28 - The translation of Greek materials into Arabic

Summary

The Arabic translation movement begins among non-Arabs, non-Muslims, neo-Muslims or heretical Muslims, as one phase of a much larger process at the interface between cultures. The Greek to Syriac translating which preceded and accompanied the translation of Greek works into Arabic is another phase of the same larger process.1 A salient aspect of this great meeting of eastern and western civilizations is the Hellenization of Islam. For all the centres of intellectual activity in western Asia during the formative period of Islamic civilization – the surviving Christian centres of medical, logical, historical and Biblical learning at Edessa, Nisibin, and Qinnasrīn, the Talmudic academies of Sura and Pumpeditha, the medical centre of Jundīshāpūr, the pagan astronomical and astrological centre at Ḥarrān, the fire temples of Magian Persia, the Buddhist centres of Balkh, and the Indian observatories of Ujjain – exhibit traditions of learning centuries old and deeply imbued with the spirit of Hellenism and with detailed knowledge of the Greek sciences and arts, often studied in the original texts, or (for us even more important) in translation or adaptation.

The new Islamic civilization which presided over the dissolution of the Sasanid Persian empire and effectively sealed the “lower tier” of former Byzantine provinces against Byzantine political control, which absorbed large numbers of Jewish, Christian, pagan and Magian converts and imposed the terms for coexistence with the unconverted, was not and by the very nature of its success could not be so radically creative or destructive as to exclude all that it found in the new-won lands.