Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video

0:03

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Welcome back everyone and welcome to our penultimate lecture. We have one more lecture after this one. We have a lot to cover in this particular lecture, so I'll be using most of the time up. So please try and bear with me and obviously you can review it again once it's uploaded. Today we want to talk about the early Abbasid period as the golden age of Arabic learning.

0:29

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So this is really one of the key ideas of the course, how Arabic learning has, in fact, influenced not just this region, but regions around the world and indeed global culture, more generally speaking. So that's really what we want to talk about in this lecture and the next lecture. So we want to split this up into two parts. One will begin with the importance of Baghdad and the golden edge of learning and how that happened, but primarily through translation.

0:59

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But we'll also talk about how that led us to the discussion of philosophy within the Muslim world.

1:06

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So two aspects. So the first part of it, though, when we talk about the golden edge and the translation movement, should also be seen as part of the next lecture, which is science. So from the golden edge and the translation movement, we move into this lecture with philosophy. But we can see it from the same perspective of the golden edge of learning and the translation movement leading us to science as well, because it's the same.

1:33

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

same kind of system, but we are just, you know, separating the topics out to make them more manageable. It's really kind of the idea here. Here then, we've looked at the Abbasids as caliphate. We've looked at their history and who was in charge and who was involved and what they did and what they achieved. We've also looked at their literature and the sense of the development of the types of literature we saw in a previous lecture when we were talking about

2:02

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

For example, the neoclassicist and the modernist poets and then the development of prose writing and so on. So in exactly the same period that we talked about all of that.

2:15

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

this was going on that I'm going to talk about today, which is commonly referred to as the golden age of Arabic learning. There is no doubt that that could easily be given as a title to Al-Andalus as well, because there was incredible things happening there too, but it is normally associated with the Abbasids and the early Abbasids in particular. So in that sense, that's what we want to talk about today. When we look at timelines of history,

2:46

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And in particular, I want to introduce the idea here today of something called intellectual history. So there are all sorts of different ways of looking at history, right? There's just the recounting of the facts, what the history was. There's also looking at, you know, what is the political history, who ruled and when and what they did and so on. And what we have been trying to look at really is intellectual history or to put it simply, the history of ideas and how ideas develop.

3:15

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

where they develop, how they transfer to other societies and cultures, and how then they reach us up until today. So when we look at the traditional model of intellectual history, especially in the Western and European context, this is the kind of model and timeline that we're given, right? This is certainly the model that I was taught, and I don't expect that it's changed that much since...

3:42

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

I was at school, quite frankly, because it is a very Eurocentric, Euro-dominant model. And how can I say that? Because we always start in that model looking at the Greeks and the Romans, over here up to about the 5th century.

4:00

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So you might study other things like the Egyptians and you might study other things like the Babylonians. But the primary focus when you look at early history is the Greeks and the Romans. And in a European sense, that actually is not a surprise because much of European and Western culture is Greco-Roman, right? In the sense that even languages, most of the European languages have an origin in some form of Latin.

4:28

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

right up until today. And similarly, many cultural ideas, like we talked about literature. So for example, if you talk about the classical heroic epic, definitely I will go to Homer and the Odyssey. It's a Greek work, right? So that's what I'm familiar with.

4:46

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Whereas, for example, if I was moreover in this part of the world, I would probably mention something like Gilgamesh in the Babylonian context, but I didn't even know about that until I was in my adulthood. So here we...

5:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The focus is always on the Greco-Roman world. And it leads in even to things like political structures and systems. So for example, in America, you have the Senate, right? And you have the House of Representatives. These are both Greco-Roman ideas. So right up until there, those ideas are influencing modern society. So we start with the Roman Empire and the end of the Roman Empire here in about the 5th century.

5:28

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And then they will move on actually to not the 16th, but rather the 15th century and something called the Enlightenment. When Europe became enlightened and intellectually open and more advanced, which led us to something called the Renaissance. And then that led us to the Industrial Revolution, which led us to modern day civilization. In fact, we are now postmodern. We're beyond modern because we've gone past that stage and now we're going to new.

5:56

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

phases of of intellectual development but what you notice even if i take it to the 15th century about here so it's fifth to 15th yeah fifth century the end of the roman empire to the 15th the beginning of the enlightenment what you notice here there is a thousand years that are missing that's an entire millennium of intellectual history where there's a gap

6:23

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

In fact, not only is there a gap, hence the question mark, but they refer to this period in Europe as the Dark Ages. So they refer to this as the Dark Ages, because from their perspective in Europe at that time, nothing was really happening. And that's how they view intellectual history and the development of their intellectual tradition. However, if we take the same time period,

6:52

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Okay, which is 5th century to about the 15th century. That, first of all, is exactly almost the time scale that we're looking at in our course. It's exactly the time scale where there's the rise of Islam and the Islamic world. And most importantly, it is the rise of the golden era of Arabic learning.

7:16

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So that is basically completely erased from this type of model of intellectual history. So here what we want to do is try and shed a little bit of light on what happened in that 1,000 years. We've been doing it actually so far. Okay, the rise of Islam.

7:35

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

stemming out of the pre-islamic period in arabia and then the development of these caliphates and then the development of literature so that's what we've done so far now we want to look at some other intellectual stuff that also developed in exactly the same time period in exactly the same thousand years in this incredible millennium that we have in this part of the world okay now when we look at the map so if we look at the map this is really the map

8:04

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

before the advent of Islam, okay? So even before Islam, there were cities like Damascus exist, Haran, Alexandria, Athens. This was actually called Constantinia, which is now modern-day Istanbul, which was the Byzantine Empire. We have the Persian Empire over here, probably more familiar with that.

8:27

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

map than ever before and actually baghdad let's pretend that didn't exist because it hadn't been developed yet so in this part of the world which is commonly referred to as the eastern mediterranean

8:40

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

you have various cities which were known for their intellectual activity. The most important, of course, would have been Athens, because Athens is the classical Greek city and capital right up until today, where a lot of this intellectual activity was taking place. Of course, with Alexander the Great conquering most of this region we're looking at and building and establishing the city of Alexandria, Alexandria became very, very important.

9:09

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

city in terms of intellectual activity. There was a library built there. There was the famous libraries of Alexandria where people studied and so on. And later on, with the development of the Byzantine Empire, there would have been Constantinia, which was the city in modern-day Istanbul. There was also, of course, Damascus. There was Haran and Antioch were the three other big ones within the context of this map.

