Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Its coordinates: 6.3 Philosophy of Education
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab.
The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature. In its fullest sense it meant a programme of formation: you became a cultivated person through poetry, history, rhetoric, ethics, anecdote and the sciences, worn lightly and used well in company. Al-Jāḥiẓ, who could write as happily about animals, misers and rhetoric as about theology, is its great example. Ibn Qutayba wrote a manual of adab for the secretaries of the state. Miskawayh, with his ethics of character, and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, with his records of learned evenings in conversation, are its philosophers.
Put this beside the Italian studia humanitatis and the resemblance is close: classical texts, eloquence, moral formation, history, the cultivated whole person. Adab came first by some four centuries.
Yet it is almost never included under "humanism". Scholars have argued about this. George Makdisi's The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (1990) made the case for the comparison, and more controversially for historical links. Mohammed Arkoun wrote about an "Arabic humanism" in Miskawayh's century. Lenn Goodman later wrote a book called Islamic Humanism.
I'm interested in why the label stuck in one place and not the other. Is it a fact about the phenomenon, or only about who wrote the history of the word?