by Ehsan Masood
Many could have exploited this discontent, but it was the Abbasids who did. The Abbasids were supporters of the side of the Prophet’s family descended from his uncle, Abbas. They were mainly based in Kufa in Iraq, but they sent out agents and emissaries to build up support on the eastern fringes. Their message was simple: that if the Umayyads were ousted and the Family of Muhammad put in their place, the world would be a better place. Finally, in the summer of 747, the revolutionary black banners of the Abbasids were unfurled in Merv, the ancient oasis city in Khorasan in the middle of the Kara Kum (Black Sand) desert. Led by Abu Muslim – possibly a pseudonym, since it means ‘Father of Muslim’ – the revolutionary army marched west, swelling in size as they scored victory after victory over the Umayyad armies, who had no particular allegiance to the caliph.
Once they reached Kufa, the Abbasid candidate Abu’l-Abbas declared himself caliph. From Kufa, the army drove on westwards, winning skirmish after skirmish, until finally they met the Umayyad Caliph Marwan and his forces at the River Zab near Mosul in northern Iraq in February 750. Marwan was routed, many of his fleeing troops being drowned in the Zab river, swollen by winter rains. Almost alone, Marwan was pursued across Syria and on south, until finally the revolutionaries caught up with him and killed him.
The age of the Abbasids had begun.
4
Baghdad’s Splendour
To [Baghdad] they come from all countries far and near, and people from every side have preferred Baghdad to their homeland … There is none more learned than [the Baghdadis’] scholars, better informed than their traditionalists, more cogent than their theologians … more poetic than their poets, and more reckless than their rakes.
Ahmad al-Ya’qubi, writing of a visit to Baghdad in the time of Caliph al-Mamun, 9th century
With the coming of the Abbasid caliphate, the curtain rose on the spectacular setting for what some have called the Golden Age of Islamic science – the city of Baghdad. Keen to start afresh, the second Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur abandoned Damascus and set about creating an entirely new capital nearer the heartland of their support in the east, right in the middle of the newly productive farmland beside the Tigris and Euphrates. And what a city they built.
Virtually nothing of the Abbasid city of Baghdad survives today to show what it was really like, but there is no shortage of Arabic written sources to testify to the city’s glamour in Abbasid times. Within just a few decades of its founding in 762, it had grown into one of the world’s greatest cities, not simply in terms of size – estimates suggest that it had a population of up to a million, at a time when few cities outside China had anything more than a few tens of thousands – but in terms of the bustling, energetic, cosmopolitan mix of people who came here from far and wide to live and work.
Baghdad is of course the city fabled in The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, where Scheherezade spun the tales to enchant her prince Shaharyar in the time of the third Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid – a city of fountains and courtyards, of carpeted and cushioned rooms where silk-clad girls would dance and poets would yearn for them, of clandestine meetings and light-fingered thieves in the night. There is no way of knowing now how much of this is true.
The Round City
At the centre of Baghdad stood a perfectly round city surrounded by a high wall. At each quadrant of the circle was a giant gate, through which roads led to the four corners of the empire – to Khurasan, Basra, Kufa and Syria. Much of the Round City was an empty park with the royal palace and mosque at the centre. The vast, sprawling mass of the city, with its narrow suqs and winding streets and its flat-roofed courtyard houses large and small, lay outside. The circular layout mirrored the classic Persian city of Fairouzabad, and the domes and arches of the palace may have been inspired by the great palace of the Persian shahs just a few kilometres away at Ctesiphon, the grand arches of which still stand.1
The tone of the city, too, in the early years was set by an established aristocratic family from Balkh in Afghanistan called the Barmakids. The Barmakids were among the richest families in Baghdad by far, and by all accounts were shrewd political operators. Three generations of the family became advisors to the Abbasid caliphs and effectively ran the empire, controlling not only the empire’s finances but also who got to see the caliph and who didn’t. One advisor is believed to have held the keys to the caliph’s harem. Eventually, though no one knows quite why, it seems that the Barmakids overstepped the mark, and in 803 Harun killed the last Barmakid advisor Ja’far – once his companion in many youthful escapades.
Baghdad style
While they were in power, the Barmakids set the tone of patronage of the arts and science followed by many other of the city’s wealthy, and of arranging majalis (salons) in which courtiers and scholars got together to debate religious and philosophical ideas with remarkable openness. Not just Muslim scholars of all persuasions, but Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians were welcomed at these salons – and the only criterion for entry seemed to be whether you could argue your case well. All the same, it wasn’t entirely free from rivalries and prejudices against outsiders.
There is a story about the young Hunayn ibn-Ishaq (Johannitius in Latin), later perhaps the most famous of translators and a medical doctor. Hunayn came from the country village of Hira in Iraq, but like so many young men of the time went to Baghdad to make his name in medicine. There he went to the majalis of the court physicians to four Abbasid caliphs. In his eagerness, young Hunayn kept on questioning what the learned physicians at the salon were saying. Eventually, one of the old medical elite from Persia became so irritated by the young upstart that he threw him out as a country bumpkin. ‘Go change money in the streets!’ he is reported to have said. Years later, when Hunayn had proved himself, the physician apologised.