9:36

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now, at the time, we've mentioned him briefly before in the story of Ibn al-Qais, there was a Byzantine emperor called Justinian. There was a Byzantine emperor called Justinian. Now, Justinian ruled in around the beginning of the 6th century. In actual fact, in 528, he took the momentum

10:00

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

this decision to establish christianity as a trinitarian doctrine

10:06

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

In other words, there were various forms of Christianity that were being practiced at the time. But in the early 6th century, he decided that all the Christianity that Byzantine as an empire would practice is Trinitarian, meaning the belief in three gods, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. That kind of idea, which is common to modern Christianity as well.

10:32

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Before that, there were other forms of Christianity, but he decided at that moment, that's what we're going to adopt and that's what we're going to practice in our empire. Now, immediately what that means, of course, is that every other form of Christianity now becomes marginalized and indeed persecuted. So everybody in this region who wasn't practicing that doctrine needed to move, essentially. So that's the first important thing.

11:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

to remember about what Justinian did. The other thing that Justinian did is that he decided, since we're now Christians, we no longer need this philosophy business that the Greeks were working on in the past. So what he did was he closed the schools of philosophy in Athens at that time. Now, if you're a philosopher, like any kind of...

11:27

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

activity that you're specialized in, you're not just going to give up philosophy, right? If I'm a professor, I'm not going to become a businessman if I'm not doing this anymore. I'm going to try to find another job as a professor, right? So in that sense, what we find here is that those philosophers did not retrain and do something else as someone might do today, but they continued pursuing philosophy.

11:53

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

They just moved as well. So the two decisions taken by Justinian to adopt Trinitarian Christianity and to close the schools of philosophy meant that those two groups of people, other groups of Christians and other groups of philosophers, had to move. And what they tended to do was move eastward. So they might go to Alexandria, they might go to Damascus.

12:21

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But one place that they often ended up and stayed in was a place here in the Persian Empire called Jundashapur. It was called Jundashapur. A place that you may probably have never ever heard of, but in terms of intellectual history, extremely important. So why is that? Jundashapur is extremely important because it was the equivalent of Athens in the Persian world. So Athens was the great...

12:50

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

center of learning and so on in the Greek world, the Greco-Roman world. And Junda Shapur was really this incredible intellectual center within the Persian world. So what happened was that many of the Christians fled the Byzantine Empire because they...

13:10

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

weren't really welcome there anymore and the philosophers left Athens and basically they moved eastwards and many of them ended up in this Persian intellectual hub called Jindashapur so this is pre-Islam this is happening now of course with the advent of Islam of course the

13:29

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The entire Arabian Peninsula and most of this area we're looking at on our map here would embrace the religion and so on. And eventually the city of Baghdad would be built between the two rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates, which led into the Arabian or Persian Gulf, depending on how you look at it, which is the point where everyone is focused on in modern news stories today.

13:57

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

That aside, let's go to Baghdad here. So Baghdad is established by the Abbasids, by Al-Mansur in particular, and around 750-ish as we know, right? So what we can see in this map is that actually Baghdad, when it was developed, was in the perfect position.

14:18

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

in the context of all of this intellectual activity in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East as we know it today. So it was near all of these big capitals like Athens, Byzantine, rather Constantinia, Alexandria, Damascus, Haran, and Junda Shapoor. So geography was a very important part in the sense that Baghdad was in the right place at the right time.

14:46

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

However, it cannot be the only factor because Damascus, which was the capital of the Umayyads, is also in a perfect position to become an intellectual capital. But in actual fact, that didn't really...

15:00

S… Speaker 3 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

happen okay so we have to look at why might Baghdad become this epicenter of the

15:09

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Golden Age, whereas Damascus didn't. And obviously the answer lies in, as you might already have guessed, that Damascus was under the Umayyads and Baghdad was under the Abbasids. And the attitudes of these two caliphates was very, very different, right? So as we saw earlier, that the Umayyads were essentially an Arab-orientated caliphate, right? They weren't that welcoming or they weren't that inclusive of other

15:39

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

peoples and languages and cultures even though they ruled over them okay so the as we said at the time that the people that they ruled over were essentially essentially disenfranchised but when the abbasids came in of course their power base was this area here which is modern day iran but what this area here which we can see

16:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

that occupies almost half of the map is what we call Khorasan. This is the area of Khorasan where the Abbasids got their power from and the people who brought the Abbasids into the Caliphate. So their revolution as we referred to it earlier. So the attitude of the Abbasids as we know for some time now is that they were very open to other cultures, other languages, other societies and even other religions as we'll see in a moment.

16:30

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So that made Baghdad particularly significant. So it was in the right place between these other intellectual capitals of the period, especially Janda Shapur, because it's very close to Persia, of course. And simultaneously, the attitude of the Abbasid Caliphs made it especially attractive for people to come in and pursue their intellectual ideas.

16:57

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

We already mentioned as well that the Abbasid period is very long. It's over 500 years. We have a primary area, the first Abbasid period, then the second Abbasid period, then the third Abbasid period, of course.

17:10

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And then what we have, of course, is that the initial period is very, very important. And this is the period that I think is the most significant. But a lot of the things that we discuss will also merge into the second Abbasid period. So the first and second periods are very, very important in terms of the golden age. But the primary innovations are made in that first period. The third period, of course, is a period of decline, both politically but intellectually. It was still very active, as we'll see over this lecture and the next one.

17:40

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The most important decision made by the early Abbasid Caliphs, especially Al-Mansur, of course, was the building of a new city, which became the focal point of people, and as a result became this intellectual epicenter hub and capital.

17:56

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And, you know, we can see from the image there, the round city that made Abbas and Baghdad famous. And if you think, I mean, a lot of you might be engineers, and especially structural engineers, building that in the 8th century couldn't have been very easy. But they managed to pull off something absolutely incredible. And so architecturally, they were incredibly advanced.

18:22

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Simultaneously, just to talk a little bit about the city of Baghdad, as we said, it didn't exist before the Abbasids and it was their new capital. And the word Baghdad is actually a Persian word. So it means the gift of God. So this city is the gift of God to the Caliphate and the gift of God to humanity really is the idea behind it. But it was also known by an Arabic name.

18:50

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Okay? So we've seen this before. We saw that the early Persian converts had Persian names and Arabic names like Ibn al-Khafa, right? So his name was Rosbah, if I remember correctly. And he adopted the name of Abdullah. Here Baghdad is similar. Baghdad is a Persian name, the gift of God. And they also adopted for the city the phrase Medina al-Salam. Literally, the city of peace.

19:17

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now immediately, if you're familiar a little bit with the Qur'an, you'll remember that in the Qur'an, paradise, so paradise is mentioned as dhar as-salam, right? Literally the abode of peace. So in that sense, really immediately the Abbasids are invoking that they're trying to build the gift of God.

