’ welfare in otherworldly terms; Shafi’i-As’ari jurists such as al-Guwayni and al-Gazali saw God’s intention as the attainment of welfare in this world and the next. Since al-Gazali, welfare was defined by preserving religion, life, intellect, progeny, and property. Ar-Razi’s solution rested on God’s habit, concomitance, and probability. One further result was the ascendance of the purposes of the law, evident in al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd as-Salam, al-Qarafi, Nagm ad-Din at-Tufi, and Ibn Taymiya; it produced new interpretations of legal license and led the Maliki jurist as-Satibi to articulate a new theory of law-finding.
The Apocryphal Kitab al-Hayda and Hanbalite Ambivalence toward Kalam
Racha El Omari’s study opens by situating the Hanbalites as Sunni traditionists who emphasized scripture and prophetic tradition, in contrast to the Gahmites who read the divine attributes metaphorically. Hanbalites criticized Mu’tazilite and Gahmite doctrines and condemned kalam as idle wrangling, yet sometimes invoked it themselves; Ibn ‘Aqil’s adoption and later retraction of Mu’tazilite methods was the dramatic case. Since Ibn Hanbal, kalam was adopted despite the condemnation. The paper traces the Kitab al-Hayda and establishes it as apocryphal — a text falsely ascribed to one historical person by another and subsequently expanded by anonymous forgers — arguing that the Hanbalites’ simultaneous need for kalam and criticism of it fed the work’s growth. Henri Laoust situated Hanbalism as “traditionalist,” George Makdisi highlighted its “traditionist” quality against As’arite rationalist traditionalism, and Josef van Ess and Wilferd Madelung stressed the rationalists’ contribution; Madelung proved that the Hanbalite doctrine of the Qur’an’s eternity had not appeared in the earliest writings but resulted from debates rebuking the Gahmites.
The argument then asks why al-Hatib did not expose the fabricated work in al-Kinani’s biography, since the fabrication bore on al-Asamm’s character rather than al-Kinani’s; had the Kitab al-Hayda contained heretical, harmful contents, al-Hatib would likely have exposed it. This appears to be why ad-Dahabi and as-Subki commented on its contents within al-Kinani’s biography, though no one before them had done so — suggesting some change occurred in their contexts and in the corpus of the text itself. Later scholars did not follow their lead: despite Ibn Hagar’s unusual access to early sources, he abided by al-Hatib’s decision to separate discussion of the text’s inauthenticity, relegating comments on its unlikely content to al-Asamm’s biography, which may suggest that ad-Dahabi and as-Subki’s differing opinions were triggered by shifts in the Hanbalite milieu. Two details about the work’s reception stand out: for al-Hatib and those following his lead, acknowledging its falsehood did not prevent regarding it as a useful doctrinal source, and willingness to parse its doctrinal relevance from its authenticity did not persist unconditionally over the next five hundred years. Two conclusions are certain — the text underwent substantial change in form and diffusion by ad-Dahabi and as-Subki’s time, and larger changes swept through the traditionalist circles in which they took part.
A History of the Kitab al-Hayda
Tracing the work’s history requires explaining its development in Hanbalite writings. Neither the initial fabricator, ad-Da’a al-Asamm, nor the pseudo-epigrapher al-Kinani were Hanbalites, and al-Asamm’s initial version remains unavailable. The first and most extensive part of the tracing concerns its initial appearance in Ibn Batta’s al-Ibana, highlighting early Hanbalites’ deeply divided views on using the kalam method of disputation.
Main Arguments
The essays in this volume advance a set of interlocking claims about the history of philosophy and science in Islamic societies. The first is that the transmission of Greek learning to the Arabs was not a passive reception but an active, mediated, and often Christian enterprise. Hans Daiber argues that Christian scholars played a decisive role in transmitting Greek science to the Arabs, functioning as translators, commentators, and authors of monographs based on Greek works. The Melkite scholar Abu l-Fath ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Fadl ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Mutran al-Antaki, a deacon from Antiochia whose grandfather became bishop after his wife’s death, exemplifies this role. Nothing is known of his life, and only two of his works are dated, to 1052; Graf places part of his output in the mid-eleventh century, while Nasrallah holds that he died at the end of that century. The point is not the biography but the function: Christian scholars were the conduits through which Greek science reached Arabic readers.
