In another extant treatise of Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq, about the medical books of Galen that were translated into Arabic, and whose account he was asked to give by one of those bureaucrats who was also close to the caliph, he related in great details the conditions that led to the translations of 129 books of Galen.[142] In it he tells us that most of those books were translated for the sons of Mūsā b. Shākir, and especially for Muḥammad and Aḥmad— the two brothers who had together patronized more than 80 books of the total—and not a single book had ever been translated for the caliph. This in addition to the fact that Ḥunain himself, who had the lion's share in those translations, was at the same time the caliph's physician.
Looking at this translation movement, which was responsible for the introduction of the ancient sciences into Islamic civilization, from this perspective, allows us to open new windows onto Islamic intellectual history, and to begin to discern the motivation that gave rise to this movement. We can then see how certain members of the society, whose livelihood was threatened by 'Abd al-Malik's reforms, had to insure that livelihood by other means. They naturally resorted to higher specialization through the translation of the more advanced sciences. That in turn helped them gain an edge in the new competition. And as a result they could secure, as Ibn Māsawayh and some others tried to do, a new monopoly at the higher echelons of government. When we remember that those echelons were in fact the very top caliphal court itself, we can then appreciate the vast power those people managed to garner for themselves and often for their descendants. This "healthy" competition also led to a healthy increase in the acquisition of the more advanced sciences, only to produce further competition, and so on.
Therefore, the conditions that prevailed during the first century of Abbāsid rule seem to me to have been the healthiest conditions for competitive acquisition of science where caliphs had a whole group of highly qualified people who could compete for whatever projects the caliph dreamt of executing. Of course, the resulting spread of science on its own created the even healthier conditions for further developments in science. In fact, it may have been this very environment that created what came to be known later as the Golden Age of Islamic civilization, and which was celebrated by the classical narrative.
All this competitive activity apparently had nothing to do with the Persian "elements" of the Abbāsid Empire who were supposedly trying to recapture their own antiquity by reclaiming their sciences from the Greeks. On the contrary it apparently happened because the Abbāsids turned out to be the unwitting heirs to 'Abd al-Malik's reforms that preceded them by about one full generation. It was those reforms that set the healthy competition in motion in the first place, and through this competition the ever- increasing desire to acquire more and more advanced scientific books to keep the competition going.
All these conditions need to be investigated much more thoroughly. Various historians of varied scientific and philosophical disciplines need to re-examine these activities, which have only been scarcely touched upon here, before any more definite conclusions could be drawn. But this revision itself should hopefully make room for a better understanding of the dream of al-Ma'mun, the role of the Mu'tazilites, and the actual role of the Syriac and Persian-speaking communities. It was the members of those communities who needed to seek the Greek and Persian classical sources, which had been treasured in dark inaccessible temples for centuries, and to dust them off and re-deploy the information therein for their own needs in order to survive the deadly competition they were facing during the early Abbāsid times.
Most importantly, the revision, that this alternative narrative forces upon us, can now definitely demonstrate that this acquisition of the classical sciences, and especially those of classical Greek, was not simply an act of blind imitation, but had to be adjusted to the needs of the time as we shall see later on. But much needs to be done still before one can substantiate in a comprehensive manner the effects of all these activities in very concrete terms.
And yet, some preliminary results have already been reached by just applying the framework of this alternative narrative. We can now put some of those results on the table and hopefully use them to paint a slightly different picture from the one the classical narrative usually offered. As we can now see, the translation movement was not a movement to imitate a higher culture that was there standing in competition with one's own. Instead, the acquiring culture had to dig out texts, that is really appropriate those texts, which were practically forgotten in the source culture. For although the Byzantines still spoke and wrote in Greek, they kept the classical books in vaults for years until they were brought out as a result of the demand in Baghdad, where they were now better appreciated. In a sense those sources were given a new lease on life as a result of the dire needs of the Syriac- and Persian-speaking communities who needed to reclaim the government positions their forefathers had lost. But more importantly, the competitive environment forced those new seekers of knowledge to quickly bypass the scientific production of Byzantium at the time and to seek their interlocutors in the best of the classical sources. It is no wonder that the names of philosophers and scientists who were not even contemporaries and who all produced their knowledge before the third century of the Christian era (Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and Diophantus, among others) became household names in ninth-century Baghdad.
Another result that can now be seen much more clearly, and continues to become more obvious everyday, is that the translation movement of early Abbāsid times, since it was generated by social conditions of the Islamic government itself, did not simply translate the classical texts, digest them and then began to create a science of its own as the classical narrative continues to tell us. What seems to have happened is that the translation and creation were taking place at the same time, as we shall also see again. Or better yet, with the alternative narrative we can discern some creative activities to have preceded the translations of the advanced text, and that those creative activities by themselves required further translations in order to lead to more creative thinking and so on. In this manner we can understand why al-Ḥajjāj b. Maṭar had to read Ptolemy's text very carefully and to correct it whenever he thought it was in error.
Furthermore, these preliminary results also demonstrate that both the translators as well as the patrons of those translations were themselves, and in most cases, scientists in their own right. And although they were close to political power, they were digging niches of their own within the ruling bureaucracy that could outlast the caliphs themselves. In other words, those bureaucrats had their own needs for those sciences and for the scientists that sometimes accompanied them. In a good number of cases they were scientists themselves as well. To illustrate their own hold on power, all we have to do is to consider their relationship to the person of the caliph himself, only to realize how much more established they were in order to survive in some cases at the caliphal court even after the succession of three to four caliphs who would be at times violently removed from power. Yet the physicians, the astrologers, the engineers, etc., would survive and continue to exercise that indispensable role their parents had wished for them, when they set them out to reach for the more advanced classical sciences.