19:44

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

to the Caliphate and humanity, and they're trying to create an earthly paradise. They're trying to create paradise on earth. So in that sense, this is also part of this kind of religious aura that was...

20:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

kind of around them. Remember, they adopted the names of the Prophet. They are from the family of the Prophet. And they were building the city in the context of trying to create an earthly paradise. So that's how people were perceived in Baghdad. It's very important to understand how they looked at it, right? We know it's an important capital even right up until today. But at the time, people were looking at this as something else, something special, if you like, in that sense.

20:28

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And it wasn't just Al-Mansur who developed the city. There were other contributions by his great-grandson, for example, who is Abdullah ibn al-Rashid, Harun al-Rashid, of course, and he was known as Al-Ma'moon. Now, if you look at Abbasid,

20:45

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Cultural history more broadly, of course, the most famous caliph was Harun al-Rashid, the father of this person we're talking about right now. Because he was a religious figure, he made pilgrimage one year and jihad the next year against the Byzantine Empire. He was known as a cultural figure because he appeared in the 1001 Knights. He appeared in...

21:05

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

He is mentioned as listening to the pietistic poetry of Abu al-Tahiyah by simultaneously being entertained by the wine poetry of Abu Nawas. So he's enshrined in the cultural history of the Abbasids. But in actual fact, we might say that his son here, Al-Ma'moon, is also enshrined in that history because he is associated with something called the Bayt al-Hikmah or the House of Wisdom.

21:35

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now it's debated as to what this was exactly, but what we are told, the traditional story at least, is that the Beit al-Hikmah essentially was this translation center, a specialized institution where books were translated and then studied and then stored, which we can see in the image there. You can see the shelves at the back, and they're supposed to be the books. That's how they stored books back in the day, only they laid them flat.

22:01

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

and the people at the front they're translating studying and reading and so on so this is like a kind of like a translation center it's a library it's a storehouse for knowledge is really kind of the idea that we're given and we are told again it's not probably uh that accurate that it was al-ma'moon through haruna rasheed's son who built this institution

22:27

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

the evidence seems to suggest this was probably more like a royal library because that was common at the time that every dynasty had a royal library and no doubt that translation was taking place there but it wasn't probably this separate dedicated institute that were given the impression of and this is why of course

22:46

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

In Sharjah, we have a house of wisdom because it's based on this idea of a place where you can go and read and study and consult the library entries and so on. That's really kind of the idea. So they've tried to reimagine this in modern-day Sharjah, which is not far from us. It's like a short drive away. But the idea comes from Abbas al-Baghdad. So what was happening in the Bayt al-Hikmah?

23:14

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

at least as far as we understand. The primary role of Bayt al-Hikmah is that of translation. So we see another kind of imagining of this, rather, on the right-hand image there, that there was this research center with all this intellectual activity going on with the books stored at the back. When we look at the Bayt al-Hikmah, we are told that its first...

23:42

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

director or the first person in charge of it was someone called Yuhanna Ibn Masaway. Yuhanna Ibn Masaway was the first director of the Bayt al-Hikmah. And history also tells us that Yuhanna Ibn Masaway was in charge of the Royal Library. So this is where the crossover occurs, of course. Here, Yuhanna Ibn Masaway, you might figure out from the name,

24:08

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

if you know a little bit of Arabic, that actually that's not an original Arabic name. In fact, he was a Christian, Yuhana meaning John. So John, the son of Masawai. So the Masawai family were a prominent Christian family within Baghdad at the time. They had migrated from, many of these Christian families had migrated from Jundashapur, remember that place that we just mentioned. So that Jundashapur became like a source.

24:36

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

for a lot of these people coming into Baghdad, which was this new, developing, innovative intellectual society. And one of the most important figures associated with the Beit al-Hikmah indeed was the student of Yuhanna ibn Masaway, even though their relationship was really problematic. I can't go into the details here.

25:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

didn't get on that well is really the point but his student was the most important translation figure in Abbasid Golden Age is someone called Hunayn Ibn Ishaq so if you're asked in an exam for example that who is the most important figure in the translation movement definitely we should be describing or you should be selecting an answer that mentions Hunayn Ibn Ishaq

25:25

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And as I said, he was the student of the first director of the Baytul Hikmah, Yuhanna ibn Masaway. He himself was also a Christian. So that we see, in actual fact, these people who were involved in the translation movement were primarily not Arabs, first of all, and they weren't even Muslims.

25:47

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Many of them were Nestorian Christians, an Eastern form of Christianity. Remember, this was a form of Christianity that was now being persecuted after Justinian's decision to close the schools of Athens and adopt, rather, a Trinitarian view of Christianity. So these people had already migrated to other places like Junda Shapoor, and now we're starting to see them appear in Abbasid Baghdad.

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S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

undertaking incredibly important translation efforts. Just a few facts about him, he translated more than 31 books.

26:29

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So that's a lot. I mean, if you wrote 31 books, you'd be incredibly happy. If I wrote 31 articles as a professor, I'd be very happy, let alone 31 books. So the fact that he translated 31 books, which in often cases is more time consuming because you have to double check across the languages and so on, is incredibly important. Now, I want to introduce an idea here, which is the idea of polymath.

26:53

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

okay the idea of polymath as it sounds poly meaning many math means science so so many scientists if someone is a polymath they know a number of scientists

27:06

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And almost everyone we'll discuss in this lecture and in the next lecture are polymaths. They aren't just good at one thing. Like nowadays, we specialize in one field. So you have your major and that's what you focus on. At that time, learning was different. Learning was across fields, across disciplines.

27:26

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

and interactive. You know, you didn't just study engineering. You studied engineering, you studied literature, you studied this. You know, like the general education prong, the idea behind the general education prong is to give you a more broad education across disciplines. So they were more like that. In fact, they were very, very good at various things. And Hunayn was an example of one of these polymaths. So he translated lots of stuff related to philosophy, logic, and so on. But his specialist field...

27:55

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

was actually medicine. In fact, he was a doctor. And at some stage of his career, he was the official doctor of the Abbasid Caliph. He was that good. So in actual fact, his focus in translation was the translation of medical texts.

28:12

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And the most important medical works that were from the Greek period were written by Galen, a person called Galen. So who's the most important medical author in the ancient Greek world? A figure called Galen. And his books constituted what's called the Alexandrian corpus. There was a group of books in Alexandria, that incredibly important capital, that were studied as part of medicine.