A second argument concerns the historiography of “decline.” Sonja Brentjes contends that the historiography of Islamic societies suffers under century-old categories, values, and judgments that have escaped reflective questioning despite postmodern critiques. She identifies a cluster of persistent notions: “decline”; the suppression of philosophy and the “ancient sciences” by religious orthodoxy and worldly rulers; the claim that philosophy died after Ibn Rusd because al-Gazali accused it of incoherence and incompatibility with revelation; the question of why no scientific revolution occurred in Islamic societies; timeless concepts like “Arabic,” “Islamic,” or “Arabic-Islamic” science; nostalgic creatures like the “Golden Age” or “Islamic Renaissance”; and oppositions such as rationality versus superstition, Europe versus the Islamic World, Christianity versus Islam, progress versus decline. These categories, she argues, persist as if immutable and outside history, and the postmodern message that all narratives about the past are socially constructed has not washed them away. Her essay is thus both a critique of a specific concept and a call for a different kind of history.
A third argument concerns the relationship between logic and metaphysics in Avicenna. Tony Street argues that Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi holds the modal syllogistic to be built at least partly on metaphysical theses. Logically, Tusi may only show that first-figure proofs are available if second-figure syllogisms are given, but Street thinks Tusi claims something more significant. The question of what Tusi means by “suppose that possible actual” opens onto a larger thirteenth-century debate: at the end of the twelfth century, two students of Magd ad-Din al-Gili sought truth-conditions for modal propositions designed to rule out Katibi’s understanding, and Suhrawardi al-Maqtul, in Hikmat al-ishraq, argued that since the contingency of the contingent—the sentence breaks off there in the notes, but the direction of the argument is clear. The modal syllogistic was not a purely formal exercise; it was entangled with metaphysical commitments about possibility, necessity, and existence.
A fourth argument, developed by Jules Janssens, concerns the relationship between the Taliqat attributed to Ibn Sina and the Ilahiyyat of the Shifa’. Janssens’s survey shows that the author of the Taliqat was very familiar with the Ilahiyyat, though he did not worry about precise wording. Most “quotations” include modifications, never contradicting the original. The author adds explanatory elements absent in the source, and most of these explanations reflect a genuine Avicennian way of thought, none in flagrant contradiction with the basic doctrine of the Shaykh al-Ra’is. It remains difficult to determine their precise author—Ibn Sina himself or a disciple—and their origin, whether teaching, commentary, or marginal notes. The argument is thus about the texture of the Avicennian corpus: it is not a fixed set of texts but a living tradition of paraphrase, elaboration, and commentary.
A fifth argument, advanced by David A. King, concerns the origins of Islamic algebra. King notes that the earliest figures in Islamic algebra are al-Hwarizmi and his contemporary Ibn Turk, both from the first half of the ninth century, with no direct evidence of earlier Muslim activity in the field. In 1975 Fuat Sezgin argued there was a tradition of Islamic algebra before al-Hwarizmi and Ibn Turk; King agrees, though conceding positive evidence is still lacking. A medieval Arabic report purports to place the beginnings of Islamic algebra in the early seventh century, involving the Imam ‘Ali, but King judges the story’s likelihood of being historical as small. It is more probably a fabrication, though not apparently a Shi’ite one. The argument is thus a study in the limits of evidence: a legend that would fill a gap in the historical record is examined, contextualized, and found wanting.
