As soon as he finished recounting the intrigues and the social conditions that governed life in the dīwān, and after explaining how the problems of its translation were resolved, both in Iraq as well as in Syria, he quickly connected that to yet another account, this time raising the question about the spread of the sciences in Islamic civilization, rather than questioning their beginnings as he was trying to do in the previous four stories. When he came to explain the spread of science in Islamic civilization he duly titled this new account as such: "Recounting the reason for which the books on philosophy and other ancient sciences had increased in this country." Notice, he was not saying the reason these books 'came about in the first place' but the reason "they increased", thus their beginnings had, at that stage of the narrative, been taken for granted.
The account that followed gave only "one" of those reasons, as it was duly titled again: "one of the reasons for that [increase]." He then went on to recount the now most familiar and famous story about al-Ma'mūn's dream[115] in the following terms:
Al-Ma'mūn once saw in his dream a man who looked as if he was white in color, with some reddish complexion, wide forehead, connected eyebrows, bald headed, dark blue reddish-eyed (ashhal), and good looking, sitting on his bed. Al-Ma'mūn said: "I was in front of him as if was filled with awe." I said: "Who are you?" To which he responded: "I am Aristotle." I was very pleased with that, and said: "May I ask you a question?" He said: "Go ahead, ask." I said: "What is good?" To which he replied: "That which is considered good to reason (mā hasuna fī al-'aql)." When I asked: "Then what?" he said: "That which is considered good by law (mā hasuna fī al-shar)." Then I said: "Then what?" He said: " That which is considered good by the people (mā ḥasuna 'inda al-jumhūr)." And when I pressed on with: "What next?" He replied: "There is no next (thumma lā thumma)."[116]
To make sure that the reader got the point, al-Nadīm gave an alternate report of the same dream:
And in another report, I said: "Go on", to which he replied: "Whoever advises you about gold, let him be to you like gold, and be sure to follow tawḥīd [the Mu'tazilite doctrine of insistence on the oneness of God]." This dream was the surest reason for the acquisition of books (ikhrāj al-kutub). For al-Ma'mūn was in correspondence with the king of Byzantium, and al-Ma'mūn had gained mastery over him. He then wrote to him requesting permission that he sends to him someone who would make a selection from the ancient sciences that were treasured (al-makhzūna al-muddkhara) in the land of the Byzantines. He yielded to his request after initial hesitation. Al-Ma'mūn then sent a group of people that included al-Ḥajjāj b. Maṭar, Ibn al-Biṭrīq, and Salm the master of the House of Wisdom (Bait al-Ḥikma), as well as others. They took what they wanted from the books they found. And when they brought them to him [that is, to al-Ma'mūn] he ordered that they be translated, and they were. It was said that Yūḥannā b. Māsawaih was among those who went to the land of Byzantium.[117]
Muḥammad b. Isḥāq [that is, al-Nadīm] said: of those who took special care to acquire books (ikhrāj al-kutub) from Byzantium were Muḥammad, Aḥmad, and al-Ḥasan, the sons of Shākir the astrologer, whose account will follow. They spent [in that regard] huge gifts (raghā'ib), and sent Ḥunain b. Isḥāq and others to the Byzantine land, who brought back for them the most fascinating books (ṭarā'if al-kutub) and most intriguing compositions of philosophy, music, arithmetic and medicine. Qusṭā b. Lūqā al-Ba'albakī had also brought along some books, which he translated, and others translated for him.
Abū Sulaimān al-Manṭiqī al-Sijistānī said: the sons of the astrologer [that is Banū Mūsā b. Shākir] used to compensate a group of translators, among whom were Ḥunain b. Isḥāq, Ḥubaish b. Al-Ḥasan, Thābit b. Qurra, and others, in a month, the sum of five hundred dīnārs for translation and dedication.
Muḥammad b. Isḥāq [that is al-Nadīm continuing] said: I heard Abū Isḥāq b. Shahram recount in a general gathering that there was an old temple in the land of Byzantium, with a two-sided door of iron, the likes of its size has never been seen before. The ancient Greeks used to venerate it, pray and offer sacrifices in it in the old times when they worshiped planets and idols. He said: 'I asked the king of the Byzantines to open it for me, but he refused for it was closed since the time when the Greeks converted to Christianity. I persisted in my request, kept on corresponding with him, and asking him directly every time I was in his presence.' He went on to say: 'He then opened it for me, and lo an behold, that house was made of marble and most colorful stones, containing so many beautiful inscriptions and writings the likes of which I had never seen or heard about before. In that temple, there were books that could be carried only by several camels, he even exaggerated and said 'a thousand camels.' Some of those [books] were worn out, others were still in their original conditions, while others had been eaten by worms. He went on to say: 'I saw in it all kinds of golden vessels for offerings and other fabulous things.' He said: 'he then closed the door after my departure, and told me that he had made me a favor. He said that those [events] took place during the days of Sayf al-Dawla (945-967). He claimed that the temple was a three-days journey from Constantinople, and those who lived around that place were a group of Ṣaba'ians and Chaldeans, who had been allowed by the Byzantines to keep their faith after paying a poll tax.[118]
This concludes the report of al-Nadīm as to why the books of philosophy and other sciences began to flourish in Islamic civilization. After this account, he went on to list the details of the process of translation, beginning with the names of the translators from the various languages.
The alternative to the classical narrative, which forms the core of this chapter and is here proposed for the first time, as far as I can tell, takes its inspiration from this very narrative of al-Nadīm. After we have seen him survey the stories of his day about the introduction of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization, and capping them with his own narrative, it became imperative to re-read the text of al-Nadīm in light of the problems that the classical narrative had failed to resolve as we have stated above. We can now assert, that the Persian element in the Abbāsid empire that was held responsible for the reclamation of the Greek sciences was based on a legendary story that was first proposed by al-Nadīm, but whose origin was the work of the Persian astrologer who obviously had a great interest in promoting that ideology in order to secure a job for him and for his descendants after him. In fact his ploy seems to have worked, although not for the same reason as we shall soon see, and early Abbāsid times witnessed the continuous employment of one Nawbakht or another as an astrologer at the highest level of the caliphal court for a period of 100 years or more.
From the Byzantine side, al-Nadīm's several accounts about the persecution of the philosophers in that land, the treasuring of books of the ancients in closed temples and the like, all the way till the middle of the tenth century, as he reported, only reflected the actual historical circumstances, as we have already seen, and further affirmed that the contact theory could not have worked, for there were no knowledgeable Byzantines who could master the classical Greek sources themselves in order to pass them on to the neighboring Islamic civilization.[119]
115
See the brief account of this dream in the previous chapter, here quoted in greater detail on account of its importance to our present discussion.
119
As Lemerle would say: "ils lisent peu, ils se contentent aisément de florilèges, de recueils de citations, de glossaries, de commentaries, de manuels;... ils ne cherchent pas." For them the classical texts of high science and philosophy had become "vaste magasin d'accessoire", as already noted again by Lemerle.