28:42

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So basically Hunayn translated all of those books into Arabic for the very first time. So that's very important to bear in mind, that he basically translated the entire medical history of the Greek world into Arabic, even though that he himself was neither an Arab nor even a Muslim.

29:07

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The other thing that we know about him that we're told is part of the legend is that he earned 500 dinars per month. Now, 500 dinars are 500 gold coins.

29:20

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And if someone offered you that salary now, you'd be incredibly happy because that's a lot of money because of the gold price at the current time, right? Although it's gone down a little bit. So here, 500 gold coins now would be a lot of money. So you can imagine approximately, you know, a thousand years ago, what it would have been at that time. It was an incredible salary. He was incredibly wealthy as a result of his translation activities.

29:49

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

because now we don't really pay a lot of attention to translation as an activity because of course translation it can be done by google or some other ai entity but that

30:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

At that time it was considered a genuine skill and people were willing to pay for the privilege of having material translated.

30:08

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The other thing that we're told is part of his legend is that he was given the amount of gold equivalent to the amount of books that he translated. In other words, his base salary, as we call it now, is 500 dinars per month or 500 gold coins. And his bonus, to encourage him to do more, was an amount of gold equivalent to the books he translated. So, for example, if I bring a book,

30:35

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

I've got one on my desk here. So if I bring this book and I've translated it and I put it on the scales and it weighs a kilo, which many books do, or half a kilo, then I'll get the equivalent of that in gold. I'll get a kilo of gold. So you can imagine there was an incredible incentive to translate as much as possible. So he did a fantastic base salary and then he got a massive bonus if he published these books.

31:04

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So in that sense, we can see that the emphasis on translation was incredibly important under the Abbasids. But this also tells us some other things, right? So if we were to ask, for example, who's paying these salaries? I mean, this is an incredible salary package, right? Who's paying for that?

31:26

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now, the obvious answer might be the caliph. And in many cases, it was the caliph, right? The caliphs were supporting, you know, this intellectual activity and indeed many other intellectual activities that I'll mention in a moment. But at the same time, you know, that would have been incredibly difficult to get and incredibly competitive, right?

31:49

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So what we've seen before is that the ambition of people was to get into the caliph's court and become like a court poet or a court secretary and things like that. So you can imagine the competition to become the court translator for these intellectual works. The competition must have been fierce.

32:10

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And in actual fact, there were groups of translators who were in actual fact, like nowadays we call them research teams. So like a research team of translators who were competing with each other for these salaries and in actual fact.

32:24

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But what we also know is that it wasn't just caliphs who were sponsoring this activity. We call sponsoring, in a kind of more traditional sense, patronage. In other words, you have a patron, someone who's going to support the work. We've seen this idea before under the Abbasid literature, right? So the most significant patron who wasn't a caliph in literature was Saif al-Dawla, right? Because Saif al-Dawla was the governor of Damascus.

32:54

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And he was the patron of both Al-Isfahani, who dedicated to his patron the Kitab al-Aghani, or Book of Songs. And also he was the patron of Al-Mutanabbi. So in the same court, the court of the governor of Damascus, you have the greatest Arabic poet and one of the greatest prose writings ever written. So being a patron or sponsor...

33:19

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

of intellectual activity and cultural activity became a thing now because the Abbasid Caliphs were doing it. And other people who were rich, like governors or even businessmen, the most famous sponsors of translation in the Abbasid period are a group of three brothers called the Ben Musa.

33:38

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

literally the sons of Moses. So these three brothers were scientists and scholars in their own right, and they were keen and anxious to get books translated so they could continue their intellectual pursuits. So they were very, very happy sponsors of the translation movement. So patronage becomes key.

34:02

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Patronage became important in literature, has always been important in literature, as we've seen in the past, when people became, quote, poets and so on, right up until the time of the Abbasids, which we've just mentioned Saifadawla. But now they're also patronizing not just literature and culture, but they're patronizing intellectual activities as well, like translation. So that's an important point to bear in mind. Under the Abbasids, patronage becomes a key...

34:30

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

feature of the Abbasid Empire. Something else that we need to bear in mind here is that Hunayn Ibn Ishaq. Why Hunayn Ibn Ishaq and why are these Nestorian Christians undertaking the translations, right? So here there's an actual, a cultural and a religious reason why that's the case. Now we are often given the idea that translation would have taken

35:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

from greek or persian or indian languages like sanskrit directly into arabic but direct translation wasn't that common actually okay direct translation from greek into arabic wasn't that common in actual fact it often took place through an intermediary language and that intermediary language was syriac

35:24

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So we might imagine Greek into Arabic, right? But actually what happened was Greek into Syriac, Syriac into Arabic. So there was an intermediary language in between. Greek, Syriac, Syriac into Arabic. Now, there's a couple of things to note about that. First of all, why did that happen? Why were they using this intermediary language of Syriac, and why didn't they just translate directly from Greek into Arabic?

35:53

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The first point is that these Nestorian Christians who were the translators were experts in Syriac. In fact, Syriac was their language, especially the language of their religion. Their Bible is written in Syriac, for example. They spoke Syriac. It was their liturgical and religious language. And as I said, when we discussed...

36:16

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

semitic languages earlier is that sirik has still spoken in some christian communities in the middle east and this is the reason why because that it's the language of their religion right the clue the second point the clue to the second point isn't what i've just said

36:34

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The second reason why the intermediary language was used is because that Syriac is a Semitic language. It is much easier to translate from Syriac into Arabic, right, than it is from Greek into Arabic. I mean, Greek has its own Cyrillic script. It's a different language structure altogether. But if I already have a Syriac text,

36:58

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

a text in a Semitic language, obviously that's going to be easier to translate into another Semitic language, i.e. Arabic, than it is from the original Greek. In addition, as I already said, that many of these translators, like Hunayn and others, and there were many, by the way, so you have, you know, Abu Bashamat ibn Yunus, there's a few mentioned, ibn al-Himsi and so on, there were many of them.

37:26

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Many of them who were Syriac speaking. So they would have already translated into Syriac for their own use. Or the use of their Syriac community. So the text already existed. There is no need to translate it again.

37:44

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Okay, and as I said, it was easier to translate it from Syriac into Arabic because the languages are much closer. So in actual fact, Hussein, Hunayn rather, he had two revenue streams, right? He had a revenue stream where he was translating Greek works into Syriac for the Syriac-speaking community who were primarily doctors. So the Nestorian Christian doctors were asking him for translations which he would provide and charge them for.