A sixth argument, developed by Charles Burnett and Gideon Bohak, concerns the recovery of lost Arabic texts through the Cairo Genizah. The Genizah was a used-paper storage room of a medieval synagogue, used from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, containing many hundreds of astrological and related fragments in Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Most have never been studied or catalogued. The authors examine four Genizah fragments from two different manuscripts, clearly copied by the same scribe, preserving a Judaeo-Arabic version of much of Tabit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus and some of the Opus imaginum attributed to Ptolemy. While both works are well known in Latin and much discussed, neither had previously been identified in any Arabic manuscript. The Genizah fragments allow, for the first time, seeing most of the original Arabic text—though written in Hebrew characters—and comparing it with the Latin. The argument is thus about the material conditions of textual recovery: what was lost, what survives, and what the survival of a text in an unexpected script can tell us.
A seventh argument, developed by Heinrich von Staden, concerns Galen’s account of anger. Galen of Pergamum discussed anger in more than forty extant works, deeming it the most common and most difficult emotion to treat. As both an activity of the soul and something by which the soul is affected, anger is the province of philosophy; yet Galen argued it is also a subject for medicine, since it has somatic causes and consequences. Only the medical techne can explain anger’s pathophysiology and show the way to medical interventions complementing philosophical therapy. Anger is also a useful test case for the body-soul relation. The argument is thus about the integration of philosophy and medicine in Galen’s thought, and about the conceptual resources he developed to describe how an emotion can be both internal and external, both an activity and a passion.
An eighth argument, developed by Beatrice Gruendler, concerns the relationship between Arabic poetry and philosophy. Arabic poetic tradition was separate from philosophy until al-Qartaganni, who died in 684/1285. Al-Buhturi faulted Ibn ar-Rumi for spoiling poetry with logic. Yet Aristotle joined the canon of exemplary figures in Abbasid poetry: Ibn ar-Rumi satirized the Christian scribe Said ibn Mahlad and his son al-‘Ala for praising a foolish son preoccupied with Aristotle’s tales, and al-Mutanabbi praised his patron Ibn al-‘Amid as “Aristotle,” “Rastalis,” careless of spelling. The argument is thus about the gradual, uneven, and often playful appropriation of philosophical authority by the Arabic poetic tradition.
Key Concepts
Several concepts recur across the volume and give it a measure of intellectual coherence. The first is adab, the classical ideal of cultured education that the dedication invokes to describe Dimitri Gutas. Adab is not merely erudition; it is a way of being, a set of dispositions and manners that shape how a person inhabits a scholarly community. The dedication’s portrait of Gutas as an adib who receives friend and stranger in their native language and cultural etiquette makes the concept concrete.
The second is falsafa, the Arabic term for the philosophical tradition descended from Greek sources. Yahya Michot’s essay traces Ibn Taymiyya’s historiography of falsafa from al-Ma’mun to Ibn Sab’in via Avicenna, and the term carries with it the whole question of how the philosophical tradition was understood, classified, and sometimes resisted within Islamic societies.
The third is the distinction between essence and existence, which Amos Bertolacci analyzes in Avicenna’s metaphysics. This distinction is one of the most consequential in the history of philosophy, and its Avicennian formulation became a central point of reference for later Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers.
The fourth is the modal syllogistic, the logical apparatus that Tony Street examines in Avicenna and Tusi. Modal propositions—those involving possibility, necessity, and contingency—require truth-conditions that are not merely formal but metaphysical, and the debates over these conditions shaped the later history of Arabic logic.
The fifth is genethlialogy, the science of astrological prognostication about an individual, beginning with the native’s parents, family, and birth. Kevin van Bladel proposes that the title of Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht’s book, preserved in an-Nadim’s Fihrist, should be read as tohmagan, a Middle Persian term deriving from tohm (“seed, stock, family, birth, lineage”) and used to translate the technical sense of genethlialogy. The concept is central to the astrological tradition that Abu Sahl’s history of science describes.
The sixth is the triad of causes that Galen adapted from earlier medical thought: antecedent, preceding, and cohesive or containing. Antecedent causes are external and precede their effects but are not sufficient conditions; preceding causes are the internal effects of external antecedent causes; a containing cause is co-temporal with its effects, which vary concomitantly with it. This triad lets Galen describe causal sequences in which external and internal factors play significant roles but do not necessitate pathological effects. Anger, in Galen’s scheme, is among the antecedent causes—external to disease even though it has internal somatic causes.
