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The roots of the alternative narrative that I propose here should be sought in the historical sources themselves. This, despite the fact that one cannot find many such sources that theorize about the beginnings of scientific activities per se. Yet we still find some who did something close to that or others from which we can cull such elementary attempts at theorizing. It is those sources in particular that I would like to interrogate, and to emphasize at this point, in order to keep the historical context as close as possible to the events we are trying to disentangle.

The foremost theoretician of the early Islamic period is a man whose personal biography is slightly obscure, but whose work, which has survived almost in its entirety, is filled with nuggets that seem to have escaped the attention of modern students of Islamic intellectual history as well as the modern historians of Islamic science. The person in question is Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad b. Abī Ya'qūb Isḥāq al-Nadīm, also known as al-Warrāq, the paper and/or bookseller. From the evidence of his name alone we cannot tell whether Abū al-Faraj himself was the one who acquired the title al-Nadīm (boon companion), or whether the title had already belonged to his father Abū Ya'qūb. I opt for the first, since we know nothing about the father. Moreover, the kind of work Abū al-Faraj himself had produced, in which he combined anecdotal and serious narrative history, amply qualified him to the companionship of any caliph. Yet, one can still find many people referring to him as Ibn al-Nadīm (the son of the boon companion). We do not know much about his birth or death dates, but what interests us here is his remarkable work al-Fihrist, a book that he completed, according to his own statement, in the year 377 A.H. = 987-988 A.D.[78] In it, al-Nadīm tries to explain the intellectual history of Islamic civilization, up to his time, by surveying the intellectual production, in all conceivable disciplines that were known in early Islam, that he himself had come across or about which he had already heard. The book is arranged in ten treatises (maqalas), each devoted to one of the distinct intellectual fields that were recognized in his time. The seventh of those treatises, which concerns us directly here, deals with the subject of the "ancient sciences", or in his own words "contains the accounts of the philosophers and the ancient sciences and all the books that were composed in those domains." And it is in this treatise that we find the following accounts about the origins of the scientific activity in early Islam.

I give these accounts as a prelude to the introduction of the alternative narrative because I wish to claim that this alternative narrative was already proposed in a round-about elementary way by al-Nadīm himself. Only that up till now no one has gone through the pain of developing it further. This exercise does not only promise to yield a better understanding of al-Nadīm's work itself, but can give us the tools with which to understand the scientific developments that were only narrated by al-Nadīm and by bio-bibliographers who followed him later in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

The Historical Account of the Rise of Science in Early Islamic Times According to al-Nadīm

Ninth-century sources, and then more elaborately tenth-century ones, spoke about such phenomena and offered their own explanations of them. But the most sophisticated account of the rise of science in early Islamic civilization and the motivation for it, that I know of, is this very account, given in the Fihrist of al-Nadīm.

In the introductory section of the Seventh Treatise of al-Nadīm's Fihrist,[79] a treatise devoted to the "ancient sciences" and their importation into Islamic civilization as we just said, al-Nadīm tries to survey the various opinions that were commonly held on the subject during his own time. Here he acts more as an intellectual historian who tries to explain historical events rather than a historian who simply records them. In his own style of holding the reader's attention, he arranges those accounts in the form of anecdotes, more like short stories (he actually calls each of them a ḥikāya (story), but in each case he reports the transmission of science from one culture to another as if he was trying to lay down the theoretical foundation for the phenomenon of the transmission of science in general. Without explicitly saying so, he certainly hoped to use these various stories in order to explain the introduction of the "ancient sciences" into Arabic.

The first two stories are attributed to the scientists themselves, that is, those who made a living from their knowledge of the "ancient sciences." By scientists, al-Nadīm seems to indicate those professionals who made a living from the "ancient sciences", and who were most likely to know the history of their profession better than anyone else. In itself, that was a very reasonable assumption, one would think. But unfortunately al-Nadīm gives no indication that he knew that the assumption itself was open to the internal party biases of the professionals. In al-Nadīm's opinion, those scientists deserved the lion's share of the interpretive narrative that governs the history of their discipline.

Because this part of the discussion touches upon the interpretive aspect of the rise of science in Islamic civilization, at least as far as al-Nadīm was concerned, and because it is both theoretically, as well as historically, very important for our discussion, I will therefore quote al-Nadīm's account in some detail at this point.

Al-Nadīm takes his first story from a book called Kitāb al-Nahmaṭān. The book itself is no longer extant in full, and seems to have survived only in fragments, such as the one quoted here by al-Nadīm.[80] Its author was Abū Sahl al-Faḍl b. Nawbakht, simply called Abū Sahl by al-Nadīm. He was apparently the same Abū Sahl who was the astrologer of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and the son of Nawbakht who participated in the casting of the horoscope of Baghdad during the time of al-Manṣūr, as we saw before. While we know that Nawbakht, the father, may have died at the end of al-Manṣūr's reign in 775, we do not know how much longer the son Abū Sahl outlived, if he did, Hārūn al-Rashīd, who died in 809. In any event, in al-Nadīm's account according to the text of al-Nahmaṭān is quoted as such (with some paraphrasing to avoid the flowery language):

The Story of Abū Sahl b. Nawbakht[81]

The kinds of sciences from which the science of the stars takes its indications of future things were already known and described in the books of the Babylonians. It was from those books that the Egyptians had learned their craft, and the Indians have also employed it in their own country. That was at the time when those ancient people had not yet committed sins and evil deeds, and had not yet sunk as deeply into the ignorance that caused their minds to become confused and their dreams to abandon them. Their confusion led to the loss of their religion, and thus they became totally lost and completely ignorant. They remained in that condition for a while until some of their descendants experienced an awakening that allowed them to remember the past sciences and the conditions of bygone days and how things used to be governed and consequences used to be drawn about the state of the inhabitants and the positions of their celestial spheres, their paths, and their details as well as their celestial and earthly mansions in all of their directions. That happened at the time of the king Jam son of Ūnjihān[82] the king.

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78

See Al-Fihrist.

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79

Ibid., pp. 391-398.

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80

The little we know about the author of al-Nahmaṭān can be found in Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, vol. VII, p. 114, although there the book is called al-Yahbuṭān.

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81

Al-Fihrist, pp. 391-393.

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82

This mythological king of Persia seems to have been at the origin of all legends of Persian civilization, somehow playing a role similar to that of Hermes. His name was usually associated with first kingship, first writing, first building, etc. His father's name is spelled in a variety of ways: Earlier in the Fihrist, and with the same spelling, he was associated with the Persian language, Fihrist, p. 23. Ṭabari, Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, Beirut, 1987, vol. 1, p. 109, and Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī al-Tārīkh, Beirut, 1995, vol. 1, p. 52, spell the name as Uyunjihān (wywnjhn). Yāqūt, Mu'jam al-buldān, Beirut, 1979, vol. 3, p. 170, s.v. sārūq, spells it as Nūjihān. All these variations underline the legendary nature of this report as will be argued later.