38:13

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And then later when the Abbasids and others around the Abbasids became interested in this, he started translating the Syriac works into Arabic, which was incredibly lucrative for him. He made a lot of money out of it, as we can see in the slide here. And in fact, the final point that I want to mention here is that Hunayn didn't act alone. He had a translation team. So he had a translation team that included his son Ishaq and his nephew Hubeysh.

38:44

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

and his student Isa Ibn Yahya. So they were a team who worked together because when translation is done that way, it becomes more accurate and more valuable. And in actual fact, Hunayn Ibn Ishaq's Arabic wasn't...

38:59

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

you know, the top level. His Arabic was okay. He's actually, it was his Greek that was fantastic. He had the best Greek among the translation community at the time. So he would translate primarily from Greek into Syriac, and then his son Isaac would translate from Syriac into Arabic. So this team effort brought the translations into being and made them available in Arabic for the very, very first time. And no one had seen them before. So they were incredibly, you know,

39:28

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

excited about seeing this material from the ancient Greek tradition now available in Arabic for the first time so if we were to ask the question which could possibly come up in an exam it has done in the past why was it why did the translation movement and why did the golden age occur under the Abbasids

39:50

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Several reasons. First of all, they built their capital of Baghdad in a perfectly situated geographical location.

40:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

among the existing intellectual traditions of the day. But that's not the only reason, as we already mentioned. The other reason, of course, was the Abbasid's attitude to other cultures and religions and languages and so on, which was very open. And as a result, people came into their society and offered the services and intellectual traditions of their own peoples.

40:27

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

key factor, of course, is this idea of patronage. The idea that they were willing to sponsor this activity. They were willing to pay. They were willing to foot the bill. So in other words, they were willing to pay for how these works translated. But that's not the only thing, as we'll see in a moment. They were willing to pay for an institution like the Beit al-Hikmah to be developed.

40:49

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

They were willing to have libraries developed. They were willing to have the final point here, which is paper. Because up until the Abbasids, around 150ish of the Hijri period, there was no paper, right? We talked about the difficulty of recording the Quran and the Hadith and other things as well as pre-Islamic Arabia.

41:11

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

This poetry not being able to be written down for many centuries to later, passed down orally, because there was no paper, right? People were able to read and write now more than they were before, but there was nothing to write on. So how did that change? There was a battle called the Battle of Teles, where in the battle, the Abbasids captured some Chinese prisoners of war.

41:38

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now, of course, China has had paper for centuries by this point, if not millennia. So those prisoners essentially taught the Abbasids how to make paper.

41:48

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And paper was much less expensive than the existing forms of writing materials. It was easier to produce than those writing materials, and they could be mass-produced. And in actual fact, the Abbasids were not only delighted to know how to make paper, that they mass-produced paper. So in addition to footing the bill for these incredible translations and paying the translation scholars, and building institutions like the Beit al-Hikmah,

42:16

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

according to the traditional story, they also built paper mills. And there were paper mills across Baghdad. So paper began to be mass produced. So think about it. How could Hunayn translate if there was nothing to translate onto? Now, this was an incredible development, an incredible development in terms of technology.

42:38

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now, we don't look at paper that way now because paper is everywhere. In fact, we're beyond paper. We've gone to digital, right? So at that time, the way we look at like an iPad or something is how they looked at paper, an incredibly powerful tool that they could now develop their intellectual activity on. And that was the final thing that the Abbasids contributed. So they built a capital in the right place.

43:04

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

They had the perfect attitude. They were willing to pay and foot the bill for the activity. They were willing to build the institutions that it needed. And they were willing to develop the mass production of paper as a result. So all of these things contributed to this golden age. Now, in addition to the...

43:32

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

translation of medical works which is what Huneno contributed of course now we had other things from the Greeks that was also being translated and one of those things is philosophy which brings us to the topic of our lecture today so in other words what I've discussed so far can be seen as an introductory section

43:51

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

to how we get philosophy, but it can also be seen as an introductory section to how we get science in the next lecture, because it's the same background, right? And these people, as I said, were polymathic. They wrote across disciplines. So they didn't specifically look at philosophy. They looked at medicine. They looked at science. They looked at a range of topics.

44:13

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

However, you must mention, of course, there were various forms of philosophy in the Greek world, and the three big ones on the right here, which we can see, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they were the three biggest, most famous.

44:27

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

greek philosophers from the ancient tradition but of course there were others there are many others here and you might be surprised to find out there was one called pythagoras because you probably know pythagoras from mathematics especially trigonometry and pythagoras's theorem so again he was a polymath

44:47

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

came up with a very significant geometric theory, but simultaneously he was a philosopher. So these people, as I said, studied across disciplines and were interdisciplinary.

45:01

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The most important form of philosophy that the Muslims really encountered in translation was something called Neoplatinism.

45:11

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

which was the last of the great classical schools that we just mentioned, and indeed was a synthesis of them. So it was a synthesis of Platonism, the teachings of Plato, Aristotelianism, the teachings of Aristotle, and Pythagoreanism, the teachings of Pythagoras, and something called Stoicism, which was the teachings of the Stoics. The Stoics were a group of philosophers from ancient times. So this was the last form of...

45:40

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

philosophy that existed before justinian closed the schools of philosophy in athens this was the last form that we have okay but what is um or who uh rather is the the kind of big thinker behind neoplatonism so neoplatonism was founded by someone called platinus

46:03

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So he's the big thinker behind Neoplatinism. And he tried to use Plato's thought as an intellectual basis for a rational and humane life. And in that time, in that part of the world,

46:17

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

People didn't really, they wrote some things down themselves, but their ideas were mostly recorded by the students. So that's the significance of students, of course. And it was his student, Profiri, who assembled his teachings in a book called The Six Anayads. So who is the big thinker behind Neoplatanism? Platanus. Who wrote it down? Who wrote his ideas down? His student, Profiri. Well, they're written down in a book called The Six Anayads.

46:47

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But what is Neoplatinism? And what we find is that it is principally a type of idealistic monism. It states that the ultimate reality of the universe is held together by an infinite, incognitable, yani unknowable, perfect one. Now looking at that superficially, it sounds a lot like what Muslims believe, right? So that was one of the reasons why they were interested in this.

47:14

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But we'll notice here that the word is monism. Whereas Muslims believe in monotheism. So they look the same. They even sound a little bit the same. But there's a key difference here, isn't there? Mono, one. D-A is the word for God in Greek. Okay, ism. So in that sense, they believe in one God.

47:37

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Muslims believe in more God as we've already established in previous lectures. But here we notice that this Neoplatonism doesn't say that. It believes that there is one overarching principle governing the universe, but they never call it God. So in this sense, we have some similarity, but we also have a fundamental difference.