The seventh is the Taliqat, the collection of notes and sayings attributed to Ibn Sina that Jules Janssens examines. The term suggests a genre of philosophical writing that is neither a finished treatise nor a mere commentary, but something in between: notes, marginalia, teaching materials, perhaps the record of a master’s oral instruction.
The eighth is the Cairo Genizah, the used-paper storage room of a medieval synagogue that preserved hundreds of astrological and related fragments. The Genizah is both a physical place and a methodological concept: it represents the possibility of recovering texts that have been lost from the main manuscript tradition, and it demands a particular kind of philological attention to fragments, scripts, and material conditions.
The ninth is the concept of “decline,” which Sonja Brentjes subjects to sustained critique. In cyclical theories of history, decline is the third stage of development of any social organism, culture, or civilization, and the disappearance of arts and sciences is normal, not aberrant. In linear theories, both modernist and postmodernist, decline is negative, a violation of good behavior, mobilizing aggression or defense. Because of its loss of status within linear theories, most twentieth-century writers felt compelled either to find causes or to present counter-examples proving that decline had not occurred. Brentjes argues that the concept is conceptually unsuited to the task, since a single category cannot capture an entire society, let alone several.
The tenth is the muwaqqit, the timekeeper associated with a mosque, whose office Mamluk sultans promoted through religious donations. The muwaqqit represents the institutional embedding of mathematical and astronomical knowledge within religious structures, and the concept complicates any simple opposition between religious orthodoxy and scientific inquiry.
Themes
The most pervasive theme of the volume is transmission: how knowledge moves from one language, culture, and institution to another, and what happens to it in transit. Hans Daiber’s Christian scholars, Kevin van Bladel’s Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht, Charles Burnett and Gideon Bohak’s Genizah fragments, and Beatrice Gruendler’s Arabic poets all tell versions of this story. The volume’s interest is not in transmission as a simple relay but in the transformations, omissions, and adaptations that accompany it. Abu Sahl, for example, omitted explicit reference to the Avesta as inappropriate for his Muslim audience, even as he drew on Middle Persian sources that presupposed it. The Genizah fragments preserve an Arabic text in Hebrew characters, a material witness to the complex linguistic ecology of the medieval Middle East. The theme is thus not merely that knowledge traveled but that it was reshaped by the conditions of its travel.
A second theme is the relationship between philosophy and religion, and the various ways that relationship has been imagined. The volume’s third part, “Muslim Traditional Sciences,” is devoted to this theme, but it runs through the other parts as well. Brentjes’s critique of the “decline” narrative is in part a critique of the assumption that religious orthodoxy suppressed philosophy. Her account of courtly patronage shows that the ancient sciences were supported by rulers and religious dignitaries alike, and that madrasa education and courtly patronage met in the persons of local landowners and religious scholars. The theme is thus not a simple conflict between faith and reason but a complex negotiation in which religious institutions, political power, and intellectual inquiry were entangled.
A third theme is the materiality of texts. The volume is full of manuscripts, fragments, quires, scribal hands, and physical descriptions. Burnett and Bohak describe the dimensions of Genizah fragments, the number of lines per page, the letter-forms, the double slashes at the end of textual units. Van Bladel reconstructs a title from scribal errors involving diacritical dots. King examines a Yemeni manuscript copied around 1600 and preserved in Hyderabad. The theme is methodological: the history of philosophy and science is not only a history of ideas but also a history of books, and the two cannot be separated.
A fourth theme is the historiography of the field itself. Brentjes’s essay is the most explicit treatment of this theme, but it is present throughout. The volume’s contributors are self-conscious about the categories they use, the narratives they inherit, and the political contexts in which their work is received. Brentjes’s account of the FSTC exhibition “1001 Inventions—Discover The Muslim Heritage In Our World,” which opened in London in January 2010, moved to Istanbul in August 2010 on the invitation of Prime Minister Racip Erdogan, then to New York in December 2010, and was opened in Los Angeles in May 2011 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a case study in how historical narratives are mobilized for political purposes. The theme is thus about the stakes of writing history: who benefits from a given narrative, and what interests it serves.
