When the time came for him to introduce his own narrative, al-Nadīm, did not produce another legend of his own. Rather, he went directly to the historical phenomenon of translation. And he properly started with the report about the earliest translations that were known to him (the translations of Khālid b. Yazīd), rather than the translations during his own Abbāsid period, as the classical narrative would have wanted to argue. Al-Nadīm definitely wanted to return to the historical facts, and had no intention of arguing from the ideology that came later to frame the interpretation of those facts. He certainly wanted to emphasize the fact that the translation activity had already started during the Umayyad period, and with Khālid b. Yazīd in particular. What he failed to report, though, was the real reason for Khālid's actual interest at that time in classical Greek texts dealing with alchemy. Instead of delving immediately into the social, the political, the economic and administrative history of the period, so that he could locate the motivating forces for that translation activity, he only prefaced all that with the frequently repeated description of Khālid that he "was enterprising and full of love for the sciences (lahu himmatun wa-maḥabbatun li-l-'ulūm). If one were to read history in essentialist terms, one could simply stop at this preface and attribute to Khālid all sorts of desires and intentions.[120] But not al-Nadīm, for as soon as he concluded the three sentences about Khālid with the phrase "this was the first translation in Islam from one language to another", he immediately went on to the subject of the translation of the dīwān, as if to say that, in his mind, those two activities were organically connected. What that connection meant to al-Nadīm was straightforward. He apparently understood the process of acquisition of the ancient sciences to have started with the attempts of Khālid b. Yazīd which was contemporaneous or immediately followed by the translation of the dīwān.
As for Khālid's interest in those ancient sciences, of whose motivation al-Nadīm remains silent as we said, we have other sources to fill that motivational gap. We are told by Abū Hilāl al-'Askarī (c. 1000) in his kitāb al-awā'il, among others, that
'Abd al-Malik b. Marwān started to write sūrat al-ikhlāṣ (Qur'an, 112) and the mention of the prophet on the dīnārs and dirhams, when the king of Byzantium wrote to him the following message: 'You have introduced in your official documents (ṭawāmīr) something referring to your prophet. Abandon it, otherwise you shall see on our dīnārs the mention of things you detest.' That angered 'Abd al-Malik, so he sent for Khālid b. Yazīd b. Mu'āwiya, who was greatly learned and wise, in order to consult with him upon this matter. Khālid then told him, 'have no fear o commander of the faithful! Prohibit their dīnārs and strike for the people new mint with the mention of God on them, as well as the mention of the prophet, may prayers and peace be upon him, and do not absolve them of what they hate in the official documents. And so he did.[121]
If this anecdote is taken together with Khālid's expressed interest in alchemy we can see why such books on alchemy may have come very handy to someone who was interested in striking new mint of gold coins. Who but the alchemists would be better prepared to identify pure gold, from other metals? And who but the alchemists would be the expert who could judge alloys and the like? That is, they had the kind of knowledge that a new mint master would desperately need.
Once we also remember that 'Abd al-Malik's reforms did not only include the arabization of the dīwān, that is the internal administrative reforms of the empire, but that he went beyond that to create the new currency of the nascent Arab empire, which was up till that time still using the Byzantine coins of the realm in the west, and Sasanian coins in the east. Under such historical circumstances, Khālid's interest in the rules of alloying gold, which could be gotten from alchemical books, was definitely not only an academic interest. The fact that 'Abd al-Malik would consult with him on such matters further affirms his reliability and the kind of answers he was supposed to supply from his alchemical books.
Going back to al-Nadīm's last story about the reasons for the spread of philosophical and scientific books in Islamic civilization and the relationship of that spread to the dream of al-Ma'mūn, all we need to remember is that although the story was of the legendary type, it still spoke to the spread of those books, and not to their coming to being in the first place. Nevertheless, the orientalists who created and championed the classical narrative in the first place harped on to that account, and made the direct connection between the expressions that were enunciated by Aristotle in that story like "reason", "tawḥīd", the two specific Mu'tazilite key words, to derive from it that feature of the classical narrative that connected the importation of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization with the Mu'tazilite leanings of al-Ma'mūn, as we already saw before. And as we have also said before this connection is still frequently repeated in the sources dealing with Islamic science. Those who repeat the story neglect to stress al-Nadīm's reason for recounting the dream, namely to give the reason for the spread of books and not their coming to be.
The same orientalists also gave the story another twist. By connecting Aristotle to the Mu'tazilites through the dream, and then by connecting the whole movement of translation to the Greek philosophical and scientific thought, concluded that the Mu'tazilites, who were the archenemies of what was then called ahl al-ḥadīth (people of tradition who later became ahl al-sunna wa-l-ḥadīth), or what they called the traditionalists, were the ones who were responsible for the importation of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization, much to the dislike of the traditionalist Muslims. In Rosenthal's words: "It is probably no accident that the Mu'tazilah should have flourished during the decisive years of Greco-Arabic translation activity, that is, from the last decades of the eighth century until the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mūn (813-833) and his immediate successors. Rather, Mu'tazilah influence on the Abbāsid rulers ought to be regarded as the real cause of an official attitude toward the heritage of classical antiquity that made impressive provisions for its adoption in Islam."[122]
In this manner, the already established conflict model that had been propagated in Europe since the age of reason, as a conflict between science and religion, was now transferred to the Islamic civilization in the form of Mu'tazilites versus traditionalists. With this "spin" people forgot the reasons behind al-Nadīm's account of that dream.
Once we strip this dream of this facile interpretation, tempting as it is, and if we understand it in its right context, we can then go back to the preceding paragraph where al-Nadīm's historical scholarship is best demonstrated. There we see al-Nadīm giving his own opinion of the story of the appearance of the sciences in Islamic civilization as a result of the administrative needs of the empire at the time of 'Abd al-Malik, and not as a result of legendary stories told by self-serving astrologers who were struggling to keep their position at the Abbāsid court. That's why al-Nadīm began his own account by the stories of Khālid and the dīwān translations, and not by another legend like the dream of al-Ma'mūn.
120
Most writers on the subject of the transmission of Greek science into Arabic refer to the stories about Khālid as legends. See for example, F. Rosenthal,
122
Rosenthal,