48:02

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So philosophy in the Islamic context has always been about trying to reconcile this fundamental difference. The fundamental difference between reason, the philosophical method, and revelation, the religious method. So trying to reconcile religion and philosophy. Or as they say, reason and revelation. So the attempt to reconcile these two things.

48:31

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

is really the idea of philosophy. And different people had different approaches to it. Some people tried to produce a synthesis. Some people tried to produce a reconciliation. Some people weren't fully in the religious sense. Some of them were fully in the philosophical sense. Different approaches. And we'll talk about each one of those.

48:53

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The first Muslim Arab philosopher is someone called Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ashaq Al-Kindi. We can just refer to him as Al-Kindi to make it simple. We can see that his death is just at the end of the early Abbasid period or the primary Abbasid period. Again, the dates of death are not so important. It's more the sequence. And more importantly, who they are and what they contributed.

49:17

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So he, in actual fact, is al-Kindi. He's from the tri-Arab tribe of al-Kinda, which we've already seen before, right? Okay, the royal tribe of Kindah was the tribe which Imr al-Qais was from and was trying to seek revenge for the death of its leader, who was his father. So they're from, ironically, we have a pre-Islamic poet and the first Arab.

49:41

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

philosophers from the same tribe he was a very kind of like intellectual individual his father was an Abbasid kind of administrator and he had one of the best educations and was incredibly gifted in terms of learning as a result of that he became the person

50:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

tutor to one of the Abbasid princes and in that role he wrote a book called or on first philosophy okay and in that book he tries to summarize what he understood from the translations of Aristotle so basically the first engagement in Arabic with philosophy by Al-Kindi is trying to summarize the teachings of Aristotle

50:27

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Because of this activity, he is known by the honorific title of Fayla Suf al-Arab, or the philosopher of the Arabs, because he was the first one, right? Okay? But he certainly wasn't the only one. And the next figure, he... So in other words, basically, essentially, Al-Kindi is trying to provide this kind of reconciliation between Aristotelian philosophy and Islam.

50:54

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

The next figure, though, is highly problematic in many respects. He's called Mohammed bin Zakaria al-Razi, or more commonly referred to, so the common name, Abu Bakr al-Razi. He was a Persian polymath, again, not an Arab. Polymath, he studied lots of things. He was a physician, he was a doctor, he was an alchemist, he was a chemist, he was a philosopher, and a scholar more generally. And we'll see him again in science in the next lecture, in actual fact.

51:23

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But what we want to look at here is what is his contribution and attitude towards philosophy. In actual fact, unlike Al-Kindi, who focused on Aristotle's teachings, he was really kind of someone who engaged more with Plato and Socrates, especially Plato. And he basically denied the nature of revealed religion. In other words, he went too far to the other extreme.

51:47

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

okay he went to the extreme of following philosophy to the expense of religion and he left religion in the end because he followed plato's idea that there are five eternal principles okay five eternal principles what are the five eternal principles god the soul matter space and time okay so he said these things have always existed now of course in

52:13

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

It sounds fine in theory, but of course from a Muslim's perspective, the only thing that has always existed is God. These other things that he's talking about, like the soul and matter and time and space, in actual fact were created later by God. They're not co-eternal. So in that sense, he compromised his Islamic teachings and as a result left the religion. Nevertheless, he later influenced a group of philosophers who came later on called

52:42

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

the brethren of sincerity or purity or the Ikhwan As-Safa. So he influenced their thinking in the, I think, 53 epistles, if I'm not mistaken. So we have someone here who chose philosophy over religion. So Kindi tried to provide this kind of reconciliation between religion and philosophy. Here we have someone who sacrificed his religion and followed philosophy. And that's the danger of it, of course.

53:12

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Here we have the next development, which is something called a Muslim Neoplatonism. In other words, we just talked about Neoplatonism as a Greek idea and an ancient Greek philosophy. But what we find here is an actual fact that there were two Muslims, particularly, who tried to provide a synthesis or a reconciliation between Neoplatonic philosophy and Muslim beliefs and come up with something called a Muslim Neoplatonism.

53:42

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So they were primarily, the first of those was Al-Farabi. Abu Nasr, Muhammad ibn Muhammad Al-Farabi, or just Al-Farabi.

53:51

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

who is commonly referred to as the second teacher. His second teacher. Because of his contributions, as we can see here, to logic. The first teacher in logic, of course, is Aristotle. So the first teacher in logic is Aristotle. The second teacher is Al-Farabi. And he indeed wrote 43 books on logic. So his contribution in that sense is huge. But he wrote on other things like music and metaphysics and ethics and politics.

54:17

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And perhaps his most famous work is something called the Medina Tal Fadila or the Virtuous City, where he talks about how a city should be developed and how it should be differentiated and stratified. We need bakers, we need teachers, we need bankers, we need finance people, we need businessmen, all the different roles in society that one needs. And he says, ideally speaking,

54:44

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

that the Medina or the city should be ruled by a prophet. But in the absence of a prophet, it should be a philosopher. Because he knows the model of Medina and the messenger and how that was.

55:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And then his argument, I mean, how many of the caliphs can we consider to have been philosophers? Probably not that many. But in his perspective, the best person to rule the virtuous city is a philosopher. The person who advanced Muslim Neoplatinism, perhaps the most, even more than Al-Farabi, is someone called Ibn Sina. Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdullah. Ibn Sina. Okay, so that's his name, Ibn Sina.

55:28

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

but he is commonly referred to by his Latinized name Evicina.

55:34

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So immediately we need to look here and see if we find someone who has a Latinized name, it means that person's works were translated into Latin later and became familiar to the Europeans. So that's definitely the case with Ibn Husina. And he wrote a variety of works on philosophy where he advanced this synthesis between Islamic faith, Islamic beliefs, and Neoplatinism of Plotinus, which we saw before.

56:04

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Here it's worth mentioning, and I mean I could have mentioned it in the next lecture really, is that he's also a famous polymath. In fact, Ibn Husina or Avicina, for most people, is most famous as a doctor.

56:16

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So he is famous for a book called The Canon of Medicine, or Al-Qanun of the Tab, which is a 14-volume Arabic medical encyclopedia. So again, we started to see now with the advent of paper and the development of time to work on things, not living in this desert environment and moving around anymore, that we have people writing multi-volume works. So we've seen multi-volume works.

