Khālid b. Yazīd b. Mu'āwiya was known as the wise man of the family of Marwān (ḥakīm āl marwān). He was distinguished in his own right, and was enterprising and full of love for the sciences. At one point it occurred to him to pursue alchemy, for which he gathered a group of Greeks from Egypt who had mastered Arabic. He then ordered them to translate the books of alchemy from Greek and Coptic into Arabic. This was the first translation in Islam from one language to another.
Then there was the translation of the dīwān, which was in Persian, into Arabic during the days of al-Ḥajjāj [b. Yūsuf (d. 714)]. The one who translated it was Ṣāliḥ b. 'Abd al-Raḥmān, the client of Banū Tamīm, who had been one of the captives (saby) of Sijistān, and who used to work as a secretary to Zādān Farrūkh[111] b. Pīrī the secretary of al-Ḥajjāj, both in Arabic and in Persian, and Al-Ḥajjāj used to favor him. One day Ṣāliḥ said to Zādān Farrūkh: 'you are the cause of my (livelihood)[112], with the commander, and I feel that he took a liking to me. I will not be sure that one day he would not promote me ahead of you and demote you', to which he [i.e. Zādān] responded: 'Don't be so sure, for I think he needs me more than I need him, as he cannot find anyone to accomplish his accounting for him (yakfīhi ḥisābahu) except me.' [Ṣāliḥ] then replied: 'By God, if I wished to convert the accounts (uḥawwil al-ḥisāb) into Arabic, I could certainly do it.' To which [Zādān] replied: 'convert a few lines of it so that I see,' which he did. He then commanded him: 'feign sickness,' which he did. Al-Ḥajjāj then sent him his own doctor Theodoros who could not find anything wrong with him, and the news reached Zādān Farrūkh, who then ordered him to return to work.
At that time, it happened that Zādān Farrūkh was killed during the uprising of Ibn al-Ash'ath (d. ca. 704) as he was on his way from some place to his own home. It was then that al-Ḥajjāj replaced him with Ṣāliḥ as his secretary, who in turn told him what had transpired between him and his master at the dīwān. As a result al-Ḥajjāj determined to do it (that is to translate the dīwān, and he put this Ṣāliḥ in charge of it.
Mardānshāh the son of Zādān Farrūkh asked him: 'what would you do with dehwīh and sheshwīh?' to which he replied: 'I would write one tenth and half a tenth'. When asked 'what would you do with wīd'! He said: 'I would write 'furthermore' (ayḍan).' He said: 'al-wīd, is al-nayyif, and the increase is added.' He was then told: 'May God uproot your descendants from this world as you have uprooted Persian.'
The Persians offered him a hundred thousand dirhams in order that he would feign his inability to convert the dīwān, but he refused and persisted in converting it until he completed it. 'Abd al-Ḥamīd b. Yaḥyā (d. 750) [the famous Umayyad secretary and teacher of Ibn al-Muqaffa'] used to say: 'How great was Ṣāliḥ, and how great were his favors to the secretaries (al-kuttāb)!' Al-Ḥajjāj had set for him (meaning Ṣāliḥ) a specific deadline for the conversion of the dīwān.
As for the Syrian dīwān, it was in Greek. The one who was in charge of it was Sarjūn b. Manṣūr, under Mu'āwiya b. Abī Sufyān (d. 680), who was then succeeded by Manṣūr b. Sarjūn. The dīwān was converted during the days of Hishām b. 'Abd al-Malik (rl. 724-743). And it was converted by Abū Thābit Sulaimān b. Sa'd the client of Ḥusain, who used to be an epistolary secretary during the days of 'Abd al-Malik (rl. 685-705). It is also said that the dīwān was converted during the days of 'Abd al-Malik as well. [For] it happened that 'Abd al-Malik had ordered Sarjūn, one day, to do something, and the latter procrastinated in the matter, which angered 'Abd al-Malik. He then asked Sulaimān who replied: "I shall convert the dīwān. .. ."[113]
After making the crucial connection between the importation of science into Islamic civilization with the translation movement, al-Nadīm seems to have laid down a careful strategy for his own narrative. With the third story he had ruled out the possibility of science having come by sheer contact with Byzantium, once he had demonstrated the poor status of that science in the northern and western lands of Byzantium. The importation from the east was equally unlikely since the two stories he reports were more in the form of legendary astrological lore, rather than historical events. Besides, they were reported by two astrologers who had a vested interest in that kind of connection. Therefore, even al-Nadīm himself would probably judge them as historically equally unreliable. Al-Nadīm must have known that. And he must have also known that he still had to explain the origins of Islamic science.
At this point he could not escape from giving his own account of the origins of the scientific tradition in Islam. And it is then that he demonstrated his preferred methodology and thus allowed us to look through a small window at the thoughts he was entertaining. For that specific reason, his own narrative gains tremendous importance for our discussion. By starting the last story with the statement about Khālid b. Yazīd as the first translator, he obviously wanted the reader to re-orient himself and think of the introduction of science into Islamic civilization as a willful act of acquisition taken by some historical persons who had a vested interest in acquiring those sciences. With this introduction he was also saying that science did not come into Islamic civilization by some 'natural' process of contact with another civilization, as he seemed to demonstrate that there was no such civilization to come in contact with, nor through a mysterious legendary survival of books in vaults whose ceilings were falling apart, nor through some pockets of high learning of which he makes no such mention. Rather the whole phenomenon was the result of a direct willful acquisition process that he wanted the reader to consider.[114]
And as soon as he finished the first three sentences about Khālid's role in the acquisition of the sciences, and here, he did not seem to have had enough information about this Khālid other than that he had a personal interest in such an acquisition, he quickly ended that short introduction with the blunt statement that "this was the first translation in Islam from one language to another", as if to say that translation was itself the answer to the importation of the sciences. The problem remained as to which translation. He could have recounted the classical narrative, at this point, and told us that there were translations from Greek into Syriac, or that the Abbāsids brought with them the Persian ideology of re-claiming the Greek sciences back to their origins, which their legends had already claimed. Instead he went directly into what he thought was the crucial step in this translation process, the "translation of the dīwān", and quickly noted that this process was an Umayyad process and not an Abbāsid one. For that purpose he gave the great details that he did on how this dīwān translation came about. As if he was leading us step by step to painstakingly appreciate the social dynamics during the times of the Umayyads that required such a translation to be undertaken.
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It is in that respect that Lemerle's term "appropriation", which was later used by Sabra, gains a special significance in its capacity to render the intent of this classical source of al-Nadīm.