None of the sciences received more patronage among the Arabs than that of medicine – a discipline which they acquired from the Greeks and in which they excelled most. The Arabic adage states: “al-ʿilm cilmān, ʿilm yarfaʿ wa-ʿilm yanfaʿ, fa-ʾl-rāfiʿ al-dān wa-ʿl-nāfiʿ al-ṭibb” (“science is twofold, that which exalts and that which is useful – that which exalts is religion, and that which is useful is medicine”). Islam not only put medicine on a high level but also conferred the title of ḥakīm (wise) on medical practitioners, a term used by Muslims up to the present day in many areas. The association of medicine with religious learning is noteworthy, and is a pleasing feature of Muslim life; for according to a Tradition of the Prophet: “al-ʿilm cilmān, ʿilm al-fiqh li-ʾl-adyān wa-ʿilm al-ṭibb li-ʾl-abdān” (“science is twofold, theology and medicine”).

Scientific medicine, from the death of Galen to the birth of William Harvey, was kept alive by the vigorous scḣools of the Byzantines and the Arabs. While among the neo-Latins in Europe, labouring under ignorance and superstition, it almost ceased to exist, and among the later Byzantines surviving in suspended animation rather than growth, under the rising crescent in the East we have to admire one of the most remarkable phases of the history of medicine, that which developed within the culture of Arabian civilization.

Ibn Sīnā is outstanding among Arabic authors for the unusually warm reception which he has been given in Europe. The secret of his success is to be found in the way that his writings synthesize all the most original features of Muslim philosophy.

It is often claimed in histories of philosophy that Arabic philosophy's only merit is its transmission of Greek, mainly neo-Platonic, thought. This oversimplifies the subject in a misleading way, for, by dispensing with the need to analyse Arabic philosophy in its own right, it relieves the student of all the technical obstacles to an understanding of the subject. A strange language, a different religion, an altogether foreign cultural milieu: these and numerous other considerations are dismissed at once.

Ibn Sīnā's acceptance in the West is indicative of the affinity which exists between his outlook and European systems of thought, an affinity that is less strongly felt in the cases of other Arabic philosophers, although, like Ibn Sīnā, nearly all of them lived in times of crisis. The crises experienced in Ibn Sīnā's lifetime were not only of a political nature but arose mainly from antinomies between Muslim religious principles, and those of the cultures which were being assimilated by an expanding Islamic empire. The resulting conflicts were what in Western terms would be called antagonisms between faith and reason. Ibn Sīnā's solution to this aporia captured the minds of the medieval Christian world, not only as a solution in its own right, but also on account of the influence which it exercised on later Arabic philosophers: on Ibn Rushd, for example, who was to play such an important part in the renaissance of medieval Christian thought.

Biography is one of the most extensive areas of Arabic literature. Its earliest, and characteristic form, is the biographical dictionary, although biographical writing early developed a variety of other forms.

Arabic has no single term for biography. The most widely used terms are sīrah (pl. siyar) and tarjamah (pl. tarājim). The use of tarjamah tends to be restricted to shorter biographical notices, while sīrah usually refers to biographies of substantial length. The term sīrah was first used in literature for the biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, but this did not preclude its use for the biographies of less eminent figures. In both modern and medieval Arabic sīrah may also be found in the titles of works which are not strictly biographies at all, such as the traditional story Sīrat ʿAntar and Muḥammad al-Maṭwī's history of the city of al-Qayrawān entitled Sīrat al-Qayrawān. A less common term for biography is taʿrīf Qit. “definition”), which makes its appearance in literary usage after the end of the Abbasid period. In addition there are a number of terms which are used for laudatory biography or hagiography. The most widely used of these is manāqib (virtues, feats, exploits), a word which frequently appears in the titles of biographies which are intended to present a portrait of a morally admirable person, together with a recital of his outstanding actions and achievements. This kind of laudatory biography early took on the character of hagiography.

The five centuries of the ʿAbbasid caliphate in Baghdad saw the flowering of Arabic writing over an extraordinary variety of literary fields, from poetry and humane letters to philosophy, law, history and the natural sciences. The second volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature is devoted to belles-lettres in the ʿAbbasid period; the present volume takes as its province the literature of the scholarly disciplines broadly delineated by “religion, learning and science”.

Arabic scholarship began with the study of the Qurʾān, the Ḥadīth and the various fields of learning which were ancillary to these; but the translations from Greek and other languages which began in the second century after the death of Muhammad and which continued through the third/ninth century greatly extended the horizons of Arabic literature, and the resulting proliferation of learned disciplines led a number of Muslim writers to draw up lists classifying the various “sciences” or fields of learning. These classifications differ in many details, but there was a generally admitted distinction between the “religious sciences” and the “foreign sciences”. The former included Quranic exegesis, Tradition, theology, jurisprudence and all those subjects such as philology and historiography which developed from them. The “foreign sciences” included medicine, the natural sciences, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, alchemy and mechanics.