Greek topics
It is likely, though, that there was considerable prestige attached to success in the salon and in displays of learning and erudition. Perhaps significantly, one of the first of Aristotle’s works to be translated into Arabic was his Topics, in which he gives advice on how to argue a case. What better way to upstage your rivals in debate than learning from, and quoting, the master? Maybe one reason why the wealthy elite were willing to spend fortunes on getting translations of learned works into Arabic was simple one-upmanship?
Amira Bennison of Cambridge University suggests a grander purpose for translating Greek philosophy. She thinks it may have been that, as a new empire and religion, Islam wanted the tools to develop its own theological and philosophical arguments to use against Christians and Jews who already had well-developed dialectic traditions. Peter Adamson, on the other hand, suggests a simpler nationalist motive – effectively, Muslims wanted to eclipse the Byzantines by showing that they understood and appreciated their own Greek heritage better than they did. Meanwhile, Yahya Michot of the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and Dmitri Gutas of Yale University add yet another incentive for Abbasid caliphs to pay for translations – astrology, which both gave them the power of prediction and confirmed the legitimacy of their revolution because it was written in the stars. Other historians of the era suggest that the Persians were simply reclaiming their heritage of knowledge after Alexander the Great destroyed Persian Persepolis in 330 BCE.
The translation movement
Whatever the reasons, and they were probably many, the extraordinary boom in translation that ran through the Abbasid caliphate seemed to be in line with Muhammad’s injunction to ‘seek knowledge everywhere, even if you have to go to China’. And Baghdad, with its new-found wealth and the extraordinary cosmopolitan mix that the spread of Islam gave it, was the perfect venue. There was wealth to be made in the translation business, too. The famous Banu Musa brothers were apparently happy to pay translators 500 dinars a month – the equivalent of about £24,000 today – and the wealthy elite would have to pay much more to get their own personal translation of one of Aristotle’s major works. It was a price they were willing to pay.
T
he translation movement began slowly in the caliphate of al-Mahdi (775–85) and Harun al-Rashid (786–809) but really got under way in the time of al-Mamun. Soon, ancient manuscripts were flooding into Baghdad (and also Basra), ready to meet the demand. Most were Greek, but they also came from Persia, from India and maybe even China too. Al-Mamun and members of the elite sent out missions to find manuscripts. One possibly apocryphal story tells of a mission to Byzantium, where only after some persistence the manuscript hunters were told that they might find Greek manuscripts locked away in an old church. When they finally gained entry, they found many of the great pieces of Greek scholarship in a fragile state, covered in dust and cobwebs or even rotting away with mildew. Some of the manuscripts for translation were recovered by official missions in this way. Others were, no doubt, brought to Baghdad by those eager to cash in on the booming market.
Many of the translators were not Arabs, nor even Muslims, but from faiths and languages brought in by the huge expansion of the Islamic realm. Many were native Greek speakers from the old Byzantine empire. Many, too, were Christian scholars who spoke and wrote Syriac, a form of Aramaic, the original language of the Bible and adopted by many eastern Christians between the 4th and 8th centuries. Many of the texts were actually translated first into Syriac and only then into Arabic in a two-step process. Indeed, some of the Greek texts, such as Aristotle’s, already existed in Syriac. In the preface to one major translation of Aristotle into Arabic, the Syriac Christian translator tells how his Arabic was corrected by his boss, al-Kindi.2
The language factory
Greek authors were the primary targets, though texts from other languages – such as those from South Asia – were translated too. The range of texts that were translated was wide. On the whole, though, it was almost entirely scholarly texts, rather than works of literature. Top of the list were subjects that had a clear practical use – medical texts such as those of the famous Galen and Hippocrates, mathematical texts such as Euclid’s Elements, and astronomy texts like Ptolemy’s Almagest.3 (Just why astronomy was so important practically to Muslims will become clear in Chapter 9.) Philosophy was also a popular subject, especially the works of Aristotle and Plato.
What has surprised scholars in the modern age is the speed with which the Abbasid translators learned to translate highly technical texts accurately and fluently. This has led some to argue that the translators were already very familiar with the subject matter. They included translators of many nationalities, and may also have included many such as the Persians who had long been familiar with astronomy.
It was a real challenge for the translators to find words in Arabic to correspond to the range of technical terms in the original, yet they were inventive in their solutions and Arabic soon had its own sophisticated technical vocabulary. Peter Pormann of Warwick University cites an example of how Arabic terms came about. The disease alopecia, for example, got its Greek name because it resembled mange in foxes, which is alopek in Greek. So the Arabic translators called it in Arabic ‘the fox disease’.
Writing in the 14th century, al-Safadi said that the translators had two basic approaches. One was literal, in which the text was translated word by word, trying to find the equivalent each time in Arabic. The second was an approach in which the translator instead tried to convey the intention and meaning of the writer. Al-Safadi points out how the literal translations were often incomprehensible, and that much better results were achieved with the second approach pioneered by Hunayn, who became one of the most famous of the translators.