A fifth theme is the relationship between the classical and the post-classical. The volume’s first part is titled “The Classical Heritage,” and its third part addresses “Muslim Traditional Sciences,” but the boundary between them is porous. Brentjes’s essay on decline is in part an argument that the post-classical period has been misdescribed, and that the categories used to describe it are inherited from earlier polemics. The theme is thus about periodization: how we divide the past into eras, and what those divisions obscure.
A sixth theme, less explicit but present throughout, is the figure of the scholar. The dedication’s portrait of Dimitri Gutas as an adib is one version of this figure. Hans Daiber’s Ibn al-Fadl, about whose life nothing is known, is another. David King’s al-Huzali, a thirteenth-century Yemeni scholar who lived in Gibla, was in charge of local government, and died in Zabid in 680/1281-82, is a third. The volume is populated by scholars, translators, commentators, and teachers, and its interest in them is not biographical but functional: what did they do, and how did their work shape the transmission of knowledge?
The Author’s Conclusions
The volume does not have a single author, and its conclusions are distributed across its contributions. Nevertheless, certain conclusions emerge from the essays taken together. The first is that the transmission of Greek learning to the Arabs was a complex, mediated process in which Christian scholars played a decisive role. Daiber’s essay establishes this for the Melkite milieu of eleventh-century Antiochia, and van Bladel’s reconstruction of Abu Sahl ibn Nawbaht’s history of science shows a similar process at work in the early Abbasid court, where Persian and Indian learning was preeminent while Greek translations were few.
The second conclusion is that the historiography of Islamic societies needs to be freed from inherited categories. Brentjes’s essay is the most sustained argument for this position, but it is supported by the volume’s other contributions. King’s examination of the legend of algebra’s invention in Zabid shows how a story that would fill a gap in the historical record can be examined, contextualized, and found wanting. Janssens’s survey of the Taliqat shows that the Avicennian corpus is not a fixed set of texts but a living tradition of paraphrase and elaboration. The volume as a whole argues, implicitly, that the history of Islamic philosophy and science is best written through close attention to specific texts, manuscripts, and contexts rather than through grand narratives of rise and decline.
The third conclusion is that the relationship between philosophy and religion in Islamic societies is more complex than the standard narratives suggest. Brentjes’s account of courtly patronage shows that the ancient sciences were supported by rulers and religious dignitaries alike, and that madrasa education and courtly patronage met in the persons of local landowners and religious scholars. The movement of the ancient sciences into these institutions secured both intellectual and material continuation through princely funding. Mathematical and astronomical manuscripts dedicated to rulers, princes, amirs, sons of amirs, and viziers exist for most wealthier dynasties after 1200. The Mamluk dynasty is an exception, promoting medicine only via a courtly diwan, yet the absence of astrologers from courtly offices and lack of dedications to Mamluk sultans does not mean the dynasty opposed these disciplines: Mamluk sultans promoted the office of muwaqqit through religious donations and appointed scholars of ‘ilm al-miqat as mudarris or head of khanqahs. The conclusion is that the relationship between religious institutions and scientific inquiry was one of entanglement, not opposition.
The fourth conclusion is that the material conditions of textual transmission matter. Burnett and Bohak’s Genizah fragments, van Bladel’s reconstruction of a title from scribal errors, King’s examination of manuscript attributions—all of these show that the history of philosophy and science is also a history of books. The Genizah fragments allow, for the first time, seeing most of the original Arabic text of Tabit’s De imaginibus and comparing it with the Latin. Correspondence with John of Seville’s translation confirms that he translated an Arabic text closely. The possibility remains that Adelard translated from a variant version not yet identified. The conclusion is that philology and history are inseparable.
The fifth conclusion, which emerges from the volume as a whole, is that the field of Islamic philosophy and science is a living enterprise. The essays are not merely reports on past scholarship but contributions to ongoing debates.