In the present volume the first five chapters deal with the literature of theology and religious experience. ʿIlm al-kalām (theology, or defensive apologia) originated with the dissensions in Islam after the battle of Siffin, but it needed an external stimulus to develop fully, and this stimulus was provided by the disputations with Christian apologists and the influence of Greek thought.

Arabic philosophic writing is a form of Arabic literature. Like Arabic poetry and artful prose it employs generally accepted opinions, rhetorical reasoning and devices, and imaginative projections to persuade and move an audience with particular linguistic and cultural habits, traditions and inclinations, and it responds to particular questions and deals with particular problems, which in turn shape its style and manner of exposition. Unlike most other forms of Arabic literature, however, Arabic philosophic writing tends to respond to questions and deal with problems that have to do with the audience's beliefs and opinions about matters theoretical and practical, human and divine, which the philosopher and his audience take to be of paramount importance both for the conduct of everyday life and ultimate salvation. Thus it tends to be serious but not humourless, rational but not inattentive to the role of emotions, rigorous but not unplayful, harsh but not misanthropic. Its scope is universal, dealing with all branches of knowledge; and in this respect philosophy is often compared to dialectic, rhetoric and poetry. In fact Arabic philosophic writing uses most of the rules of dialectic, rhetoric and poetry to examine and clarify generally accepted opinions, and to persuade and arouse the audience to embrace and endorse certain views and courses of action or to reject and abhor others.

The pioneers of Shīʿī theology seem to have begun to propagate theological views during the middle of the second/eighth century. By that time, distinct branches of the Shīʿah had emerged. All of these believed that ʿAlī b. abī Ṭālib (reigned 35-40/656–61) was the most excellent (afḍal) after the Prophet and that he should have been the caliph or imam. The party which supported his claims and the claims of his family (abl al-bayt) for the leadership of the community became known as the Shīʿah (originally shīʿat ʿAlī, the party of ʿAlī). ʿAlī did eventually attain the caliphate and was succeeded briefly by his elder son al-Hasan, whose mother was Fāṭimah, daughter of the Prophet. When al-Hasan, who was forced to abdicate by Muʿāwiyah b. abī Sufyān (reigned 41–60/661–80), died, the Shīʿah called on his brother al-Ḥusayn to lead them in revolution against Muʿāwiyah. Al-Ḥusayn did not embark on action until after the death of Muʿāwiyah, when he answered the call of his supporters in Kufa to lead them in revolution against Muʿāwiyah's son Yazīd (reigned 60–4/680–3). The revolution proved a catastrophe and al-Ḥusayn and many of his close relatives were tragically killed at Karbalāʾ by vastly superior forces as they were on their way to Kufa (61/680). Only one son of al-Ḥusayn, ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn (d. 95 / 713–4), survived this disaster, and for the rest of his life he seems to have followed a quiescent policy towards the Umayyad authorities.

BIOGRAPHY AND RELIGIOUS VIEWS

Medieval authors have left confused and contradictory biographical accounts of Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī (Rhazes), the most original physician–philosopher among the Arabic-speaking peoples. He was born in Rayy (near modern Tehran) probably in 251/865. Physicians, he believed, should practise in great cities which abound in patients and skilful medical men; hence his sojourn in Baghdad, where, in his youth, he studied and practised medicine at its hospital (bīmāristān). Later he returned to Rayy, at the invitation of its governor, al-Manṣūr b. Isḥāq, to assume responsibility as director of its hospital. To this ruler al-Rāzī dedicated his al-Kitāb al-Manṣūrīfīʾl-ṭibb (Liber ad Almansorem) and al-Ṭibb al-rūḥānī (“Spiritual Physic”). These two books were meant to be complementary: the former treats of diseases of the body, the latter, diseases of the soul.

Having achieved fame in Rayy, al-Rāzī returned to Baghdad to become head of its newly founded al-Muʿtaḍidī hospital, named after al-Muʿtaḍid (reigned 279–89/892–902). On account of political events, and in relation to high-ranking positions he had held, he resided on several occasions either in Baghdad or Rayy, but spent the last years of his life in Rayy suffering from glaucoma (al-māʾ), until he became blind and died in his birthplace around 313/925 or 320/932.

Al-Rāzī's self-restraint and modesty are best expressed in his own words, in al-Sīrah al-falsafiyjah:

The earliest juristic writings on Islamic law we possess date from the beginning of the second/eighth century. There exists little or no contemporary writing concerning the laws or customs of Arabia in the pre-Islamic era, except for some minor references in the historical works of classical authors. What we know of the pre-Islamic period is therefore gleaned from information appearing in the works of Islamic writers and later oral traditions.

