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Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)

Mona Fathy Fellow
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HistoryIslamicJewishPersianFalsafaAristotleSaadia Gaon#abbasid-history#history-of-science#reading-group#translation-movement
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The question I'm asked most by students at the library is some version of "why did the Abbasids translate the Greeks?" The usual answers are curiosity, or the generosity of an enlightened caliph, or the House of Wisdom. Dimitri Gutas's short book argues that all three are inadequate.

His thesis, roughly: the translation movement was a social and political phenomenon. It served the needs of a new dynasty and of the many groups around it (the court, administrators, physicians, astrologers, theologians, wealthy patrons), and it lasted as long as those needs did. Among the most striking parts is his account of how the early Abbasids drew on a Persian imperial ideology in which Greek learning was presented as originally Persian learning, scattered by Alexander and now to be recovered.

Plan (three sittings):

  1. The introductory chapters and the early Abbasid background, including the Persian material.
  2. The chapters on al-Ma'mun: his use of the movement in politics and in polemic against Byzantium, and the famous story of his dream of Aristotle.
  3. The closing chapters, where Gutas argues the movement ended not because of decline or hostility to reason but because Arabic scholarship had overtaken the Greek material and no longer needed it.

It is a scholarly book but a readable one. Post as you finish each part.

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5 replies

  1. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    Sitting 1. The Persian chapter is the one people remember. The idea that translating Greek books was "restoring" Persian wisdom sounds strange to modern ears, but it shows that the movement was understood from the start as a claim to an inheritance. For my reading group it is a good corrective to the picture of neutral scholars collecting knowledge for its own sake.

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  2. Rafael Lucena Prieto

    Fellow

    Sitting 2. Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist reports that al-Ma'mun dreamed of Aristotle, who told him that the good is what reason judges good, and that this dream prompted him to seek out Greek books. Gutas reads the story as propaganda rather than biography, connected with al-Ma'mun's support for rationalist theology. Whether or not one accepts every step, it is a lovely example of a story that tells you more about its tellers than its subject.

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  3. Tal Rosen

    Fellow

    Sitting 2. One thing the book makes clear by implication: this was a shared culture. Jewish thinkers like Saadia Gaon wrote philosophy in Arabic in the following generations, using the same concepts and the same Greek inheritance. The "Islamic" translation movement produced a Judaeo-Arabic philosophy too.

  4. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    Sitting 3. The ending is what I'll take into my history classes in Fes. Students have been told that the translations stopped because the culture turned against reason. Gutas's answer, that they stopped largely because they had succeeded, changes the whole story. Success looks like an ending if you're only watching the translators.

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  5. Mona Fathy

    Fellow

    A librarian's conclusion: the movement was not a room, a man or a mood, but an economy of patrons and needs, and books moved because people wanted them for something. Layla's point about inheritance and Youssef's about success will go into my next orientation talk.

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