The Persians had translated in the past some of the books of logic and medicine into their language, and those were in turn translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa' (d. 759).[100]
In this account we clearly note al-Nadīm's intention to demonstrate how philosophy was persecuted in Byzantium, and as an afterthought he seems to indicate that some of the elementary books on logic and medicine had already been translated into Persian in ancient times. He concluded his story with the translations of Ibn al-Muqaffa' in order to give due credit to all those who did in fact translate old Persian books into Arabic. He did this in order to emphasize the role those people played in the transmission of science to Islam. Nevertheless, he still insisted in the previous sentence that when Christianity returned to Byzantium the prohibition of philosophy also returned, and the situation continued to be so till al-Nadīm's own time, that is till the end of the tenth century: "There resumed as well the prohibition of the books of philosophy and their treasuring of them as is the custom up till this day."[101]
When he was writing his Fihrist, toward the end of the tenth century, al-Nadīm, then posing as a historian of science of his own time, asserted therefore, that Byzantium of the tenth century did not encourage philosophy, and apparently used the philosophical books as trading treasures. He was apparently convinced that Byzantium had no appreciation for philosophy as such, despite the independent, but controversial evidence from the Byzantine side, which speaks of the rise of Byzantium's "first humanism" at that time.[102] Here again, it seems that the primary sources corroborate al-Nadīm's story as they did Fārābī's story that was mentioned before. In fact there are several "legendary" (and legends almost always have a kernel of the truth) accounts of missions sent by Muslim rulers to the Byzantine
Emperors seeking from them those very treasured books.[103] Some of those accounts would describe missions ending up in old temples, with restricted access, and would have great difficulties in acquiring the books that were treasured there. Such a science that continued to be locked up well into the tenth century, and which was being fought by Christian dogma, could not possibly produce a viable scientific tradition that could be passed on to another culture, neither through contact, nor through isolated pockets as was already argued before.
More importantly, the stories relating the mission of al-Ma'mūn to the emperor of Byzantium to request Greek books assert that al-Ma'mūn could not find such books in his domain, nor could the Byzantine emperor find them at first, until he was led to them by a priest who knew about the locked temple which had such books.[104] This should not be surprising, in light of the several accounts of the dearth of scientific books in Byzantium at the time.
The fact that such conditions, as the ones that were described by Lemerle, seem to have been prevalent in the Byzantine domain, especially during Byzantium's "dark ages" can be also confirmed when one considers the contemporary Syriac scientific material, which in my opinion was directly inspired by the Byzantine sources. And when one considers the extant Syriac sources, like those of Sergius of Ras'aina (d. 536),[105] Severus Sebokht (c. 661),[106] or George, the Bishop of the Arabs (c. 724),[107] or even the works of Job of Edessa (c. 817), especially in the latter's encyclopedic Book of Treasures[108] on the Syriac sciences in the early Abbāsid period, at the time when the translation movement from Greek into Arabic was at its apogee, one could easily discern elementary scientific books, very similar to the elementary logical and medical books that continued to be used in Byzantium and were translated into ancient Persian as we were told by al-Nadīm. Why should one expect otherwise? When we know that most of those who wrote in Syriac lived under Byzantine dominion, and were arguably persecuted by their Greek overlords. Echoes of this persecution are evident in the spontaneous remark that was made by Severus Sebokht, and which was already published by Nau, in connection with Sebokht's reference to the Indian numerals as an argument against the Greek claims that they were the masters of all the sciences and of all times.[109] What these sources very clearly demonstrate is that we could not possibly expect such Byzantine subjects to outsmart their masters and create a new science that was itself suppressed in Byzantium.
We shall have occasion to return to the role that was played by this community of Syriac speakers, who also mastered Greek at times for their liturgical needs, in the transmission of the Greek sciences into Arabic but not before the end of eighth and early ninth centuries. We shall see how important that role was, and attempt to pinpoint the causes that led to it.
But for now, I wish to return to the intentions of al-Nadīm and ask once more about the reasons he must have had in mind for recounting this third story about the transmission of science. In my opinion, he did not only wish to indicate that the position of the philosophical sciences were really endangered in Byzantium in his own time, but that the situation was as such for a long time, at least as far back as the time that preceded, and followed immediately after, the death of Julian (The Apostate). He wished to stress that Julian was the only one who allowed philosophy to be studied and pursued. But when we remember that Julian ruled for barely two years only, that is, between the years 361 and 363, then the picture, al-Nadīm was trying to paint, becomes very clear. That picture recounts the story of the continuous Christian persecution of philosophy, thus echoing the expression of al-Fārābī who claimed that philosophy was "liberated" only when it reached the lands of Islam.
Up to this point, the reader of al-Nadīm's text still cannot account fully for the transmission of the sciences from the ancient cultures into Islamic civilization. Such a reader is still entitled to ask: how could such sciences, that were persecuted in their original Byzantine domain, provided there were such scientific activities to be persecuted, be passed on to another Islamic culture that did not have any science of its own as well, as we are so often told?
Al-Nadīm had not reached this stage of his narrative yet. His preparatory anecdotes, which he used to introduce his treatise on the "ancient sciences", have not yet reached their conclusion. But we can almost begin to see where he was going. He had already indicated that there could not have been a direct transmission of science from Byzantium into Arabic, as the classical narrative so often asserted, if the conditions were in fact as they were described by al-Nadīm. And to answer the question of how could those sciences be brought into Islamic civilization, especially from Byzantium if the situation was as he described, al-Nadīm's answer would lie in the fourth anecdote that was apparently used as a climax for the earlier ones. Because of its importance, and as it will become the focus of the discussion that follows, I give here a close translation of this fourth anecdote, just as it appeared in al-Nadīm's Fihrist.
101
See a similar report, in the work of another tenth-century author, al-Mas'ūdī (d. 957),
102
This "first humanism" has to be nuanced with the same nuance that was used by its foremost student Paul Lemerle, in
103
For the various missions to acquire books from Byzantium and the conditions in which they were kept there see al-Nadīm's account below, and al-Qifṭī,
105
For a detailed bibliography on this Syriac author, see Albert Abuna,