The number of early Islamic legal works lost or suppressed must be considerable. Early Arabic bibliographies, such as Ibn al-Nadīm's Fihrist, list many hundreds of early works by jurists whose names are now only encountered in the works of their pupils. From time to time a new book or document, a fragment or minor text is discovered in the archives of the great libraries of Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul or north Africa, and it is likely that much more remains to be discovered.

The writings on law in the first two centuries of Islam fall into the following categories:

1. 1 The Qurʾān and the immense number of commentaries (tafsīr) that it generated.

2. 2 Collections of Traditions (Ḥadīth and books of āthār) concerning the behaviour of Muḣammad and his Companions.

3. 3 Books by the principal founders of the early schools of law, which deal in the main with sources of law (uṣūl al-fiqh), but particularly with the recognition given to subsidiary sources of law and the relation of the sources in cases of inherent conflict.

Astrology has had a deep and pervasive influence on the thought and culture of the Arabs and Persians; and it has also had effects on Arabic literature in that many metaphors and other tropes are based on the ideas and technical terminology of astrology. In another respect too it has been influential. Starting from the initial, now discredited, premise that astronomical events have a reflection in sublunary events, the astrologers sought to develop principles for the practical application of this premise by methods which include the matching of observed astronomical events with actual human events. This methodology, of relying on observation as a criterion for establishing general principles, is a strictly scientific one, and was a fruitful forerunner of the observational technique characteristic of true science and especially noteworthy in, for example, the clinical approach to medicine of Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī. At the same time, it must not be supposed that astrology had a total dominance over Arab thought. At all periods there were individuals who, for either religious or purely intellectual reasons, rejected the initial premise of astrology and consequently the whole of the art.

THE SOURCES OF ARABIC ASTROLOGY

Methods of predicting the future on the assumption that the motions of the heavenly spheres are the efficient causes of changes in the sublunar world of the four Empedoclean elements were developed in Hellenistic Egypt, and became the “science” or “mathesis” of the Roman empire; thence it spread to India and to Iran.

The medieval period witnessed a vigorous and variegated output of Arabic literature written by Jews, which in virtue of both its intellectual and linguistic enrichment of Jewish and Arabic culture deserves to be included in any historical survey of Arabic letters.

Judaeo-Arabic literature arose at a time when the majority of Jews lived beneath the dominion of Islam, when the latter itself was at the height of its cultural achievements. A decline began to set in at the end of the ʾAbbasid period, when the employment of Hebrew for literary purposes started to gain ground. There were two factors, one external, the other internal, that caused the decline of J udaeo-Arabic letters. First cultural introversion and a subsequent inadequacy in Classical Arabic, and secondly the fostering of an elaborate Hebrew culture in the wake of the Hispanic schools of translation, which was then propagated throughout the Mediterranean after the expulsions from Spain in 1391 and 1492. However a distinctly vernacular brand of Arabic continued to be written, albeit among the culturally less favoured classes, right down to modern times, when in the wake of the European enlightenment the Jews experienced a cultural renaissance (nahḍah) and the revival of a certain form of literary Arabic. In north Africa a “classicized vernacular” was employed to express the new themes inspired by the European Haskalah, whereas in the East the Arabic employed, sometimes in Arabic characters, was nearer the standard language.

The prose literature of Islamic mysticism, or Ṣufism, during the ʿAbbasid era is rich and varied. Distinct accomplishments can be credited to Ṣūfī writers who often did not shun the use of prevailing genres and styles of expression. In the face of criticism and pressures from the ulema, Ṣūfī authors often resorted to the oblique and enigmatic as tools of literary expression and ideological articulation. Beliefs were often couched in symbolical and allegorical references, and so thoroughly camouflaged at times that authors in the later centuries found it necessary to write their own commentaries.

Basically Ṣūfī writers were not particularly innovative with regard to prose categories. They favoured definitive and descriptive works, guidance and reference manuals, epistolary and instructional treatises and biographies and hagiographies. Their themes tended to explain and moralize, with heavy stress on the exemplary. Didactic techniques seem to govern most aspects of their writings, particularly in the later stages when instructing and guiding novices required much wisdom and exemplification.

On the defensive during much of the earlier centuries, Ṣufism generated a wealth of polemical and introspective literature. To enlist sympathy for their cause, Ṣūfīs developed a remarkable capacity for communication. In contriving the means, they contributed not only to literary norms but to the language as well, in the form of direct facile expressions which, in the long run, reduced the tendency toward affectation, subtlety and exaggeration.