56:43

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

in literature but now we're seeing multi-volume works in other fields as well especially medicine in this context so you know we're talking about abhi sina in the context of philosophy and his contribution excuse me to a muslim neoplatonism but we could easily give an entire lecture an actual fact on how he contributed to medicine because this book the qanun or the canon of medicine was the medical textbook

57:12

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

in europe for centuries literally when it was translated into latin later okay so was everybody happy with this engagement with philosophy and the attempt to synthesize muslim beliefs and ancient greek wisdom

57:33

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Evidently, they won't. Not everyone was happy with it. And one person who was definitely not happy with it was a traditional Muslim scholar called Al-Ghazali, or Abu Hamad Muhammad, Ibn Muhammad, and Muhammad Al-Ghazali Atusi. So we just call him Abu Hamad Al-Ghazali, or Al-Ghazali for short. He was not satisfied with this attempt to synthesize philosophy and religion. And in actual fact, he found some aspects of philosophy incredibly problematic.

58:03

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

We should bear in mind here that philosophy in that time meant a broad range of things or polymathic things that we mentioned just before. So philosophy included in its broad umbrella things like mathematics, logic, medicine and other fields of science that we're familiar with today. So philosophy included all of that.

58:26

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So when we are talking about philosophy, there were aspects of philosophy he thought were fine and there was no issue with them. And in particularly, he loved the field of logic.

58:37

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

But there were aspects of philosophy which he didn't really like at all. And they usually relate to something called metaphysics. Metaphysics is basically unseen things. So philosophers think that you can arrive at those unseen ideas like paradise and the hereafter through logic or through rational inquiry, right? Whereas a theologian like Abu Hamad al-Ghazali believes you can only know about those things through revelation.

59:06

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So that's the tension I talked about earlier, that you can know unseen things through rational inquiry, or can you only know them through revelation? And that was his position. You can only know about those unseen matters through religious texts. Now, of course, as a theologian and traditional Muslim scholar, the first accusation that would be given against him

59:30

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

if he tried to refute philosophy or criticize it, is that this isn't your field, right? You're not a philosopher. That's our field. So, you know, in this sense, what he did first was he wrote a book called Maqasad al-Philasabh called The Objectives of the Philosophers. Yeah, The Objectives of the Philosophers. And in there, what he did was perfectly describe what philosophers think, especially Muslim Neoplatonists.

1:00:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Like Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. Okay, so he's describing the teachings of Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In fact, when the book was translated in Latin later, the Europeans thought he was a philosopher. They referred to him as Al-Ghazali, the philosopher. Whereas in actual fact, he wasn't a philosopher. He was just describing what philosophers think.

1:00:23

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

to prove that he understood everything okay and the second stage of his project was in actual fact to destroy philosophy to refute it which he did in a second text called

1:00:39

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Okay, literally the destruction of the philosophers or as it's often referred to, the incoherence of the philosophers. In other words, how their thinking is incoherent, it doesn't make sense. So in that book, he basically refutes the Muslim Neoplatonism of Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina in 20 points.

1:01:04

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And in those 20 points, he finds that 17 of them are essentially something which some group of Muslims have said at some point in history. But there are three issues which he says, in actual fact,

1:01:17

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

absolutely unacceptable within the context of Islam. And if a philosopher was to believe in them, he wouldn't be considered one of the Muslim community. So what are those three issues? The first issue is something called the eternity of the world. The eternity of the world. Qidham al-Alam as it's referred to in Arabic. Here, this is the idea that some philosophers believe

1:01:45

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

That the world has always existed. The world that we live in has always existed as God has always existed. So God and the world are co-eternal, right? They've always existed and they've always been around and they've always been together.

1:02:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now, the problem with that, of course, is that from a Muslim's perspective, is that in the Islamic faith, in the Islamic belief system, it is God who created the world at a certain point in time. The world didn't always exist. And that's a major problem for someone who's a Muslim theologian, as we can see here. In fact, we know that God created the world ex nihilio, as it's referred to sometimes in your book. Ex nihilio essentially means from nothing.

1:02:30

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So basically the world didn't exist and then God created it from nothing. That's really kind of the idea here. So in that sense, al-Ghazali found this completely unacceptable because from a Muslim's perspective, the world has not always existed and has not been co-eternal with God, but indeed God created it in a certain point in time. The second issue which Imam al-Ghazali had with the philosophers is this issue called God's knowledge of particulars.

1:03:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So this is a very fancy way of saying that God knows everything, because some philosophers didn't believe that. Some philosophers didn't believe that God knows everything. For example, what time you woke up this morning, or what you had for breakfast, or what time you went to sleep exactly last night. God doesn't need to know those fine details. He knows everything in a general sense, but the fine details, he doesn't need to know them.

1:03:25

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now, of course, in the Islamic faith tradition, Allah has a name which is Al-Alim, which is the omniscient, literally the all-knowing. There is nothing that Allah does not know. So in this sense, this was highly problematic. And in that sense, Imam Al-Ghazali completely rejected it. In fact, in the Quran, we are told, of course, in no uncertain terms, that if a leaf was to fall from a tree,

1:03:54

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

then he would know it. Now, of course, this is referring to autumn or what the Americans called the fall when the trees lose their leaves, right? So in other words, how many trees are in the world? Millions, if not billions. How many leaves on those trees? Billions. How many of them fall and where do they fall and when do they fall and how many fall? Now, this, according to Muslim faith and according to the Quran, is known by Allah.

1:04:23

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Okay, simultaneously we find in the Hadith, if there was a black ant on a black rock in the midst of night, something that is undetectable, he would know it. So in this sense, we find that, you know, from a Muslim's faith perspective, God knows everything. It's not acceptable to say that he doesn't, you know, he knows certain things.

1:04:43

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And the final one is this idea of the bodily resurrection. So the bodily resurrection was denied by certain philosophers. In other words, they believed that resurrection would only be souls. And their argument was a purely rational one. They said if all the bodies were resurrected, then there would just be no...

1:05:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

place for them and of course that is you know and it's not a very strong argument and in fact in the islamic faith system there is this belief that the body will be resurrected and recombined with the soul and then that body and soul will go forward together into the year after so on these three points the eternity of the world god's knowledge of particulars and the bodily resurrection imam al-gazali completely rejected philosophy as articulated by

1:05:31

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

the Neoplatanism associated with Al-Farabi and Ibn Husina. Now, we also have the world of Muslim Spain in the Islamic Caliphate of the West, right? Okay, and Al-Andalus. So was any of this philosophical activity going on there? Yes, indeed it was. In fact, we had many philosophers associated with the philosophical tradition, but in Muslim Spain.

