Now that we can better appreciate the importance of the administrative reforms of 'Abd al-Malik, after having stressed the need for relating them to the general translation movement of the philosophical and scientific texts, just as al-Nadīm had already done in his Fihrist, we should, at this point, go back to discuss the social conditions that paved the way for the importation of the foreign sciences into Islamic civilization. An importation that proved over time to be the most remarkable and unique achievement that was performed by the Persian and Greek speaking communities of the early Abbāsid empire. And by focusing on the social conditions we would be in a better position to answer the larger questions about the actual historical needs that were being met by the transmission of those ancient sciences.
Reading the texts that describe the translation of the dīwān, especially those that had been preserved by Jahshiyārī and al-Nadīm, give very clear indications of the serious social consequences of that activity. From among those consequences, the arabization of the dīwān seems to have led to the loss of the administrative jobs that were held by Persian and Greek speakers of the empire, who were mostly either Zoroastrian or Christian. Previous to this arabization, those early classes of bureaucrats must have felt so secure about their positions in the administration that they could afford the bragging of Zādān Farrūkh and the arrogance of Sarjūn.
We also saw that the Persian community was willing to bribe Ṣāliḥ b. 'Abd al-Raḥmān so that he would feign the failure of the dīwān arabization. We also saw in the report of Jahshiyārī a reference to a meeting that was held, at the time when al-Ḥajjāj had just come to Iraq, by the Persian notables (idahaqln), at the house of a man called Jamil, in order to discuss among themselves how to protect the community from al-Ḥajjāj. They were then told by Jamiclass="underline" "You will fair well with him if you are not afflicted by a kātib from among you, meaning someone from Babylon. And they were in fact afflicted by Zādān Farrūkh who was a one-eyed evil man."[133] It was in that context that Jamil related his famous parable about the head of an axe that was cast in a forest. The trees then spoke among themselves saying it was not for a good reason that this axe was thrown here. "To which a simple tree responded, if one of your branches does not go into its end, then you have no reason to fear."[134]
Doesn't this anecdote of Jahshiyārī point to the sense of a collective anxiety on the part of a community, this time the Persian community, and the eventual attempt of its members to accuse each other of treason, as any sociologist could have predicted under such circumstances? Wouldn't it be natural for such things to happen in a community that suddenly found itself disenfranchised, after it had already happily monopolized the positions of power in the government for years, just because the members of that community could control one language or other, or some science or other? Doesn't the sentiment commonly referred to with the term shu'ūbīya (racial prejudices), which is so often repeated in the sources of the period, represent something of the sort as well? Didn't the translation of the dīwān produce such a group anxiety so that Zādān Farrūkh had to tell his friends, when Ṣāliḥ had succeeded in translating few lines of the dīwān, "go seek an abode other than this", as reported by Jahshiyārī?[135]
I am almost certain that all that took place. And that the often repeated references to the competition between those who were employed by the government with those who were seeking such employment only confirms this, especially when we all know that the government was always a flourishing market, as was already known to Ibn Qutayba and later on to Ibn Khaldun,[136] as it was usually the main employer at all times and in all places.
What could those communities do in response to those events? How could they awake from their first shock and try to reclaim their previous positions in the corridors of government? I think they did what most communities would do under such circumstances: go back and try to monopolize the government positions by other means. One such mean was to acquire the more advanced specializations in the very sciences that the government badly needed so that they would become once more indispensable to the running of the government.
How could that acquisition of advanced sciences happen when I have argued that there were no teachers and no experts to teach those disciplines? But if we stop to think that science does not always progress by the steady instruction of teachers, but rather by the leaps that are taken by very bright individuals who are capable of going beyond where their teachers had taken them, and who are usually inspired by an urgent need to do so, then the answer to this question would become slightly easier to comprehend.
Consider the following circumstances. The bureaucrats, who worked in the dīwān before it was arabised, were the very persons who knew the elementary sciences and used their linguistic and scientific skills to monopolize their positions at the dīwān, as we have already argued. Those same bureaucrats also knew that the very sciences that they mastered for their limited purposes were only introductions to more advanced sciences that they did not need to acquire as long as their positions were secure through the monopoly. I say this as I can almost hear someone like Sergius of Ras'aina, who died toward the middle of the sixth century, and Severus Sebokht of the seventh century, say in their introductory treatises on astronomy: "whoever wants to verify this or that problem, more accurately, he should seek the more advanced texts of Ptolemy called the Almagest, or the Handy Tables."[137] And those were the most advanced Syriac scientists of the period just before Islam or in early Islamic times. We note that they still used that kind of language about the Greek sources. Wouldn't their co-religionist and their community members, who were employed in the government, a few centuries later, share the same expectations from the Greek sources, and have at least the kind of knowledge that was similar to theirs? It is most likely that they too used to find in their own administrative scientific texts references similar to those that we can still find in the extant works of Sergius and Sebokht.
In order to be able to compete with the new occupants of the dīwāns, and go back to monopolize the high positions of government, members of these communities of bureaucrats had to make use of their knowledge of both the Greek language and the elementary sciences that they used in the dīwān, and try to educate themselves or their children in the more advanced sciences, to which their elementary sciences referred for higher precision and sophistication. They did all that in order to be able to deploy that new information and win their previous positions at the dīwān. Now that they had lost their jobs, they had an excellent motivation to go to Ptolemy's Almagest, that they knew only by name before, when they had no need for it, and to which they were referred by their co-religionists.
136
Ibn Qutayba,
137
In the case of Sergius, see G. Saliba, "Paulus Alexandrinus in Syriac and Arabic",