Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

28 • The Making of Islamic Sciencethe translation movement was the result of the scholarlyzeal of a few Syriac-speaking Christians who … decidedto translate certain works out of altruistic motives for theimprovement of society. The second theory, rampant in muchmainstream historiography, attributes it to the wisdom andopen-mindedness of a few “enlightened rulers” who, conceivedin a backward projection of European enlightenment ideology,promoted learning for its own sake. (Gutas 1998, 3)Gutas claims both of these theories fall apart under close scrutiny.He states that the translation movement was “too complex and deeprootedand too influential in a historical sense for its causes to fallunder these categories—even assuming that these categories are atall valid for historical hermeneutics” (Gutas 1998, 4).This movement was unprecedented in the transmission ofknowledge. It was a movement that enriched the Arabic language byforcing its philologists to coin new technical terms, forced the bestminds of the time to find ways to accommodate, discard, or transformtheories and ideas that conflicted with their religious beliefs, broughta very large amount of scientific and philosophical data into Islamiccivilization, and produced tensions and conflicts within the Islamicintellectual tradition that were, in the final analysis, greatly beneficialto the development of Islamic scientific tradition.Although translation activity had already begun during thepre-Abbasid period, it was the Abbasids who provided resources fora sustained and systematic process of translation of scientific textsinto Arabic. The translation movement became more organized andreceived financial and administrative impetus after the founding ofBaghdad by al-Mansur (r. 754 –775). Three distinct phases can beidentified in this movement. The first began before the middle ofthe second century of Islam, during the reign of al-Mansur. Majortranslators of this first phase were Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 139/756); hisson, Ibn Na‘ima (fl. eighth century); Theodore Abu Qurra (d. ca.826), a disciple of John of Damascus (d. 749) who held a secretarialpost under the Umayyad Caliphs; Thabit ibn Qurrah (d. 901), aSabian mathematician; Eustathius (fl. ninth century), who alongwith Theodore Abu Qurra translated for al-Kindi; and Ibn al-Bitriq(877–944), who was a member of the circle of the Caliph al-Ma’mun.