1:06:00

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And there are many mentioned in your book, like Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Ubadjah. But by far the most important and most significant and famous is this figure called Ibn Rushd. Okay, Abul Waleed, Muhammad, Ibn Ahmad, Ibn Rushd. Who is commonly referred by his Latinized name in English, Averroes. So don't get Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd mixed up. And don't get mixed up by the Sina.

1:06:27

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

and Averroes, okay, because they're two very different people. Ibn Rushd was a dedicated scholar of Islamic law. In fact, he was the Qadi or the chief judge of both Cordoba and Seville. So in that sense, he's a traditional Muslim scholar. But the surprising thing about him a little bit is that he was also a dedicated

1:06:54

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

student of philosophy in particular aristotelian philosophy so the teachings of aristotle to the extent that he wrote detailed commentaries on aristotle and that earned him the title of the common commentator literally

1:07:11

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So he said to have written three commentaries on all the works of Aristotle, a rudimentary commentary, an intermediate commentary, and an advanced commentary on every work that he wrote. So in other words, he was a dedicated student of Aristotle in this sense. And he attempts to refute Imam al-Ghazali with a book called Tahafut al-Tahafut, or literally The Incoherence of the Incoherence, or his attempts, as it says, The Harmony of Religion and Philosophy.

1:07:41

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So this idea of a synthesis and indeed reconciliation between the two. Now, the first thing that springs to mind is, well, didn't Imam al-Ghazali do a good job? In fact, obviously he did a good job. So how was Ibn Rushd able to refute Imam al-Ghazali in his Tahafat al-Philasifah? Well, it comes down to the fact that Imam al-Ghazali, what was he refuting? He was refuting Muslim Neoplatonism. In other words, the teachings of

1:08:10

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. Whereas Ibn Rushd was a dedicated Aristotelian philosopher. So a completely different philosophical system. So basically what Ibn Rushd was saying is that the philosophy you're describing, this Neoplatonism developed by Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, that's not real philosophy. The real philosophy is the philosophy that was taught by Aristotle. So in that sense he refutes

1:08:40

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

the refutation of Imam al-Ghazali about Muslim Neoplatinism by using Aristotelian principles. So in that sense, it's not really fair, is it really? Because he's refuting an apple with an orange, essentially, right? Because he's using Aristotelian philosophy to refute Neoplatinism. So they're two completely different systems. So in that sense, it's not exactly fair.

1:09:04

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

At the same time, we can say that this is obviously a very vibrant debate. But the effect of Imam al-Ghazali on philosophy, was it final? In the sense that after Imam al-Ghazali's refutation of Muslim Neoplatanism, did it completely disappear and we never saw it again? Well, that didn't happen either. In fact, Muslim Neoplatanism is reimagined and redeveloped under something called Illuminationist.

1:09:34

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

philosophy okay which is developed by someone called shahabddin yahya bin habish as suhrawadi so that's the most important name as suhrawadi as suhrawadi was the person who developed illuminationist philosophy or oriental philosophy which is called in arabic so this idea he took the neoplatonic systems of al-farabi and uh

1:10:00

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

and reimagined them through the metaphors of light. Hence the idea of illuminationist philosophy. And he is sometimes given the honorific title of Shaykh al-Ishraq, literally the master of illumination, which is the positive way of looking at him. Unfortunately, a negative way of looking at him is a Shaykh al-Maqtul or the murdered master. Because of this,

1:10:23

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

development in illuminationist philosophy. In actual fact, many people thought he had left Islam and as a result of that, he was a heretic and was killed. So we can see that although Imam al-Ghazali's refutation of Muslim Neoplatanism didn't end philosophical discussion because it went on with illuminationist philosophy by Suhrwadi and later by Mir al-Damad and Mullah al-Sadra.

1:10:50

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

but it was certainly still very, very controversial and, you know, wasn't so important to many people. This was a small group of individuals who were kind of interested in it, really. Let's look at our map again, then, by way of conclusion.

1:11:07

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

and to see really what was the influence of all of this on the rest of the world, which is kind of one of the points of looking at Arabic heritage. So in our earlier map, what we saw is that everything was coming into Baghdad, right?

1:11:23

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Everything was coming into Baghdad at the beginning. And there was this translation movement and all sorts of different texts from the ancient traditions were being translated and a result then being studied and taken further from there. But what we see now is that this material is now being transported across the Mediterranean, right? We can see that from Baghdad it's going to Cairo and Alexandria, which...

1:11:48

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Alexandria was going to Baghdad before. Now it's Baghdad to Alexandria. And from there into Tunisia. From there into Palermo in Sardinia and southern Italy. From there we're going to North Africa and places like Fez and Tanja. And from there, of course, we go into what was then Muslim Spain. So all of this intellectual activity and translation work which was being done in Baghdad was spreading across the entire Muslim territories.

1:12:18

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

That's one aspect of it. And as we know, as we mentioned earlier, there was this cultural exchange between Muslim Spain and the Abbasid Empire, even though they were politically at odds with one another. There was this cultural exchange. So when this material gets into Muslim Spain, it develops its own versions of things in Muslim Spain. And most importantly, in a city called, which we can see there, called Toledo.

1:12:46

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Toledo was the most important center for translation. Now we saw earlier Baghdad was the most important center in Abbasid Empire for translation. But there we were going from languages like Greek and Sanskrit and Persian into Arabic, mostly via Syriac. But here we're seeing that we're translating now from Arabic into

1:13:14

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And once it's in Latin, it can travel through the entire European continent. So these ideas developed by Muslim scholars across the Muslim world, primarily starting in Baghdad, under the Abbasid and their golden age, are now being transferred across the European continent. And in fact, many would argue that they significantly contributed to the European Enlightenment, which we mentioned at the beginning.

1:13:42

S… Speaker 2 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So now I would stop there and ask if in the last couple of minutes, one minute that's left, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I appreciate we covered a lot today and you will need considerable time to digest all of that. But if you have any questions, please feel free to ask whether they be about this lecture or the final or anything else. So just to put you in the picture, we're having the final exam meeting today.

1:14:11

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

And after today, I'll be able to highlight all the details related to the final exam for you and let you know exactly what will be happening. I have office hours. I mean, office hours are by appointment in the traditional times. So if someone wants to meet me in an office hour online, they're welcome to do so. Or if they want to send me an email, I'll be happy to answer it.

1:14:50

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

Now the questions. Thank you also, and you too have a great weekend. We'll stop there, everyone. And we'll see you again on Monday for our final lecture, which will be on Sunday.

1:15:00

S… Speaker 1 (Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video)

So see you then. Thank you.

Class Presentation - The Translation Movement and Arabic-Islamic Philosophy - Video

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