The earliest surviving piece of Arabic literature which may fairly be described as an original geographical work is al-Masālik wa-ʾl-mamālik of Ibn Khurradādhbih, who was writing during the reign of the caliph āl-Muʿtamid (reigned 256–79/870–92). By this time half a century had elapsed since the death of the magnificent al-Maʾmūn who is generally credited with the generous encouragement of the arts and sciences, and more than two centuries since the Arabs had first had their eyes opened to the dazzling novelties of the world outside their arid and barren peninsula. Ibn Khurradādhbih's work describes a vast, well-organized and well-known empire and clearly it must have had some antecedents. Our knowledge of these, however, is extremely fragmentary.

As the Muslim empire grew and became increasingly difficult to administer, its leaders began to feel the need for recorded information about their territories, if only for fiscal and military purposes. It may be surmised that a great deal more information of this kind was written down than we have any knowledge of. There are a few scattered and uninformative hints as to this kind of activity, such as the caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-Azīz's ordering his newly appointed governor of Spain, in 100/718, to send him a description of “al-Andalus and its rivers”, for he had it in mind to evacuate the Muslims from that remote and dangerous territory.

One of the greatest thinkers of the classical Islamic age and the man who influenced Islamic thought after the sixth/twelfth century more than any other was Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. Led by Muʾtazilites and philosophers such as Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, Islamic thought had maintained certain modes of rationalism for 300 years; al-Ghazālī redirected it towards mysticism.

Today there are signs of al-Ghazālī's influence in the works of his successors including those of the great shaykh, Muḥyī ʾlDl-Dīn b. al-ʿArabī (560–638/1165–1240) who seems, at first glance, to have little in common with al-Ghazālī's conservatism. Al-Ghazālī's book Iḥyāʾ ʾulūm al-dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”), exceptional for its exalted tone of moral instruction, is still widely read in religious and learned circles and is occasionally reprinted in Cairo and Beirut. Of particular interest also is a shorter work called al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (“The Deliverer from Error”), which was written towards the end of his life and in which he describes certain periods of his life and summarizes his ideas on philosophy, mysticism and Ismacilism. In both these works, and in others also written in the last years of his life such as Ayjuhā ʾl-walad and al-Qisṭās al-mustacīm (“The Correct Balance”), al-Ghazālī blends mysticism with jurisprudence and theology with philosophy.

PUPIL AND TEACHER

Poor but well-educated, the young al-Ghazālī visited the great cities of his time: Jurjān, Naysābūr, Baghdad and Damascus, in order to gain more knowledge which he could share with others.

During the millennium which followed the introduction of mathematical astronomy from Indian, Sasanid and Hellenistic sources to the vigorous cultural scene of ʿAbbasid Iraq in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, Muslim astronomers compiled a remarkably rich and varied corpus of literature relating to their subject. Some of this literature survives in about 10,000 manuscript volumes preserved in the libraries of southwestern Asia, north Africa, Europe and the United States, and during the past 200 years a very small number of scholars has turned its attention to a fraction of this surviving material. Catalogues of varying quality exist for some library collections, but there are many important collections of scientific manuscripts which are not yet catalogued at all. Lists of medieval authors, titles of their works and available manuscripts thereof, have been prepared from these catalogues by H. Suter, C. Brockelmann, C. A. Storey and F. Sezgin.

No classification of the Islamic astronomical literature exists in the modern literature, and besides, the scope of this literature has only become known during the past few decades. The present chapter represents an attempt to fill this gap, and to discuss the different categories of Islamic astronomical literature, the variety of which reflects the keen interest of Muslim scholars in astronomy for over a millennium. Very little of the Islamic material was transmitted to Europe in the medieval period, and that which was transmitted was hardly representative of the whole.

As a result of the great conquests of the first century of Islam, the Arabs became the heirs of the ancient civilizations of western Asia and north Africa. They also inherited the links that those civilizations had maintained over the centuries with their neighbours, and thereby came into possession of a considerable corpus of written material covering a wide field of knowledge, including scientific subjects. Many Greek manuscripts were preserved in Byzantium, but the Byzantines did little more than preserve, and made few significant contributions to the progress of science. Of greater significance were the Greek schools set up in Asia Minor soon after the council of Nicaea in AD 325. The Nestorian church made one of these schools, that of Edessa, their scientific centre. In AD 489 this school was transferred to Nisibin, then under Persian rule, with its secular faculties at Jundishāpūr in Khūzistān. Here, the Nestorian scholars, together with pagan philosophers banished by Justinian from Athens, carried out important research in medicine, astronomy and mathematics. To assist in instruction a number of Greek works were translated into Syriac. At about the same time the sect of the Monophysites, who like the Nestorians were subject to persecution by the Orthodox church, were working on similar lines in Syria. They also made translations of philosophical and scientific works into Syriac. A group who were to provide some of the greatest translators and scientists of Islam were the Ṣabians of Ḥarrān in Mesopotamia.