Under the new conditions, and with the pain of unemployment, these bureaucrat communities would go back to teach their children and their co-religionists and to urge them to acquire the more advanced sciences about which they were well informed by the Greek as well as the Persian classical sources. And since Arabic had by then become the language of competition they were obliged to demonstrate their competence both in the new bureaucratic language as well as in the sciences of the higher order. Again, all those difficulties had to be re-negotiated before they could re-establish the monopoly that they once had in the dīwān. Within one generation or two, the children of these two communities managed to achieve that, and under the severe competition they also managed to perform the unique and remarkable feat that they did. It is the children who surpassed their teachers in acquiring the new advanced sciences, because they were motivated to do so by the pressure of their mere survival.
That such a thing did in fact take place is also reported in the classical sources, when those sources report the return of whole families back to the highest positions at the Abbāsid court. Families whose members knew perfectly well both the languages and the sciences of the Greeks and the Persians. Those new families could now occupy positions that were much more sensitive than the old dīwān jobs; they could become the personal advisers to the caliph himself. Think about the Bakhtīshū' family, which produced several high-ranking physicians for the Abbāsid court and whose members passed those jobs from father to son for nearly 100 years. The same Nawbakht family, of whom we spoke before, also achieved the high status of court astrologers, and also for several generations of fathers and sons.
Think also of Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq, who managed to recruit his son and nephew, among others, into the court of the caliph as translators and physicians at the highest level of government. And to have a glimpse of the deadly competitive environment those new aspirants had to go through, think also of the very tough competition Ḥunain himself had to face from his own co-religionists and the speakers of his language, as he himself laments in an account that is preserved in the work of the thirteenth- century bio-bibliographer Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a.[138]
What is being proposed here is that the translation movement that is under discussion was generated by the desire of two communities to re-acquire jobs that their parents and co-religionists had lost in the government offices. And in order to do that, at that particular time, that is during the early years of the Abbāsid empire, they aimed to become indispensable to the government by their sheer possession of highly specialized knowledge. From those new posts, they tried to re-establish a new monopoly that the lower dīwān workers could not even dream of having as long as they stayed with their elementary sciences.
The evidence that such things did take place come from all those sources that speak of the competition among the highest bureaucrats in the government and their various attempts to exclude others from the competition through casting doubt about their competence in the advanced sciences. Ḥunain's treatise which was just cited, and in which he recounts the attacks he had to suffer at the hands of the other Christian physicians, who would malign him by referring to him as "just a translator and not a physician", is a brilliant example of that activity. It also opens for us a small window at the court of the Abbāsid's of the early part of the ninth century, with the court bureaucrats attempting very earnestly to create the new monopoly that will secure their jobs.
The sources have also preserved for us the communal solidarities that began to appear among the Syriac and Persian communities, and at times even among the people of the same city. We know, for instance, that Yūḥannā b. Māsawayh refused to teach Ḥunain b. Isḥāq medicine because Ḥunain was from the people of 'Ibād (a group of eastern Arabian tribesmen) of Ḥīra, whose members made a living mostly from exchanging money. Yūḥannā, on the other hand, was from Jundīsāpūr that produced the famous Bakhtīshū' family of which we just spoke. According to Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a, "the people of Jundīsāpūr especially, and their physicians, shied away from the people of Ḥīra and abhorred introducing the children of merchants to their profession."[139]
We also read in the same classical sources about the new environment of arrogance that in the past used to characterize the life of the dīwān, as we saw in the cases of Zādān Farrūkh and Sarjūn in their respective dīwāns. In the new era, we now begin to see a new class of people, who managed to create, somehow, a new monopoly, at the highest levels of government. And those people seem to have been emboldened, as in the case of the same Yūḥannā b. Māsawayh, who, according to al-Nadīm, was "a venerable physician, given due respect by kings, a great scholar and author, who had served under al-Ma'mūn, al-Mu'taṣim, al-Wāthiq and al-Mutawakkil",[140] and above all dared to behave in the following fashion in the presence of the caliph al-Mutawakkil himself:
Al-Nadīm says: "I read in the hand of al-Ḥakīmī, who said: 'Ibn Ḥamdūn the boon companion [of the caliph] teased Ibn Māsawayh, one day, in the presence of al-Mutawakkil, to whom Ibn Māsawayh responded: 'if you had had as much intelligence as you have ignorance, and if that intelligence were distributed over a hundred beetles, then each of those beetles would have more intelligence than Aristotle.'"[141] If this is true, and there is no reason to doubt the veracity of al-Nadīm in this account, then we can say this competitive environment produced for the Abbāsid bureaucracy the finest class of servants, who had a remarkable competence, and who also tried to exercise their newly-found power by showing off at the highest positions of government. Those new highly qualified bureaucrats must have felt quite secure in their new posts, when they sat next to the caliph, and within his most intimate circles. Otherwise why would someone like the caliph al-Mutawakkil tolerate the behavior of Ibn Māsawayh when the latter dared insult the caliph's own boon companion?
This anecdote simply illustrates that this class of new bureaucrats had in fact managed to accomplish one of the most important feats in the history of Islamic civilization. They motivated and produced a translation movement, which was primarily an administrative movement in the first place, in which various competences were fighting over government positions, and in which many accusations of treason and the like frequently took place. That should not be surprising, for any sociologist could easily predict that such competition and behavior would be quite natural in cases of extreme competition.
As a by-product of this movement and the competition it engendered, the Arabic language, which had become by then the language of the new sciences, also managed to widen the circle of competition, and to open the opportunity for the Arabs, now working in the dīwāns, to join in the competition in order that they too could acquire the new sciences and preserve their new positions. Those Arab or Arabic-speaking bureaucrats now had their own reasons to hold on to power, and thus had to join the competition as well, either by accumulating knowledge directly, or by securing the services of men who could acquire that advanced knowledge for them. That was the case with many bureaucrats of the time. And for that reason we see that most of the translations, which were produced during the ninth century, were themselves patronized by bureaucrats, who were close to the center of power. Those translations were rarely patronized by the caliph himself, if they ever were. The caliph only got the best competent class of employees, but the employees sorted themselves out by their own sifting and competition. We all know that political power usually remains distant from science itself and occasionally even devotes itself to the exploitation of the scientists. Why should it be any different during Abbāsid times? Only at very rare occasions does one find a learned potentate, and if that person ever existed his influence could not have spanned the vast period of scientific activity that was produced during Abbāsid times and thereafter. Something else must have been at work, and our model predicts a continuous competitive environment at the bureaucratic level that kept those sciences alive and prospering.
138
G. Saliba, "Competition and the Transmission of the Foreign Sciences: Ḥunayn at the Abbāsid Court",