Hunayn: medicine man
Hunayn was a Christian, and after his salon argument with the court physician, he set off to Byzantium to learn Greek and Syriac. When he returned to Baghdad a few years later, still only seventeen, he was commissioned by a court official to translate the works of Galen. It was to Hunayn more than anyone that later ages owed the survival of so much of the work of Galen, the first great medical texts and the basis of most medical knowledge for 1,000 years.
However, Hunayn was not content to merely translate. He was a doctor, and where he saw limitations in Galen’s work, he improved on it. He made crucial additions to Galen with his anatomy of the eye, and his drawings are typical of the wonderfully clear scientific illustrations that became a hallmark of the Islamic scientists’ work, and of the best science texts ever since. Hunayn also wrote a brief summary of Galen’s work in question-and-answer form, which was one of the first Arabic scientific texts to be translated into Latin in the 11th century and became a key medical primer for many centuries.
Hunayn fell from grace later in life, but his translations made him rich and highly respected. One observer from the time describes his lifestyle:
He went to the bath every day after his ride and had water poured on him. He would then come out wrapped in a dressing gown and, after taking a cup of wine with a biscuit, lie down until he had stopped perspiring. Sometimes he would fall asleep. Then he would get up, burn perfumes to fumigate his body and have dinner brought in.
Despite this lifestyle of leisure and luxury, he found time to produce a staggering amount of work. He also turned translation into something of a family business, and both his nephew Hubaysh and his son Ishaq became important translators.
Qusta and Thabit
Besides Hunayn and his family, other famous Abbasid translators included Qusta ibn-Luqa, whose name means Constantine, son of Luke. Another was Thabit ibn-Qurra the Sabian. The Sabian community were polytheists who lived on the borders of what is now Turkey, and most of them were thoroughly at home in Greek, Syriac and Arabic, which is why many became translators. Thabit, though, was just a young money-changer in the small town of Harran until one of the Banu Musa brothers spotted his talent on the way back from a book-hunting trip to Byzantium.
Thabit’s background in money-changing clearly stood him in good stead and he became famous for his translations of mathematical and astronomical works from Greek. As with so many of the Arabic translators, though, he did not simply translate. The translations were a starting point for his own ideas. One of the famous mathematical problems that Thabit is linked to is the chessboard problem, an example of an exponential series.
The problem goes like this. The man who invented chess so pleased his king that the king asked him what his reward should be. The man replied that he wanted nothing more than to receive one grain of wheat for the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on, doubling until all 64 squares were filled up. The king seemed happy at such an apparently modest request. But of course the doubling actually means that the total number of grains is gigantic. Mathematicians loved this problem, and al-Biruni later calculated the answer as 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains (or 18.5 million trillion grains).
Al-Kindi
The doyen of the early Abbasid translation world was Ya’qub ibn-Ishaq al-Kindi. Al-Kindi was not a translator himself, but he was the head of a major translation circle working for the caliph. The 10th-century historian ibn al-Nadim recounted how al-Kindi was called the Philosopher of the Arabs, ‘unique in his knowledge of all the ancient sciences’.
Al-Kindi was a Muslim, but he also spent much time confronting the problems of reconciling faith and reason and providing a philosophical basis for Islamic intellectual life. Today we would call him a rationalist, and he wrote treatises exposing what he considered to be the charlatan nature of both astrology and its predictive powers and alchemy with its promises of turning base metal to gold. His belief in the power of logic and his willingness to search for answers everywhere, including Greek texts, later got him into trouble with Baghdad’s rulers, but he was always held in high esteem in later centuries. He wrote:
We ought not to be embarrassed about appreciating the truth and obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth n
or belittling of one who speaks it or conveys it.
Yet accounts from the time tell us that he was not an easy man to get on with. He had a notoriously short temper, and the author al-Jahiz lampoons him in his Book of Misers. One story al-Jahiz tells is about one of al-Kindi’s tenants who was foolish enough to ask him if he could have a guest to stay. Immediately, al-Kindi raised the rent by a third. It could have been such lofty disdain that prompted the Banu Musa brothers to arrange for the confiscation of his personal library, though he did get it back later. Al-Kindi is said to have been physically assaulted by people he had offended.
The original polymath
Al-Kindi was Arabic-speaking, from a noble family who settled in Kufa after the conquest. He is believed to have written many books, though it’s not just the quantity that’s impressive but the range too. He was the original polymath and seemed to write on just about everything, from astronomy to zoology. Most of the scholars of the time had wide-ranging interests, switching easily from science to philosophy to poetry, but al-Kindi’s range was seemingly boundless.
Some of his interests were clearly driven by the needs of the caliphate. He wrote a famous treatise on metallurgy and sword-making. He also wrote on cryptography and described frequency analysis as a way to crack ciphers, which must have proved invaluable to the caliph’s spies. Here is his beautifully simple explanation:
One way to solve an encrypted message, if we know its language, is to find a different plaintext of the same language long enough to fill one sheet or so, and then we count the occurrences of each letter. We call the most frequently occurring letter the ‘first’, the next most frequently occurring letter the ‘second’, the following most occurring the ‘third’, and so on, until we count for all the different letters in the plaintext sample.